There's good news and bad news...

...about the student lawlessness here in Southern California that I mentioned the other day. It looks like police threats to crack down on kids leaving school are showing some results.

No student walkouts over proposed immigration reform were reported early Thursday after three days of increasingly tougher truancy crackdowns.

"It's quiet," said Ellen Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Good. Students need to stay in school. But south of here, in the San Diego area, the Oceanside Unified School District is closing schools because of threats of racially-motivated violence. That seems like a cave-in to mob rule, but if they think the threat is credible and they don't have the security resources to deal with it, I guess there's not much else they can do.

Meanwhile, back in my neck of the woods...

Los Angeles school administrators who watched students march onto freeways and scuffle with police telephoned parents and warned them that their children faced a possible $250 citation if they marched.

[...]

Students took notice of the crackdown.

"I have to go to school today because they called my home and said I had to go to school or I'm going to get a citation," said Rene Hernandez, 15, a student at Van Nuys High School who took part in earlier protests.

On the popular Web site MySpace.com, where many students have said they look for protest information, the word was to wait until Friday for the next mass demonstration.

Carla Yocute, 14, who also attends Van Nuys High, had seen flyers for the walkout but said she wouldn't join.

"I don't want to risk it," she said.

On Tuesday, the school closed its gates and kept students in their homerooms to prevent walkouts.

"I felt like an animal in a cage," Yocute said.

That's right, folks. When students aren't allowed to roam the streets and disrupt freeway traffic, they're like caged animals. And if there are walkouts tomorrow, I hope massive numbers of these kids get truancy citations. If they get on the freeways again, I hope some of them find out in a much harsher way what it feels like to be "caged," if you know what I mean.

The article says that only about 200 students walked out of schools in L.A. County yesterday compared to 11,000 the day before and 36,000 on Monday. The fact that someone is telling the kids to leave school on Friday is troubling, though, and I want to reiterate that there should be an investigation into who's instigating this nonsense.