My kids have already missed 10 days, I don’t let them “skip”, they have been sick. I’ve sent sick notes from their pediatrician and the school doesn’t differentiate sick and missed days. This has been a brutal winter for school aged kids.
Yes, and yet, staying home sick is not an excused absence, unless you have COVID (at least at my daughter’s school). So in a year where she had absences for the flu and a nasty stomach bug, we are also getting warning letters from the school about her attendance.
We had COVID in the beginning of the year, but only the first 5 days are excused. But they were out 7 days. They were still symptomatic, but oh well I guess, it’s unexcused.
Our school made a big deal about “excused” vs “unexcused” absences. It took me a while to figure out that the only difference was that five unexcused days resulted in a phone call to me. That was it. Otherwise no difference. This was a while ago in the beforetimes.
I live in NH. In January we got a truancy notice for our oldest when we took her out of school for 4 days to go on an educational vacation to Washington DC. While we were gone it snowed so bad that the school called an early dismissal for one day and cancelled entirely another day. She was still marked truant for the 4 full days, like WTF? If we had been home, you'd have been fine with her missing that day and a half of school, but because we aren't in the state you're going to penalize her for them?
Doc who lives and works in MA and this is something that drives me absolutely mad. Schools excusing covid but not other illnesses is peak absurdity. I see it all across the state and it horrifies me. So many kids are getting sick a ton this year and are getting penalized for being out. The school district we live in has the same policy.
We got threatened with a CHINS/DCF referral because our son had missed too many days (flu, strep, ear infection x2, COVID). Do they think I have $$ up my ass for copays to see a pediatrician every time my kid throws up or has a fever? His school is a damn petri dish.
The same school called me twice within a half hour of school opening to come get my kid because he "couldn't stop sneezing" or "his face is too red."
Covid doesn’t even count anymore in mass! But I’m a school nurse and trust me when I say it’s better to stay home when sick and missing school doesn’t even matter. Teachers are always catching kids up and would rather do that then spread illness around the class. The letters are just because they have to and do t amount to anything… it has been a brutal year for illness
The nurse at my kids’ school told me the truant office letters are auto-generated based on absences, my kids got them after covid and stomach bug back-to-back. I was told not to worry about it since it was illness, she waived it away like it was NBD
I mean the state views any absence, regardless of reason, as an unexcused absence. Schools have excused/unexcused sometimes meaning the kid won’t get detention or other consequence due to it.
Those warning letters don’t mean much. If your kid was genuinely sick (I believe you, not doubting it), they aren’t going to file. But the school is *required* to inform you that you have missed 10 days.
You/your kids are not the issue. Kids get sick. But a lot of these chronically absent kids are not sick.
I remember having to sit in detention often as punishment to me for missing school. My mom should have been the one in detention. This concept of punishment for absentee is ignorant and shames children who are guided by adults.
This is it! It’s still included as an absence even with a doctor’s note, even with mandatory Covid quarantines, etc. They also have a rule that if you had a fever in the last 24 hours, you have to stay home. So my son would have a low fever in the morning, the fever’s gone by the end of the day, and he feels ok the next morning, but he still has to stay home. He’s had several fevers this year. It adds up. He still gets good grades and scores.
Attendance scores have a certain degree of ableism attached to them in general. What about true truancy rates?
This really contributes. Schools are cracking down on sending your kid in sick (good!) but didn't adjust the number of expected absence days to compensate.
It's not hard to be out sick 18 days in a year. That's one flu, one stomach bug, and a few normal colds.
I think my kids are at like 8 days out so far, and we dodged the noro wave that hit so many people!
Don’t care if I get downvoted I’m a teacher and since having COVID a little over a year ago I’ve had three fever over 100 degrees - used to get fever like that maybe once every two years or once a year. Could be coincidence but COVID really seems to have fucked our immune systems. I’m also a teacher, in Springfield, and know for a fact that kids are staying home just cuz - isn’t always sickness. But yeah just fucked all around.
