One hundred families which have repeatedly ignored truancy fines will be receiving a “letter of final notice” warning they will face legal action if they fail to pay up, The Sunday Times of Malta has learnt.
Parents of truant children can be fined as much as €2.33 for each day their child misses school without a valid reason. Failing to pay up is considered a criminal offence under the Education Act.
Around €1m was still uncollected at the end of last year
Despite this, many of the fines are habitually shrugged off by parents, as authorities tasked with taking legal steps against them often fail to do so. Eighty per cent of the citations dished out over the past 10 years have been ignored, with around €1 million still uncollected at the end of last year.
Principle social worker Marija Zahra, tasked with overseeing the government’s new school attendance policy, said the Attorney General was roped in to inform non-compliant parents that if they did not settle unpaid fines, they would face legal action.
Education Minister Evarist Bartolo had hinted at the possibility of legal action being taken against non-compliant parents last July, telling Times of Malta that the Justice Ministry was examining what steps could be taken to curb the abuse.
‘We knocked but they didn’t open’
Ms Zahra said a special committee comprising personnel from the justice, social welfare and education ministries had highlighted the “worst offenders”.
The truancy problem was catapulted onto the national agenda last year after a Cospicua primary school head told a public consultation meeting that schools were being “plagued” by truancy.
Ms Zahra said repeated attempts to get non-compliant parents to pay the fines had failed.
2,825
- the number of fines issued in 2014
“We literally went to their homes and knocked on their doors but they wouldn’t even open up. We sent for them through the police too, but they didn’t come.
“When the parents aren’t on your side, that makes the problem so much worse,” she said, adding that cooperative parents had agreed to pay their accumulated fines in instalments.
Ms Zahra said there were so many unpaid fines that a local tribunal had waived several years’ worth of the citations as the backlog was too much to process.