Be sure to watch Senator Kamala Harris’s reflective and detailed answer about her policies on truancy, citing research on dropout rates and the known correlation between lack of a high school education on the likelihood of incarceration or being the victim of a homicide. When pressed on how some DAs were prosecuting parents, she expressed regret for that and acknowledged how jailing parents is not the answer to chronic truancy.

I dropped out of high school in 1985 and I’m sure the last year I attended I missed at least 80 days of school, if not more. I was a troubled child and teen, with emotional, and what I now know to be neurological, issues that made a formal school setting difficult for me. Unfortunately in the 70s and 80s there was not much help for me outside of some counseling and both my parents were incapable of ensuring I got to school daily, for reasons I won’t get into and I don’t blame them for it anyway. I needed help and they needed it and we never got it.

Among high school dropouts I count myself as extremely lucky and privileged. I am white and grew up middle class. I could read at grade level by third grade. We had books in our house. Before there was the internet there was the library and I loved being there and learning new things. (No child doesn’t want to learn. I fully believe that.)

Still, at seventeen, working shitty fast food jobs, hanging out with sketchy adults I had no business even being around, I realized my prospects were grim. I wasn’t the only one. The predatory men circling me like vultures also figured a girl with no future made easy prey. As did the drug dealers, who were often said predatory scuzzballs.

When the Navy recruiter called me, at the suggestion of a high school friend who had joined a year earlier, I didn’t believe his promises of high pay, exotic duty stations, and a Corvette. I did know I wanted a life that wasn’t like the one I was living so I enlisted. Back then you could get in without a high school diploma if your aptitude test score was high enough. Again, my privilege and good fortune saved me.

In my early 20s, I swallowed my embarrassment and told my Senior Chief I didn’t have a high school diploma when he asked why I wasn’t taking classes at the community college like many of my shipmates (it was shore duty but that’s what we called each other) did. He calmly picked up the phone and arranged a GED test for me. One week later I was a high school graduate of the State of New Jersey! I took college courses there and at University of Maryland while stationed in Yokosuka, Japan. I eventually got a Bachelors from University of Phoenix (shut up, my job paid for it while I collected my GI Bill so I consider myself the winner in that situation).

I feel like my life has turned out fine and my regrets are few, though when I accompanied my partner to his reunion at Stanford University in 2016, I did half-joke to him I wished a DeLorean would come along and take me back to the 80s so I could get my teenage shit together!

But when I think of how my life could have turned out without the Navy, it’s horrifying. Being smart and literate would have gotten me only so far and not continuing my education might have led to even more serious problems with dependency on substances and shitty men than I already had. The military, it should be noted, rarely takes high school dropouts anymore.

Kamala Harris was right to care about this, to learn about it, to address it. I am active in politics because, well, I love it, but also for things like this. It’s important to keep kids in school and to figure out why they’re missing days. Yes, we should be careful not to do counterproductive things such as jailing parents to do that! Kamala Harris agrees!

But I’m also pretty sure close to 100% of the people currently using truancy policy as a reason to score political points against Harris did not end up quitting high school and I know for a fact at least some of these very active social media critics of hers went to some nice colleges too.

TL;dr: This does not make me dislike or want to stop supporting her so don’t bother!