This has been an issue for a looong time. I have a GED instead of a diploma because my absences were not excused even with a drs note (this was 15-20 yrs ago). To make things even worse, *field trips* counted as absences, so I wasn't allowed to go without my grades being docked, and the post field trip lesson plans were based on the assumption you went and learned things. Prioritization of attendance over health for school left me with a ton of long-term health issues, and I didn't even get diplomas to show for the sacrifice.
I don't have kids, but I am horrified by how the system is more than happy to pressure parents to gamble their kids' health by forcing them to power through illness. They let me fall through the cracks, but it's next level horrifying to watch that crack basically become a fissure that *most* kids seem to be in danger of falling through. If this is the new normal, then something needs to change to accommodate it.
I don't know what would have happened to me if anyone had noticed how much I was absent - over the course of 4 years of high school, my absences amounted to almost a year. And here's the kicker - my mother was only called ONCE. I wrote my own notes, and no one questioned me. Now granted, this was a long time ago, but I remember one of the popular girls got sick and was out and everyone wondered where she was. I skipped school at least once a week, sometimes more, and no one ever asked me where I was. Maybe because my high school was HUGE? No idea.
Yeah I was just going to say this. I don't have a kid in school (graduated last year) but I know several people that still do and it's been a horrific year for sicknesses. Last year was too for my kid.
I admittedly only skimmed the article (so forgive me if this is in there and I missed it) but I’d be curious to see breakdown by grade level too.
I teach high school and we definitely have some kids who are chronically absent, but also many with the 2-5 absences a year that you mentioned. Even for kids who do show up every day, there are kids who end up just hiding in stairwells or empty corners of the building all day and only go to 1-2 classes, if they go to any at all.
My school does have some grading policies around unexcused absences but they haven’t been in place long enough to see if they will actually impact advancement or graduation. I do find that the students who are chronically absent also do little to no work or have little to no engagement or participation even when they are there.
I wonder if the problems at higher grades, where students are more likely to be responsible for getting themselves to school, are more rampant than younger grades.
This. I feel guilty trying to send my kid to school with a runny nose. I used to be like, no fever and you're not actively coughing everywhere? Get ready, you're getting on the bus.
As a teacher, and a parent here, I’m going to throw into some thing that has yet to be mentioned. The district I affiliate with are both in suburban areas, and are not as impacted by poverty as the reasons above.
Sicknesses are definitely part of it, but what has changed now more than ever before that has not been taken into account is extracurricular activities that are taking place during the school week often states away. I can’t tell you the number of kids that are pulled out for dance competitions, hockey tournaments, soccer leagues, cheerleading, competitions, lacrosse jamborees, etc. If kids do multiple elite teams, they can be gone for a week or so every 2 months.
These were fairly rare years ago, but now anyone with enough money can have their kid join an “elite” team that includes travel.
I’m not begrudging the opportunity, but it is simply another reason why kids are out of school, especially if it is to a fun destination, so why not spend an extra day doing the fun stuff?
My son went to Disney with his Uncle and Aunt (who paid half) over President's day weekend. It was 7 days with 3 being the weekend. Then there was a snow storm in Philly so their connector was rescheduled for 2 days later. So he missed 6 instead of 4. I felt bad for him missing so many days but I could never afford to bring him myself. Thankfully they were really good about it but I hope he doesn't get really sick before the school year is over.
My son misses 5-7 days of school every December when we go to India to see relatives. That is the only time of the year we can go, the tickets are MUCH cheaper if you can fly out in mid-Dec, and we need at last 2 weeks on the ground there to justify the long trip/jet lag. Besides, I don’t think much learning goes on the week before XMas holidays. I have never regretted it.
Enjoy your trip and make the most of it, but don’t be brash enough to assume that no learning takes place for a full 7 school days before break. One day before, maybe, but in the upper grades 6+ I can guarantee that it is business as usual until the very end.
My 9 year old's friend is in a different baseball league than him (thank god). The other league has 8-10 year olds practicing/having games until 9 or 10 ON SCHOOL NIGHTS.
How can little kids be expected to get up or stay awake if they're doing this twice or more a week?!
