House Bill 2398<\/a> \u2014 the court has employed several interventionists, known as juvenile court case managers, providing liaisons between school districts and the municipal court in non-criminal cases involving minors.<\/p>\nSchool districts can file criminal charges against parents through the city attorney\u2019s office if mediation doesn\u2019t work, but cases like that are rare and the punishment includes fines. <\/p>\n
Currently, the court has 10 case managers working with 11 San Antonio-area school districts and four charter school networks. Usually embedded on school campuses, their goal is mediation between families, school districts and the court before a district files any criminal charges against parents for truancy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I would always tell the families that I worked with was that my job was to help them address the issue and fix attendance to avoid any further court of involvement,\u201d said Katie Kappler, a senior juvenile case manager for the city. \u201cSo we are not involved with the criminal aspect of it, where it could lead to a charge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three of the court\u2019s juvenile case managers are funded by a grant from Texas\u2019s Office of the Governor for truancy prevention. The city has to apply for it every year, and the grant amount keeps shrinking, Kappler said: in 2015, the court had 20 grant-funded juvenile case managers.<\/p>\n
The San Antonio Report sat down with Obledo and Kappler to talk about the municipal court\u2019s intervention efforts in chronic absenteeism, the challenges those efforts face and why attendance matters on a city level. <\/p>\n
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n
As presiding judge and someone who has a larger overview of the municipal court system, what does your work with chronic absenteeism actually look like?<\/p>\n
Obledo: So we\u2019re trying to provide a community of agencies and support that my team doesn\u2019t offer because we are still a court. We even bring in city departments that help support us to provide those services for students and their families.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also trying to do new things. I don\u2019t want to be doing the same old thing and expect a different result. If we want a different result, then there\u2019s probably a different solution. That\u2019s what I really like about our juvenile team, is they\u2019re always willing to try new things like the Attendance Matters campaign and the Senior Summits, and they\u2019re just always up for for a new challenge.<\/p>\n
What happens when a family gets called in for mediation through the municipal court for truancy? <\/p>\n
Obledo: The school districts will provide names and addresses, and then the court mails out letters to the students and their families, summoning them to court if a student\u2019s truant behavior does not improve. It\u2019s not a criminal case, it\u2019s still civil. If they don\u2019t come, there\u2019s not a warrant that gets issued or anything like that, but they do appear before a judge, and the judge will go over an agreement with them. Our juvenile case managers work very closely with the students and their families to find out if there\u2019s any support services that the family needs so that the child does get to school every day.<\/p>\n
Kappler: Not everyone shows up, but we get usually a decent turnout. Then we\u2019ll do it by family. So whether there\u2019s one kiddo or six in that family, it typically is a family issue. Usually, when the school submits that information, they also look at the whole family, so that the parent is not having to come in multiple times.<\/p>\n
Obledo: And these are kids that have been identified by the school that are not attending school regularly, and they\u2019ve already tried interventions at the school and they\u2019re not working. So the next step is for them to be called a court, to come to mediation, to come before a judge, and again, it\u2019s not punitive. There\u2019s not a fine. Nobody is incarcerated, but it\u2019s kind of like a last chance.<\/p>\n
What happens if a school district decides to file criminal charges against a parent for truancy and the parent is found guilty? <\/p>\n
Obledo: There\u2019s a fine. There\u2019s not a whole lot of those cases actually filed. The school district works with the city attorney\u2019s office, and the city attorney\u2019s office has some requirements that they want the school districts to meet before they\u2019ll accept a case. But that case load is nowhere near what the juvenile case managers are working with.<\/p>\n
Kappler: Even with the criminal cases, the goal is always still to get the attendance improved, not the fines.<\/p>\n
How else has the municipal court been creative in addressing the chronic absenteeism issue in San Antonio? <\/p>\n
Obledo: Something different that we tried in 2023 was our \u201cSenior Summit: Rise to Graduation\u201d event. We put that thing together in three weeks and we invited schools. We just worked with SAISD at that time to see if it was going to work. It\u2019s kind of a mediation on steroids, and I had like four judges who went over mediation agreements with the students and their families, and we actually had community partners here at the court from SA Ready to Work, the library, Alamo Colleges and others. Not only were those community partners there to provide resources for them, to help them graduate, but we also wanted to show them the possibilities that could happen when they do graduate.<\/p>\n
Another neat thing that the juvenile case managers are working on is a transition docket for chronically absent kids that are going from fifth to sixth grade, eighth to ninth grade. Unfortunately, a lot of times you lose a lot of students during those transitions, so they\u2019re working very closely with those kiddos.<\/p>\n
Kappler: We have a parenting class that\u2019s evolved a lot over the last two years that it\u2019s existed. It started as a parenting class talking about parenting styles, but over time, we have kind of shifted it to focus on school attendance. We primarily use it for elementary age parents. A lot of the parents like that class because the case managers do the educational part with it, to talk to the parents about it, but it\u2019s also very discussion-based. We\u2019re working on kind of expanding that class to reach as many parents as we can, where we\u2019re going to start implementing that on campus, not just here at the court.<\/p>\n
You have a lot of purview over what kind of initiatives come from the municipal court. Why are youth issues something you\u2019ve really taken under your wing as presiding judge for five years now?<\/p>\n
Obledo: Focusing on youth issues strengthens our community. It makes our community safer. I\u2019m born and raised in San Antonio, you know? I don\u2019t like hearing about how, \u2018Oh, Austin is doing this\u2019, or \u2018Dallas is doing this.\u2019 You know, we have a beautiful culture and heritage heere in San Antonio and we should be proud. I think that some kids just get lost.<\/p>\n
I do come from a fairly privileged background. I went to private school, and I\u2019ve never worked in education, but communicating with my team and witnessing what\u2019s happening in the community makes me want to do more for the community, even in the municipal court\u2019s limited role.<\/p>\n
We are a court so we can\u2019t really, you know, take a stance. We have to be unbiased and fair and all that. But, on some certain issues, I think that we can be a court that actually helps move people along to a better to a better position \u2014 to a better station in life<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a quarter of students in San Antonio are chronically absent, meaning they\u2019re missing at least 10%…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[44607,44608,39343,11532,815,44609,20973,44610,44611,4042,82,84,83,92,44612,93,16057],"class_list":{"0":"post-96289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-alamo-colleges","9":"tag-carla-obledo","10":"tag-chronic-absenteeism","11":"tag-city-of-san-antonio","12":"tag-courts","13":"tag-judge-obledo","14":"tag-municipal-court","15":"tag-q-and-a","16":"tag-sa-ready-to-work","17":"tag-saisd","18":"tag-san-antonio","19":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","20":"tag-san-antonio-news","21":"tag-top-story","22":"tag-truancy","23":"tag-typefeature","24":"tag-wc-1500-2000"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}