Why is nothing being done to address public school attendance crash?

[Alias Detective 1,399]

On 7/7/2024 at 2:05 PM, IGotWorms said:

After the pandemic, regular attendance in public schools crashed. Went from like 90% of kids attending on regular basis to 60% in my area.

Now it is coming back up in some, but not all, areas, but slowly for the most part.

How come there haven’t been any national initiatives to address this? It is a problem everywhere as far as I understand.

So where’s the bill offering federal dollars to hire more truancy officers? Maybe some kind of public education campaign about the problem and encouraging people to return their kids to school? I dunno, gotta be other solutions out there as well I’d think.

 

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/whats-going-americas-public-schools-absenteeism-rates-tell-dramatic-tale.amp

Cyber, charter,Catholic and home schooling.

[TimHauck 2,857]

26 minutes ago, Fireballer said:

All I’ve seen in this thread is percentages of absenteeism rising, not actually quantity of students absent.  Am I missing something?  If less students are enrolled, then obviously those homeschooled kids are impacting stats. 

Yes but to me the drastic increases in absenteeism % can’t be explained by kids being homeschooled or going to charter/private schools.

I live in NC.   At least here, that’s not what’s driving the increase.  The absenteeism rate increased from 15% in 2018 to 27% in 2023.  The number of chronically absent students however increased from 241k in 2019 to 462k in 2022:

https://www.wral.com/story/nearly-half-a-million-nc-students-are-considered-chronically-absent-according-to-new-study/20994843/

Interestingly, the % is slightly higher in rural areas than urban: 

https://dashboard.myfuturenc.org/college-and-career-access/chronic-absenteeism/

edit: and the number of students enrolled in traditional public schools hasn’t seen significant changes, although 2023 was the first year it declined since 2020

https://www.ednc.org/enrollment-2023-school-year/

[Fireballer 2,642]

2 minutes ago, TimHauck said:

Yes but to me the drastic increases in absenteeism % can’t be explained by kids being homeschooled or going to charter/private schools.

I live in NC.   At least here, that’s not what’s driving the increase.  The absenteeism rate increased from 15% in 2018 to 27% in 2023.  The number of chronically absent students however increased from 241k in 2019 to 462k in 2022:

https://www.wral.com/story/nearly-half-a-million-nc-students-are-considered-chronically-absent-according-to-new-study/20994843/

Interestingly, the % is slightly higher in rural areas than urban: 

https://dashboard.myfuturenc.org/college-and-career-access/chronic-absenteeism/

I’ll dig in later, thanks.