Why does the school system need to fine or lock people up? Sure that’s what would be required to force compliance but I don’t think the issue is that kids don’t want to go to school at all.
The parent comment even mentions that they have the option to contact juvenile services but can also provide counseling. That seems like the real answer in probably the vast majority of cases.
> I don’t think the issue is that kids don’t want to go to school at all.
This is an incredible assumption. There are probably millions of people (Paul Graham, for one) who would agree with Scott Alexander's "description of experiencing school as tortuous": one such example, "Scott, your description of school-as-hell deeply resonated with me. I can say without exaggeration that my time in the public school system was more miserable to me, and left me with deeper scars and issues, than my time in Iraq."[0]. Most of these complaints about child-prison hell-schools are from people who went to far better schools than the one in the article. I spent ten years in prison, and I have far more hatred for the public school system than I do for the prison system.
I agree that counseling could help in many cases, perhaps most, but it's deeply mistaken to say that the vast majority of kids are willing to go to school. There will always be a significant number of kids who simply don't want to go, or would rather spend their days involved in drugs or gangs. Plenty of people think that going to school is "acting white".
A friend of mine is a public school teacher. They have a standing policy to not report anything to the state for minority students, even violent ones. This is because it shows up on reports and makes the school look bad, school gets accused of racism.
The parent comment even mentions that they have the option to contact juvenile services but can also provide counseling. That seems like the real answer in probably the vast majority of cases.