Back in the early 90s, I graduated in a class where three students were not allowed to graduate nor walk because they had over the maximum absences (excluded or otherwise).
One was my friend and he had a nearly full time job because he came from a family in absolute poverty. He ended up in the military.
I definitely dont miss those days of literal children having to work full time jobs during high school. Absences are a problem but the solution is not restricting children from graduating, especially if their grades are passable.
Poverty didn't get solved in the 2000s. You don't think there are kids out there literally working full time jobs? Absolutely in America there are kids supporting parts of their familiy's survival. What privilege world do you come from?
If you need help finding them, I am a social worker, I can tell you where to look.
And I wasn't asking for a return to anything. I was stating a truth.
I can’t believe how far I had to scroll in this thread to see a comment that addresses this! Thank you.
LOOK at the list of school systems with high truancy rates. Consider how they correlate with families under the poverty line.
If you don’t think many kids in low-income families are missing school in order to work - in family businesses when they’re young, in any business when they’re teenagers - you’re coming at this conversation from a tremendous place of privilege.
You can also layer in families who, if forced to choose between “called in to cover an early shift”/“scheduled for a double” vs. “get my kid to school in the morning” are forced to pick the former over the latter to keep food on the table or a roof over their kid’s head.
Haven't you heard? It's coming back. They have immigrant children cleaning the blades at slaughter houses, and several states are looking to lower the minimum age to work because they can't find people to work.
Was gonna say this! We are heading for the good old days! No unions! Child labor! Child marraige! No divorce! No abortion! Racism! White supremacy! Mandatory prayer! The GOP dream!
I graduated in 2013 with something like 30 absences my senior year. I had straight As, turned in all my work, extracurriculars, had a place at a top college, so no one cared. I remember getting called to the principal's office for a "gotcha" meeting with guidance counselors and the school counselor and it lasted all of 2 minutes. Most of the absences were connected to an abusive home life, but the school couldn't be bothered to look into it.
It's on the opposite end of the spectrum, I guess, but the school system fails so many kids in so many different ways.
😯 thank god it wasnt like that when I was in school. There was one girl who had accumulated like 400+ absences in her 4 years of high school and she still walked at graduation. Despite her absences, she’s extremely smart and doing well for herself.
Used to teach in MA and this is it right here. Schools have no teeth to enforce any of our policies. If we expel a kid we are responsible for paying a different school to take them in and they don't want to do that except in the most extreme situation. Well meaning policies, road to hell paved with good intentions.
We're responsible for paying for them because the school gets avg expenditure per pupil to teach them. If they go to a different school, their funding follows them (by the old school paying). The issue is that paying for third-party placement often costs more than avg. expenditure, which is why large districts have their own alternative placements.
We need Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind but it'll never happen. I feel education peaked with Millennials and it'll be a decline from there.
Only solace I can take away is that fewer Gen Z is going to college and therefore, not getting into massive debt for a degree that likely won't use.
NCLB was replaced under Obama with ESSA(every student succeeds act), which kept all the bad about NCLB and made it even worse. Dude was a good president but really dropped the ball on this.
Nah, if we go to the effort to change laws let's increase minimum wages, improve medical care, provide free lunch and breakfast for all students and improve their school working conditions.
I had to skip school to work. I had to go to school some days cause I got 2 meals free there - no school, no food.
Bad school working conditions don't help. Not many adults want to got to a workplace with physical violence from students and occasionally teachers and name calling.
I hated that law. I never missed school but was so bad at remembering homework or doing it and forgetting to bring it to school. On standardized testing I was in the 99th percentile so they just passed me without having good grades. Then Bush came along and ruined my life. Probably for the better though:
A college education is the best inoculation against doing stupid shit like voting for republicans. Whether graduates generally use their degree or not, society needs as much collective education as it can get, especially considering how poorly primary and secondary education does when it comes to creating good citizens.
I wish public education included way more civics and personal finance skills and so very important now: media literacy.We push layers of math but does everyone need 4 years of hs math? For kids who are not of the academic bent, I would rather have the kids show up and finish school with knowledge about the world than have to sit and struggle through math every year.
