WITHOUT COMMENT. Dallas considers daytime curfews for adolescents.

Home-schooling families were prominent among the roughly 80 people at a city-council hearing Wednesday, and also organized a protest outside City Hall on Monday. Doreen Fisher, a Dallas mother who homeschools her two young children, said she is also concerned about the impact of fines on low-income families.

"I was raised poor," she said. "I know if I had come home with a $500 fine because I skipped school to get a tan for the prom, it would have been catastrophic."

I'm not sure whether the social-justice sensibilities of the homeschooler or the loss of the concept of truancy is the greater astonisher.