Parents Arrested For Letting Kids Skip School

Orange - Five parents were arrested today on misdemeanor charges of letting their children repeatedly skip school, despite warnings from school officials and police.

The arrests are the result of the first such crackdown by Orange County officials. Prosecutors teamed with police in the city of Orange, sheriff's deputies and Probation Department officials to cut down on truancy.

The parents were arrested after their children were taken to school and brought to the Orange County jail, but were released before the school day ended so they could be home to look after their children, prosecutors said.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office identified those arrested and charged as:

-- Alice and Ayman Haddadin, ages 45 and 47, respectively. Their son, a middle school student in the Capistrano Unified School District, has skipped school 12 times.

-- Porfirio Ascencio and ex-wife Natividad Arteaga, 34, have a middle-school student in the Orange Unified School District who has skipped school 10 times and was not registered for classes for the first three weeks of the school year.

-- Claudia Diaz Perez, 41, has an elementary school student in the Magnolia School District who has 30 absences, eight of them unexcused, according to prosecutors. The rest of the absences were sick days, but she did not have a doctor's note to justify all of the absences for her son, prosecutors said.

The parents are scheduled to be arraigned June 7 and face up to a year in jail and $2,500 in fines if convicted, according to prosecutors.