Many come from neighborhoods where crime and drugs are rampant, and many are chronic truants running away from broken or dysfunctional families.

A piece questions a new approach to cracking down on school absenteeism: In California, Florida, and Michigan, prosecutors are imprisoning the parents of chronic truants for up to 90 days.

But the problems continued, and he was put on a list of chronic truants, school officials said.

Around the country, dozens of parents from Florida to Ohio to California have spent a night or two in jail for permitting their children to be chronic truants.

Instead he focuses on the potential "threes," in the belief that he can more easily prove the attendance of the chronic truants who came to school on at least three days in October.

Around the country, schools that have tried less severe methods to get students to class are losing patience with chronic truants and threatening to punish their parents.

Some school administrators question the moves in Detroit and elsewhere to punish parents, saying that families of chronic truants may already be dysfunctional.

Many have been abused; some have been chronic truants, and most are on some form of medication.

They are three of the most chronic truants among about 150 students who regularly skip classes at the high school, New Jersey's largest, with 4,300 students.

Threatening to jail parents of chronic truants is one way to insure that students get a better education, some officials say.