“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Lawmakers react to a BuzzFeed News report showing that more than a thousand teens have been sent to adult jail on charges stemming from skipping school. The Texas legislature is debating a host of possible changes to the law.

Serena Vela, who was kicked out of high school after being jailed for nine days on truancy-related charges.

Photo by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed News.

Two key Texas lawmakers who are pushing for the state to decriminalize truancy said this week that they are shocked and galvanized by a BuzzFeed News report that showed how more than a thousand teens have been jailed on charges stemming from skipping school.

Texas lawmakers had long known that jail was a possibility for students, but until BuzzFeed News' report no one had any idea of the scale on which it was happening, said State Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., a Democrat from Houston who chairs a committee on juvenile justice and has authored a bill that would decriminalize truancy.

The BuzzFeed News investigation found that Texas' truancy system, designed to keep kids on course to graduate, often drives students out of school instead. Some students were jailed for a week or more, including during school days — and some fell so far behind that they never went back to school. Texas is unique in locking up large numbers of truant students in adult jail.

Dutton said he was outraged at the findings. "You've gotta be kidding me," he said.

The investigation found that more than 300 students in nine of the state's ten largest counties were locked up in 2014 alone; that is almost certainly a vast undercount because it does not include data from more than 200 other counties in the state.

The report also found that many of those students were incarcerated because they couldn't pay fines associated with their truancy charges; in effect, some children were sent to a teen version of debtors' prison.

Rep. Harold Dutton

Harry Cabluck / AP

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