May 21, 1999

Let's return rights to parents

The great news that crime has dropped significantly for the seventh year running can be partially credited to harsher sentencing laws, but the graying of America has been a big factor, too.

The over-40 crowd is much less likely to engage in criminal pursuits than the young and the restless. However, by 2009 the number of 14- through 17-year-olds will grow by 500,000, boosting the most criminally active age group, which has resisted the trend of declining crimes.

While theories for reducing juvenile crime abound, surely it would help to cut the free time - and thus the opportunity - available for them to get into trouble with the law. Yet believe it or not, education and labor regulations dictate just the opposite to the most at-risk teens of all - dropouts.

The best-kept secret in California is the Catch-22 of its child labor laws: Even though it's legal for those who are at least 16 years old to drop out of high school, these teenagers cannot legally get jobs unless they are in school. The reason is buried within a labyrinth of disconnected laws that allow the school system to usurp yet another decision rightfully belonging to parents.

If parents agree to let their 16-plus-year-old drop out, the schools, with their "absolute authority," won't grant a work permit because even dropouts have to obtain permits from schools because they're still subject to the very same California compulsory education laws that allowed them to drop out. This convoluted logic comes directly from the California Labor Commission and the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District.

Naturally the schools insist this snare is for the children's good, intended to keep them in high school. Let's assume that neither education unions nor other labor unions are protecting their jobs. Let's assume they mean what they say about minding the best interests of adolescents.

Has it occurred to them that a stint of menial labor can be the best motivator for more education? Mopping up restrooms at a gas station would certainly make school look like nirvana to me. And if some kids managed to find employment niches where they were able to learn on the job and advance into rewarding careers, that would be a good outcome, too. We need to break the stranglehold schools have on parents' rights and adolescents' options.

© 1999 Cynthia Hahn