SACRAMENTO, California — Gavin Newsom just undid one of the most contentious policies Kamala Harris championed during her time as San Francisco district attorney.
The California governor today signed a bill ending a policy punishing parents for their children’s chronic truancy — a measure that became a flashpoint in Harris’ 2020 presidential primary campaign.
The 2011 law, which Harris continued to spotlight as the state’s attorney general, made parents eligible for a misdemeanor if their children repeatedly missed school, which Harris argued was necessary to prevent young people from becoming “a menace to society hanging out on the corner.” It defined a “chronic truant” as a child absent from class for 10 percent or more of school days in one year.
Controversy surrounding the policy — which critics at the time said criminalized parents — followed Harris when she ran for president. Coverage of police handcuffing mothers of truant schoolchildren sparked outrage, forcing her to walk back her support for it.
“I regret that that has happened,” she said in 2019 of parents’ criminalization. “And the thought that anything I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not the intention.”
Patrick Ahrens, a Bay Area Democrat who wrote AB 461, the repeal bill, said he was motivated by his own experiences as a child, saying in June it has “nothing to do with our former VP.”
The repeal of Harris’ legislation comes not long after the former vice president released a memoir of her presidential campaign in which she cast Newsom as unreachable in the hours after Joe Biden dropped out of last year’s presidential race.
The two friends and rivals — and potential 2028 contenders — moved in the same San Francisco circles for years before they were elected to statewide office. Harris went Washington after a successful 2016 run for Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat.
“Hiking. Will call back,” the former vice president wrote in her notes from her calls that day.
