When Parents Want The State To Take Over

I found this article via the Chicago Schools blog and the setting is New Orleans. Here's something that should make you wonder:

JOYNAL ABDIN, police and public safety officer: Police. Police. I'm here to serve your summons. You got your I.D.? Are you going to go to court?

PARENT: Yeah, I have to take that day off.

DORIS TAYLOR: Ma'am, make sure you go. Make sure you go, because if you don't, we're going to come back out and pick you up and bring you down to lock-up. That's your responsibility as a parent to make sure that your kids attend school.

And this makes me very frustrated, because this is a child's education we're talking about. There's no excuse why a child should miss 21 days and he's just a second-grader?

PARENT: Can I ask a question?

DORIS TAYLOR: Sure.

PARENT: Is there like any way that the state could pick them up, I mean, if they miss like a couple more days?

DORIS TAYLOR: You keep saying the state going to take them. You sound like you don't want with them.


PARENT: To be honest with you, I don't.

JOYNAL ABDIN: If the parents don't want you, what kind of message do you think you're sending to the child? I mean, it's frustrating. It's sad. It's very emotional. But at the same time, that's what we're here for.

It should make you wonder. Why do these parents have kids they don't want? What's occuring in their lives where they parent may just decided that they don't want to keep their kids and they're ready for the state to take them away? It's unfortunate that there are those parents who want to thrown their children into the system.

I also would ask do these kids have anyone else in their lives they can lean on. Especially if their parents seem to have given up on them. You know I assumed this was a single mother and I would always ask the question where's the daddy. Indeed it's messed up when both the mother and father just don't have their act together and there's literally no one who could step in for the sake of the child.

You know it should make you wonder. Parents that don't care is why the children find themselves messed up in the future. They don't attend school or eventually find themselves in jail. What can we do about this problem.