Hard-working teen jailed as truant

An employer says a 17-year-old girl Texas girl who spent a night in jail for truancy does nothing but work and go to school. Diane Tran, an 11th-grader, was jailed for 24 hours May 23 after a judge found she had disobeyed an order not to miss any more school, KHOU-TV, Houston, reported. Under Texas law, students can only have 10 unexplained absences in a year. Mary Elliot, who runs the wedding planning service where Tran works on weekends, thinks that is unfair. She said Tran, an honor student at Willis High School in the Houston area, sometimes oversleeps because of the pressure of holding two jobs, including a full-time one at a dry cleaner. "I can understand if a child is staying out of school, running around, a bad kid, getting into trouble, taking drugs," Elliot told ABC News. "I can understand why he would slap them into jail for 24 hours. But Diane doesn't do that. All she does is work and go to school." Judge Lanny Moriarty told KHOU he needed to set an example. "If you let one run loose, what are you going to do with the rest of them?" he said. "Let them go, too?"