The Truancy Question.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 9819, 19 July 1900, Page 8

The Truancy Question.

[to the editor.]

Sir,— Any member of any public body is liable to insult and abuse if he conscientiously and fearlessly performs his duties, and it is evident from Mr John A'Deane's letter that I have no exemption from such a liability. The enclosed letter from Mr Cornford is the source from which I and other members obtained our information, and when I asked for the letter to be read to the Board the clerk replied that it was against the rule to do so, as it had not been received in time. Mr A'Deane is quite in error in jumping to the conclusion that the action •of the select committee, of which I was a member, was intended as a personal attack upon himself ; so far from that being the case his name in my hearing was never mentioned. The only subject submitted to the select committee by the Board and discussed by them was the replies of the school committees on the ■question whether or not the results of the truant officer's services were equivalent to the «ost. Twenty replied no, four yes, one indifferent, and the rest did not reply. Under these circumstances I do not see how the select committee could have reported otherwise than they did, that the replies showed the results were not commensurate with the cost, and the report had no reference to the officers but only to the office. < Personally I had no objection to Mr A'Deane and have nevtr said or heard a word against him till the last Board's meeting, but I am bound to say that if he showed anything like the temper and indiscretion in the performance of his duty that he has done in his letter he was quite unfitted for his office. I must add in reference to Mr A'Deane's gratuitous insult to, an Inspector that his suggestion is utterly without foundation. Mr Hill was never consulted upcn the subject by the select committee, neither was it ever referred to.him, and neither on auy occasion has he mentioned the subject to me nor I to him. —I am, etc., Thos. Tanner. July 19th, 1900.

Napier, 16th July, 1900, The Chairman aud Members of the

Hawke's Bay Education Board, Napier.

Gentlemen, —I have the honor to inform your Board that I was recently instructed by a number of parents to appear for them in the Police Court and defend a score or so of prosecutions under which they were severally charged with neglecting to send their children to school. The cases were heard this morning, and as the truant officer, who appeared to prosecute, failed to prove the charges , , two of the cases were dismissed and the rest withdrawn. The parents of the children concerned have requested me to ask your Board, as they assume the truant officer acted under your Board's instructions, to give that officer specific directioDS as to the performance of his duties so as to attain the results contemplated by the Act without occasioning unnecessary trouble to parents. The Act, I respectfully submit, ■ could be administered in such a way as to occasion no annoyance to the parents of children attending private or Roman Catholic schools. And I venture respectfully to submit to your Board that if the truant officer had been credibly informed that all the children of school age in respect of whom his prosecutions were instituted were, at the time he laid the informations, "under efficient and regular instruction elsewhere" than in Napier District schools, he would not have been justified in commencing proceedings, notwithstanding the provisions of Section 3 of the School Attendance Act 1894.

Now my clients assert and are prepared to prove that all the children of school age mentioned in the informations laid by Mr A'Deane were actually, at and long prior to the time at which lie commenced proceedings, regular scholars at Roman Catholic schools in this town. And they assert that he might have known this and ought to* have done so, and ought to have oommuiiica'ed his knowledge to the School Committees concerned, and ought not to have lOinmenc d proceedioga which unnecessarily subjected my clients to expense andloss of lime. My clients further contend that they should not have been selected as the subjects of the truant officer's experiments in legal procedure. There are private schools in Napier attended by scholars whose parents have not applied to the School Committeee to grant to their children exemption from attendance at district schools. Now if notice in the form prescribed by the Act was served upon one of these last-men-tioned parents calling upon him to eend bis children to a district school, the probability is that he would read it and say that it did not affect him because his children attended a private school. If 14 days afterwards (as in the present cases he received a summons, and then was told that as he had misunderstood the notice he could not oppose the making of an order compelling him to send his i ehUdnn to a dist<ict school, I submit to your Board that the parents would think he had been trapped in a most improper manner, and to his own and his children's prejudice. And I therefore ask your Board to direct your truant officer to make all possible enquiries in every case and to give all possible information to apparently delinquent parents before adopting the extreme measure of commencing a prosecution, especially when the intended defendant is in humble circumstances and ill able to afford the loss of a day's time or to pay for legal assistance.—l have the honor to be, gentlemen, your obedient servant, H. A. Cornford.