Washington Towns Trying Daytime Curfews For Kids

Along the dusty road that serves as this Eastern Washington state town’s center, youths huddle and talk the hot day away. Young girls saunter by, pretending not to notice the boys on the corner who pretend not to look. Teenagers in pickups tune their radios to the area’s two Spanish-language stations.

In this town of 3,800, where businesses are dying and recreational activities for teens are few, standing on the cracked sidewalks has always been a favorite pastime.

But now it could be illegal.

The Wapato City Council last month unanimously approved a measure making it illegal for children younger than 18 to be in a public place on school days between 9 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. Police plan to fine the parents of repeat offenders up to $300.

The daytime curfew, only the second in Washington state - nearby Toppenish started the first last spring - took effect Aug. 30, the first day of school for the 3,000 schoolchildren in the Wapato district, which draws from a large area outside the town.

The curfew will not affect youths under 18 who have graduated from high school, who have a General Education Development certificate or who are home-schooled.

“This all originates from the parents not being able to control their kids and provide them with things to do,” said Ray Judd, a Wapato City Council member and bus driver.

During the last school year, Wapato Police say, two-thirds of the calls they responded to between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. involved youths. Police said 179 juveniles were involved in 86 crimes during those hours.

“It’s just a crying shame. You almost need a boarding school for the kids,” Judd said.

In Toppenish, officials say they plan to study next June how the law has affected juvenile crime. But, they say, their curfew has already resulted in a decrease in calls to police during school hours.

The cities’ push to stem juvenile crime and keep kids in school mirrors efforts by the Legislature and local governments to face the two issues.

And adding fines for parents reflects a growing mood among governments that parents should be forced to take responsibility for kids who get into trouble.

In Silverton, Ore., for example, the City Council last year enacted one of the nation’s first parental-responsibility laws - with fines of up to $1,000 for the parents or guardians of a youth who commits a crime.

While Washington state law allows parents to be fined up to $25 a day if their children are absent from school without an excuse, school districts rarely enforce it because of the time and cost involved in taking truancy cases to court.

But a statewide curfew would not be the answer, said state Rep. Suzette Cooke, a Republican who chairs the House Children and Family Services Committee. Instead, she wants school districts to enforce truancy rules and become more active in monitoring truancy cases.

“The main issue of truancy lies with the parents, but schools are placed in the parental role when children are in school,” Cooke said. “I don’t see the state’s role as being one of instituting curfews.”

The U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., has just completed a study that found a national trend toward curfews - mostly nighttime ones. The study concluded that curfews will not work unless local police and juvenile agencies are expanded.

But Paula Jellison, a Seattle resident who heads the Parents Coalition of Washington, supports laws like Wapato’s and said the Legislature should consider closing school campuses during school hours as a way of instituting a statewide daytime curfew.

The Wapato and Toppenish school districts once employed truant officers to curb student absenteeism, but that ended in the last decade as school budgets became increasingly tight. Elsewhere, some districts, feeling the pressure to come up with their own solutions to truancy, are trying other approaches.

The Bellevue School District, for example, has created a program in which chronic truants receive counseling and academic help from the school and are referred to the courts only as a last resort.

In Wapato, Dolores Gallardo, 23, stands in front of the town’s only drugstore as she talks about her ambivalent feelings about the city’s new ordinance. She became a reluctant supporter of a daytime curfew after her daughter’s bike was stolen from the family’s front porch.

Gallardo said she became frustrated after she and police went to the home of the alleged bike thief and his mother refused to come to the door.

“Parents need to be a lot tougher on their kids,” she said. “I know if my 11-year-old came home with a bike and I had not bought him a bike, I’d say something.”

On the other hand, Gallardo said, some kids do not listen to their parents - yet it is the parents who will be fined when kids violate the ordinance.

Another dilemma associated with the ordinance is what many Wapato residents see as its underlying current of racism.

Jose Moreno, pastor of a nearby Pentecostal church, said that when town leaders talked about crime and gangs, they seemed to be talking of the town’s Hispanic majority.

He acknowledged that many of the youths hanging out on the streets were Hispanic. But, he added, “Just one bad apple doesn’t mean all the apples are bad.”

Town leaders, nearly all white, did not deny that the law targets a mostly Hispanic group of kids suspected of being involved in gangs and who have gotten into trouble with police in the past.

“Maybe it’s a difference in culture, but these kids sit around and play their music loud even on Sundays and their parents don’t do anything to stop them,” said Councilman Russ Insley, who has lived in Wapato since the 1940s.

“If parents don’t think they can discipline their kids, then this curfew will do it for them.”

Asked whether the town’s parents, many of whom work on nearby ranches or in the grape vineyards or peach and apple orchards that carpet this agricultural basin, could afford a $300 fine, Judd said many likely could not - although, he added, he had seen them “buying brand new rigs (trucks) and (simultaneously) going down to the welfare office.”

“I had certain day-to-day responsibilities when I was a child, but now kids are turned loose without any direction,” said Councilwoman Edna Mauch.

But Theresa Huizar, director for the Washington Migrant Council’s Headstart program in Wapato, said most of the city’s Hispanic parents are interested in their child’s education and often volunteer in the classroom during farming’s off-season. When they work they often donate fruit they have picked.

“What this town needs for the youth is people who care and are willing to donate their own time to put on youth activities,” Huizar said. “And they must be consistent with the activities and not give up so quickly.”