Illinois officials still looking for way to enact truant driver law
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By Kartikay Mehrotra | Wednesday, January 09, 2008 |
SPRINGFIELD — Truant or not, a student’s right to privacy has stopped a state law that would prevent dropouts from driving until they attend school.
In 2006, the Illinois General Assembly approved a system of checking teen drivers’ school attendance records. The process included communication of those records between school districts, the state Board of Education and the Secretary of State’s Office. If a student was deemed to be truant, the law declared the student’s license would be suspended.
But within weeks of it going into effect July 1, the U.S. Department of Education halted the process, saying it violated federal rights and privacy laws if the secretary of state received student enrollment information.
Since mid-July, when the federal government informed the state of the law’s legal bounds, agency officials and lawmakers have been without much wiggle-room while searching for a way to get the law back on the books.
“It’s mostly a legal issue at this point. We’ve been discussing with our staff and state board but don’t have any solution per se,” said state Rep. Bob Flider, D-Mount Zion. “The whole goal of this is to assure that in the long run, as kids are going through school and
beginning to take driver’s ed, that staying in school, doing good in school and driving are seen as co-existent.”
Flider sponsored the proposal based on recommendations from a Decatur-area school improvement task force and hopes to have a solution before the next school year begins.
Federal authorities suggested the best way to make the law legal would be to require parents to provide written proof of enrollment when their child applies for a learner’s permit or driver’s license. Although Flider said he supports that option, the state Board of Education has yet to formally consider it.
“There have been some discussions, but it’s really too premature to decide,” said Matt Vanover, spokesman for the state Board of Education.
The Secretary of State’s Office is taking a wait-and-see approach, saying that “we are just the back end of the process,” spokesman Henry Haupt said. “If we receive any information from the state board or a school district, based on truancy statues, we will go ahead and cancel that student’s driving privileges.”
If either agency decided the federal recommendation was not worth abiding by, the state could have found itself without the nearly $2 billion in federal funding it received for education in 2007.
“The ultimate penalty for the violation is a cut off of education department funding,” said Jim Bradshaw, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education Family and Compliance Office. “But let me hasten that we have always been able to work with schools to help them come into compliance, short of having to take that last final step.”
The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act allows school districts to disclose information that would otherwise be public information, but a student’s attendance record does not qualify and would be a violation of the act.
Kartikay Mehrotra can be contacted at (217) 789-0865.
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