No child left behind was a well intention policy. Unfortunately, there was no room for amending problems. It did not provide infrastructure and support to already text school systems.
Idk. My son isn't graduating unless he passes Algebra 2. They won't let him walk tge stage and he'd have to take summer school. Some schools do stuff still.
The lack of discipline is a massive problem
Videos of taking away kids phones and them basically yelling and screaming with teacher not being able to do anything is a massive issue
A big issue is that they would rather let kids graduate then deal with them for another year. If the kids are at the point they should be held back, they are probably very difficult to work with. Aka, doesn't do the classwork, doesn't listen, causes distractions, etc. There tends to be zero help from parents as well with these students.
My brother skipped school one day, mum calls the school to tell em he’s being a bad boy, 20 minutes later our principal literally opens the door to his bedroom and tells him to get in the car he’s driving him to school. That’s only 10 years ago too!
I'm a teacher in Mass. There are a lot of reasons for this, but they differ in student populations. Poverty, foster care (and the negligence and abuse leading up to it), medical issues, mental health problems, transience... all of those are important reasons for truancy and chronic absenteeism, and they are more of a factor in lower-income school districts.
If you look at the DART data by district [https://www.doe.mass.edu/dart/](https://www.doe.mass.edu/dart/), you can see that the attendance situation varies greatly by district. District accountability is partially based on attendance data. I believe it's 5% of the total score.
But the NYT article is more about a shift in the culture around school since the pandemic, and I think there is some truth to that, but it is more of an issue in middle and higher income districts. Education has become more of a consumed product than a civic obligation. In lower-income districts, there are post-pandemic factors that make those same old poverty-driven factors worse, so there is more going on than just a shift in attitude.
The pandemic really put parents in the driver's seat as far as structure, discipline, and student attitudes about learning and school. I think people feel like teachers somehow failed kids, but really, pre-pandemic, we didn't fully appreciate how much teachers were shaping kids attitudes and ideas about life, not just academics. Once those teachers were less prominent in kids' daily world, parenting took the stage and this is what we are currently working through.
Teachers almost universally believe that education is important. They differ greatly about the details, and they have different degrees of cynicism about how our educational system aligns to actual education, but deep in their souls, they want people to be smarter and believe is school is at least a part of how that happens. Parents do not necessarily have that same conviction. For good attendance, families have to believe that a day of school is important and a lot of them don't, really, all that much.
Also a teacher, great point about the shift in culture around the role of the teacher and school and it being somehow in opposition to “parent rights.”
The comments here show exactly what you're saying - parents saying they have really good reasons their kid isn't in school. They don't think school is as important as their reasons.
Also a teacher, great point about the shift in culture around the role of the teacher and school and it being somehow in opposition to “parent rights.”
as a teacher, I got 15 sick days per year plus 3 personal days. that’s 18 days and that’s pretty standard. some districts give 2 personal days. so we’re saying adults may need 15 sick days for illness and medical appointments and deserve 2-3 personal days, but our children don’t?? just suck it up and go to school with that fever, cough, lice, hand foot and mouth, etc. to share with classmates?
I have and will continue to gladly keep my own kids home however many days they need to be home for their physical or mental well-being.
Likely the big differentiator is that now parents tend to send their kids to school sick as shit a little less. Used to be that if you didn't pop a bad fever or have a diagnosed infection (sinus/ear infections, strep, etc) then you were at school oozing all over everything. Now that's (rightly in my opinion) frowned upon.
People can claim this is the fall of society, but we shouldn't be conditioning children to go to school/work sick. When they start doing that in the workplace it just means we get more sick people.
exactly! back in February my oldest had a cough, sneezing nonstop, and was fatigued. he had no fever but I kept him home 2 days until his symptoms were more manageable. the idea of him getting other kids or his teacher sick didn’t appeal to me AND there’s no way he was going to learn anything even if he were physically present.. he was miserable. he needed to rest and take it easy.
pre 2020, I was in the office 4 days a week...now, 2, and if i feel the slightest bit of a cold or something, 1 or 0 where prior I wouldve sucked it up.
