California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed legislation repealing one of the most controversial policies advanced by Kamala Harris during her years as San Francisco district attorney, closing the chapter on a law that dogged Harris through her presidential campaign.
The measure, Assembly Bill 461, ends a 2011 state law that made parents criminally liable if their children were deemed “chronic truants,” defined as students absent for 10 percent or more of school days in a single year. Parents faced the possibility of misdemeanor charges, fines, and even jail time.
Harris, who helped champion the policy in San Francisco before carrying it statewide as attorney general, argued the law was a tool to keep young people in class and out of trouble. She said at the time it was meant to prevent children from becoming, in her words, “a menace to society hanging out on the corner.”
But critics argued the law unfairly punished families, particularly low-income and single-parent households, while doing little to address the systemic barriers behind absenteeism. Media coverage of parents — often mothers — being handcuffed over their children’s attendance sparked outrage and forced Harris to temper her defense of the law during her 2020 presidential bid.
“I regret that that has happened,” Harris said in 2019 when asked about parents being prosecuted under the statute. “The thought that anything I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not the intention.”
Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, a Bay Area Democrat who authored the repeal bill, emphasized that the effort was personal rather than political. “This has nothing to do with our former vice president,” he said earlier this year, citing his own childhood experiences with absenteeism.
The repeal also comes as Harris and Newsom — longtime allies turned occasional rivals — continue to circle each other as potential contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Harris recently released a memoir reflecting on her failed 2024 campaign, pointedly recounting that she could not reach Newsom in the crucial hours after Joe Biden exited the race.
For now, Newsom’s action dismantles one of Harris’ most enduring — and polarizing — legacies from her years in California politics.
