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NY Post
New York Post
11 Dec 2023


NextImg:Almost one in three public school students were ‘chronically absent’ during last school year

Hooky has gone haywire in American public school classrooms.

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

That amounts to a minimum of 18 AWOL school days, with many blaming the difficulty oif adjusting back to in-person learning following the COVID-19 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.

Nearly 15 million public school kids missed at least 18 days of school during the 2021-2022 school year. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

“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 said, 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, while Texas had 1.5 million.

Florida had 30 percent 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 — ignited in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic — has spurred one Florida school district to add several four-day weekends to the academic calendar to help curb absences.

School buses.
Schools are scrambling to address the crisis. NurPhoto via Getty Images

“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.

Public schools have been plagued by a litany of problems since the pandemic, including plunging teacher shortages and retention rates, along with dropping enrollment.

Beset by these challenges, more than 900 public school districts across the country have introduced 4-day school weeks, and their number continues to grow.