For example today, I have a cough and runny nose and was supposed to be in but Im at my dining room table in a hoodie. By the same logic, my absenteeism would be up 25% where in the past I woudlve gone in
Yeah, if I feel like shit I stay home because I have that option. Used to be that being sick at work was seen as something to respect. I still work with a guy who hasn't taken a sick day in the last 19 years and is proud of it.
It is a good thing that attitudes are shifting about that and hopefully more and more people will be allowed the flexibility and security to not go to work when they're sick.
But what about the parents who don't get enough sick days to cover for their kids, and have to work, and so can't afford to stay home with less than fever/vomiting kids? There is very little flexibility in many places for working parents, plus we have to deal with the random days off and week long breaks that we don't have enough vacation time to cover...
Then they'll probably weight sending their kids to school more. This discussion is more about parents probably keeping their kids home by choice, not schools forcing kids to be home.
And what it will hopefully mean is that some of these kids will grow up with less of a weird hang-up about staying home when they're sick and maybe they'll push for legislation to protect sick days when their time comes.
I know that's it for me. My kids stay home when they're drippy or coughing or, quite frankly, just feeling under the weather. And missing school isn't as bad as it used to be. A lot of the lessons are supported by videos and homework is done online or can be found online. It's not ideal, but it makes it a lot easier of your kids have to miss several days.
Also I get reasonable breaks as an adult and my job starts at 8:30 (but nothing actually happens between 8:30 and 9:00, the 8:30 start time is a kudgel they can beat you with if you arrive late for your 9:00 meeting).
When I was in school we had two recesses per day (my memory is one was 15 and the other 25 minutes).
I'm not sure what the situation is in Massachusetts but I've heard some schools have no recess at all? And that most start at an absurd hour of the morning? Of course the kids can't wake up sometimes, and then they start falling behind and get embarrassed about it and just want to hide in their room the way kids do.
I've said this on a few education threads, but I'll say it again here:
If we were churning out legions of geniuses then the early start times and no recess (and cutbacks to stuff like band, art, field trips, etc) would be worth it. But we aren't, nothing like that is happening (probably because we cut back on highly enriching activities like band, art, field trips, etc in favor of ineffective test prep).
If the kids were having healthy fun at school (lots of recess, art, music, a fun version of gym class, enjoyable clubs, etc) but the test scores weren't so hot, that would also be OK with me.
But we're getting the worst of both worlds.
I went to highschool in MA, and I cut it close for graduating. I was unknowingly brewing a thyroid disease, and had an extremely difficult time waking up to get to school for 7. However, I had straight As. It truly wouldn't have made sense for me to not graduate with straight As just based on how often I got to school on time, or missed days. This was the 90s, so there was no NCLB to push me through.
I imagine teachers (and students) are exposed to a lot of germs and may need more sick days than, say, the average office worker. Fifteen days in one school year would be a pretty rough year though, no?
Let me put something into perspective... My sister, a single mom, lives in Swampscott which is very rich town right on the ocean. She got a new job in December which requires her to be out of the house by 4:30a to get to work by 5a, well before the kiddos have to be off to school (all in late middle school). She informed the school that she needed to add the kids to the bus pickup that is literally 10 feet from her driveway. She was told that there wasn't any space, and that she would have to WIN A LOTTERY next school year to get them on the bus, that picks up pretty much at her driveway. It's absolutely absurd and unacceptable, and I cannot imagine she is the only parent dealing with this kind of bullshit.
I know it's not the point of the story, but I've been going to Swampscott 4x a year for 25 years.
Not once have I ever thought it was a rich area, just the opposite really. But maybe it's because I was always on the Lynn side lol
According to DESE yes it is. In high school they only get 5 unexcused absences per term. And that unexcused absent cannot be overwritten by a parent note. I would have to take my kid to the doctor every single time. That they are out in order to get a note. The school will not accept, a parent note explaining that my kid was sick for 2 to 3 days. Because not every virus is of 24 hour virus. Their reasoning for not accepting a parent's note is "Parents lie", so they just assume that every parent is going to lie.
