truancy courts don’t typically target far right homeschooler quiverfull families.

…Because they don’t have to. The homeschoolers are home schooling (or, at least claiming to do so), whereas truant kids aren’t being educated at all. If the parents that were going to truancy courts were home schooling kids, they could just say that and be done with it. (I’m no fan of home schooling; I think that it’s almost always a disservice to the kids. But it’s still a legal right.)

IIRC, Harris had other programs that she was using/working with to reduce truancy rates, and courts were the last-ditch effort for parents that refused to even show up for anything else. If I recall correctly–and please, fact check me here–no parents received any jail time for truancy while she was a DA. It was used as a tool to get parents to take truancy seriously.

And yes, I agree that school lunches, etc. would all help, But there’s only so many tools that a district attorney has to use. The DA can’t mandate a tax to cover daycare or after school activities; that’s the job of the city council or state legislature.