If your child misses school for a doctor’s appointment, it’s no big deal, right?
Miss another when family visits from out of town? It happens.
Just have a crazy morning and miss the bus? No big deal. She’ll make it tomorrow.
But it all adds up more than parents realize.
If a child misses just two days a month, national and local experts on school attendance note, that’s missing 10 percent of school. It’s enough to start lagging behind classmates, multiple studies show, and qualifies a student as chronically absent.
If it’s a long-term pattern, students end up a year or more behind others, miss crucial third-grade reading benchmarks and have higher dropout rates.
“It’s an early warning indicator,” said Heddy Chang of Attendance Works, a national organization working to educate families and schools about the danger of absences. “As soon as kids miss two days a month, they can be academically at-risk.”
Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University professor and leading researcher on attendance issues, said it may be obvious that students learn more when they are in school, but many still miss too many days.
“Being there really matters,” Balfanz told a summit on chronic absenteeism hosted recently by the Cleveland school district. “The data clearly shows that the kids who thrive are the kids who come to school every day.”
“When they miss school and when they miss so much school they miss 10 percent of school a year, which is a month, and become chronically absent, their outcomes really suffer.”
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