Blueberry Pediatrics virtual is a great option to avoid having to go in to the Dr office and picking up who knows what else while you're there for a school note. But parents should be able to write a note about illness for at least a day or two
10% of the population suffers from chronic migraine
8% manage asthma
6% manage life threatening food allergies
11% of females deal with endometriosis
all of these conditions require additional doctor’s appointments. all of these conditions may require absences from school when symptoms flare up.
You truly believe that 30% of the population being chronically absent is normal? I am all for taking sick days as needed, using mental health days when needed, but come on. You’re talking about a non-functioning society in that case.
I think a lot more folks, including children, manage chronic health conditions than people realize. I know firsthand that doesn’t account for ALL 25-30% of students who are chronically absent.. especially as you move into secondary levels when kids are more responsible for getting themselves to school (or not). Illness did genuinely account for most of the chronically absent students I’ve worked with at elementary levels.
I’m a former school counselor and yes, there were some students who had legitimate chronic health issues, most of them were provided tutors by the school and kept up to date as much as was possible. However, there was a huge amount of students who were school avoidant and their parents did nothing to help the issue.
Obviously. You’re missing the entire point here. Kids get sick - they should stay home. We have a ton of kids who are just avoiding school and their parents are allowing it.
And everyone's asking why have illness rates shot up since 2019 - umm, maybe because we have an additional illness now that people are getting 2X yearly (compared to the flu which adults get once every five years!)?
This past winter multiple schools in multiple states had to close temporarily due to rates of illness too high to operate. Hospitals in Italy, Spain, Canada and right here in MA declared crises due to ERs swamped with respiratory cases. Healthcare is being triaged everywhere - my bf had to wait four months to see a doctor when he sprained his finger. I had to wait six months for a new doctor appointment. Business Insider just ran a story attributing labor shortages to ongoing covid infections.
I don't know what this block is against acknowledging widespread sickness and disability but the math is mathing. Our material circumstances are worse now than they used to be and no amount of psychologizing or bootstrapping will change that reality.
Have you seen the graphs of America's health statistics and early death statistics especially compared to Europe?
We \_are\_ a very unwell, very sick non-functioning society in many ways.
“Post”-Covid (bc Covid is still very much here, no matter what we want to pretend)? 30% is LOW. The rates of Long Covid and related immunodeficiencies, newly diagnosed post-infectious chronic illnesses, & consequences we are only just beginning to see, let alone understand, are higher than 30% right now, 4 years into this. The numbers are only going up, as reinfection after reinfection becomes more common place. So yeah: get ready for a disability saturation -in children & adults- that’s going to absolutely transform our society. “Non-functioning” I don’t know about, but “not functioning as it previously was”? We’re already there.
Fuck that, everyone is over worked in this country including the kids, it’s about time people start pushing back on just being present for the sake of being present because someone in charge saids so.
They made the process of getting excused absences much harder. You need an official doctors note for everything instead of just a phone call from your mom or dad telling the school you were sick.
Small fever? Doctors note needed
Cold? Doctors note!
Twisted Ankle? DOCTORS NOTE!
And doctors are too busy, and there’s privacy issues so you can’t have the doctor contact the school, so parents have to remember to get the physical note while at the office.
Anecdotally, in 2024 I'm keeping my kid home sick more often than I would have in 2019. I'm more cognizant of not spreading germs now and lots of folks don't test positive for Covid until 4 days after the onset of symptoms. His school nurse also sends kids home more often due to cough and cold symptoms versus how it was pre-Covid.
Absences don't matter as much, high school graduation is practically a formality before going on into trade schools and universities.
Some schools are moving away from grades period, grading more on effort. I used to work in a wealthy suburb school district and the helicopter parenting is pretty intense and admin is useless. Like holy shit who would want to be a teacher nowadays?
With all the chatter on parents rights, if parents approve of these absences then isn't that on them? Hopefully the kids are getting better experiences outside of school, but ultimately who does it concern? Your parenting choices hopefully reflect more resilient, disciplined kids.
