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The Charlotte Housing Authority board enacted a new rule Wednesday that allows the agency to evict public housing residents if their children skip school too often.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System, which worked with the housing authority on the new policy, hopes it will improve attendance. Housing officials hope it will help families become more self-reliant.
“The children of our community cannot be educated if they're not in school,” said Barbara Pellin, an assistant CMS superintendent who oversees support services and worked with the housing authority on the policy.
But some advocates for the poor say the rule could make more families homeless amid a dire economy. They also say families could suffer from children's actions.
“Please think about what you're about to do,” Yvonne McJetters, member of the Homeless Service Network and mother of two sons, told the Housing Authority's board of commissioners at a public hearing Wednesday. She pointed out that teenagers, in particular, don't always consider the consequences of their decisions. “Please think about the families that it's going to affect.”
The policy passed unanimously with little discussion Wednesday among the Housing Authority's seven board members. It says that if children living on Housing Authority property or in homes subsidized with Section 8 vouchers have 10 unexcused absences from school, their families will be given 30 days to move out. The families will get a warning when the student has three absences, then again when the student reaches six.
The policy follows a decision by the Housing Authority earlier this year to require each head-of-household among the agency's residents to be working at least 30 hours a week by April 1, 2011, to keep the family's housing subsidy. Elderly and disabled residents are exempt, but the rule will affect many of the 15,000 people in Charlotte who live in federally subsidized housing.
Critics have complained that the work rule will hurt the city's poorest residents just as jobs are particularly hard to find and homelessness is rising.
Truancy policies similar to Charlotte's have been used in a number of other cities, including Chattanooga, Tennessee; Chicago; and Kansas City, Missouri.
Six years after the Kansas City Housing Authority started its program in 1998, officials there said that truancy had dropped dramatically and not a single family had been evicted because of truancy, according to one published report.
CMS's Pellin said the housing authority's truancy policy will give the school system clout to deter some of the 6,000 truancies that occur daily in the 134,000-student school system – though it's unclear how many of those are associated with public housing residents.
Currently, she said, truancy laws are often ignored.
“We send notices. We even take them to court, and we have no teeth,” she said. “What we hear from parents is, ‘I'm done. I can't deal with this child anymore.'”
Pellin said she hopes the policy will motivate parents to get more involved in their children's lives and to connect with services that can help them. She said once a truancy problem is identified, the family will also get help from a school system “intervention team” before they would ever be evicted.
“Hopefully, it will act as a deterrent before they get to that (eviction) stage,” she said.
Jennifer Roberts, chairman of the Mecklenburg commissioners, said she wonders whether the policy will just push evicted housing authority residents to lean on other social services.
“I know how teenagers are very hard, even if you have very engaged parents,” she said. “It's hard to have the family punished for the acts of a minor.”
David Jones, chair of the Housing Authority board, pointed out that the policy change is not irreversible. He encouraged critics to monitor the program and speak up if it is doing a “disservice to the community.”
“If we are coming up with bad results because of this policy,” he said, “please don't hesitate to point that out to us.”
