‘Present!’ danger

14.7M kids chronically absent — 950K in NY

Hooky’s gone haywire in American public school classrooms.

A staggering 14.7 million public school kids — about 30% of all enrollees — were chronically absent during the last school year, leaving districts across the country scrambling to get students back in buildings.

According to a study released by Attendance Works, 66% of all public school children from California to New York attended a school with high or extreme levels of chronic absenteeism last year — defined as missing at least 10% of the academic year.

That amounts to a minimum of 18 absent school days, with many kids blaming the difficulty of readjusting to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Worsened by pandemic

“When chronic absence reaches high levels, the educational experience of peers, not just those frequently missing school, is also affected,” Attendance Works said.

A jarring 43% of schools had at least 30% of kids who were chronically absent during the 2021-2022 school year — up from just 14% in 2017-2018.

“The long-term consequences of disengaging from school are devastating. And the pandemic has absolutely made things worse and for more students,” Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, has previously said.

Soaring absenteeism, the study warns, is contributing to learning loss at alarming rates among

American public school kids already damaged by school closures and interrupted education during the pandemic.

In New York state, roughly 950,000 students across all grades were chronically absent during the 2021-2022 academic year, according to figures from Ed Data Express.

California saw 1.9 million students missing at least 18 days of school. Texas had 1.5 million. Florida had 30% of kids, about 950,000, chronically absent last year.

“National assessment data for 2022 show these increases in chronic absence are associated with significant declines in student achievement and threaten efforts to recover from the pandemic,” the Attendance Works study asserted.

The crisis has spurred one Florida school district to add four-day weekends to the academic calendar to help curb absences.

“The primary objective of this revamped schedule is to encourage families to take advantage of these planned breaks for family trips, vacations, and appointments, while ensuring that students attend school consistently during scheduled contact days,” Pasco County education officials said last week.

The sobering figures do not include hundreds of thousands of kids who stopped going to school outright during COVID-19 and never re-enrolled.

Beset by these challenges, more than 900 public school districts across the country have introduced four-day school weeks, and their number continues to grow.

The long-term consequences of disengaging from school are devastating.

Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works