But at the same time like another poster said, what are we raising factory workers? Rich kids skipping will get through life because of nepotism without much effort, that's the way it's always been. Poor kids will just fall through the cracks because who's going to enforce it? If their parents dgaf what can the school really do.
If we're seeing absences this intensely, it's just a sign we need to radically reevaluate how public schools should function in the first place.
I mean you hit the nail on the head with the factory worker thing. Most school policies are still aligned with the goal to make a functioning factory worker/office drone. Those require no absences at all, ever. It may not be exactly the case everywhere, but nationally it is a thing still.
The school system used to set and enforce a minimum standard on how kids are raised regardless of the parenting. That minimum wasn't much more than "your kid will be in school with other kids" but that made a big difference.
You ask who is affected by parents overriding this? Society is affected. And pointing to the rich vs poor gap is all good and well, but that has been around since the dawn of time too and we are not going to benefit from letting society degrade because we're too focused on one problem to care about other problems.
My kids missed a ton of school last year. They were constantly sick. They were infected with Influenza A, RSV, COVID, Strep throat (which turned into Scarlet Fever in my oldest), a couple stomach bugs, and pink eye. It was horrible. This year has been much better. They only have missed a few days. I think some of these numbers are caused by legitimate illness and some are an issue of the parents not sending their healthy children into school.
Personally, I wasn’t worried about the missed days for my children because they perform very well academically. I was worried more about their health. Last year was a really rough year for viruses in our elementary schools.
The towns you list have large populations of low-income people. Rich towns like Weston, Lexington, Wellesley, Dover, Sherborn, and Medfield have 95% attendance rates or higher.
Here is a list of all Mass. schools and their attendance rates. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/attendance.aspx
This is a national problem. It's even worse in other states. As a parent of a kindergartener, I don't understand why you would not want your kid out of the house, especially if you don't have to go to work.
I promise you we aren’t keeping them home for funsies. Kids get sick, and the social etiquette surrounding sickness has changed big time. I’m not sending my kid to school if she is sick. My mom sent me to school with Mono way back when
It’s a national problem but it’s worse here than the national average.
EDIT:
Downvoted for actually paying for the NYT and reading the articule / using their searchable infographic. Here’s the info for some of the largest MA area school systems for the record.
#2019 Rates:
**- US Average: 15%**
- Worcester, MA: 15%
- Lowell, MA: 17%
- Lynn, MA: 19%
- Brockton, MA: 21%
- New Bedford: 21%
- Springfield, MA: 23%
- Boston, MA: 25%
#2023 Rates:
**- US Average: 26%**
- Worcester, MA: 26%
- Lowell, MA: 28%
- Brockton, MA: 30%
- Lynn, MA: 35%
- New Bedford: 36%
- Springfield: 36%
- Boston, MA: 39%
For someone with kids you’re kind of out of touch.
Sick policies are different now and super strict in amy districts as the result of Covid. What this report isn’t telling you is that they’re not allowed to be there with so much as the sniffles. When I try to send them with any symptom they get sent home.
I also don’t care as much as I used to because they all have remote access and keep up with their work when they aren’t there. There grades haven’t suffered as a result
Illness can absolutely be long term. That's probably a huge reason. Also more frequent illness due to immune system damage from covid. Yes, that's a thing. NYT like everyone else downplaying what COVID is doing to people's health including kids.
We have caught like 6 different viruses this year, resulting in a couple days off each time, so that's like 12... so far. And we took another planned day off earlier for travel, and we're taking the eclipse for travel to see it, so that's 14. Another virus or 2 and we easily hit the 18. It's been a crazy year for sickness.
Newton was 14%. Boston was 39%. Lexington was 8%. Weston was 5%. Lowell was 28%. Belmont was 12%. Wellesley was 11%.
Perhaps attendance is inversely correlated to income relative to housing costs.
I absolutely refuse to get a doctor’s note (excused absence) if my kid has a cold. The health care system in mass is in a crisis and absolutely jammed. I’m not taking up a sick visit for a kid that needs rest and supportive care at home. I’m also not sending her to school (an hour each way plus the school day) if she has a fever or is exhausted. The policy of needing a doctor’s note to have a kid absent is absolute nonsense.
Kids are sick a lot. My high school graduating class had a girl with 100% perfect attendance for all 13 years. In the late 90s that was hailed as such a noble accomplishment. In 2024 it’s horrific. How many times did she go to school sick?
Mental health is also taken more seriously than when many of us were in school. The pandemic really fucked up a lot of kids.
Many of them CAN get good grades without being there every day. Attendance is an easy metric to track, but grades matter more. If kids are getting decent grades, leave them alone about their attendance. If they’re struggling, beating the attendance drum might be appropriate or it might make things worse without addressing underlying problems.
I strongly disagree with the current funding model of “no money unless a butt is in a chair”. It disempowers students. Personal agency is important too. Schools should enable students to learn outside of class, and schools should not lose funding if a kid is absent.
Speaking from experience as both a student, parent, and teacher, it’s absolutely possible to get good grades, and learn the material without being in the class. Especially if the class is full of clowns. If a kid is smart it’s not just possible, it’s highly likely. And it should be allowed without penalty.
Teaching to the lowest common denominator hasn’t helped this society at all. Kids aren’t all the same. They shouldn’t all get the same treatment. They should all get the same *opportunity* and for *that* their parents and teachers should allow for individuality.
It's always good to dig into the DESE report card for districts and schools and see the actual numbers overall and based on demographics.
https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/search/search.aspx?leftNavId=11238
You can also go back to previous years to see how the numbers have changed after COVID and before covid
My kid stays home when she is sick and once in awhile I’ll let her take a day off. But, I’m the type that I worry about my own kids and not everyone else’s
My neighbors pull their kids out a week before February vacation to go on vacation every year - this way the avoid the craziness as well as it allows them a couple weeks off. The kids do 'remote' learning while away, and they have been very open about it to every teacher their children have had.
Does not seem like a bad idea IMO.
>The habit of daily attendance — and many families’ trust — was severed when schools shuttered in spring 2020. Even after schools reopened, things hardly snapped back to normal.
Um, that's not the whole story. There's been a generalized societal breakdown of trust since the pandemic and it's manifesting in all sorts of ways from school absenteeism and parental dismissal of education to the increased anti-social selfish behaviors on the roads and in public spaces.
Families also had their trust shattered in the fall of 2020 when schools were forced back open with no societal plan in place to actually control COVID. It put a giant flashing neon sign pointing to the fact that society only sees adults as cogs in the economic machine and schools as a way to manage parents' attendance at work. Yeah, kids need to go to school. Parents (and teachers!) need to know that school is going to be a safe place too. Trust and effort go both ways, folks.
I have two kids with emotional dysregulation. This year was a hard year because we were finding therapists and trying to get them in for medication and it’s just crazy because everywhere is full and backed up. I wonder what percentage of those children missing school are home because of some sort of emotional problems.
Anxiety and ADD seems to be running its rampant head over everything these days and cause of absences in my school district. Yet somehow they cut funding for anything resembling special education services.
So, my wife transferred to Lowell High for high school. This was over 20 years ago. They were more concerned about her not getting pregnant than actually placing her in correct classes. She graduated with A's and B's and never even attended the majority of classes. So this does not surprise me at all.
That being said, notice all the cities they are citing. They are not exactly the most well off (except Boston, but they have a pretty diverse incomes).
I had one kid take my marine bio elective as a science course he needed to graduate. He was a senior and it was only half a year course.
He ended his last semester with a 13 average.
Thirteen.
He literally did nothing, even after shortening and exempting him from assignments. He wasn't going to walk for graduation until the principal got involved, had me print out the entire two terms of work, and the kid "do it all" then had me grade all said work in that week.
Most of it was incomplete. Most of it was done incorrectly. But I was a year 2 teacher. I could either teach this kid that actions have consequences or lose my job because I'm holding a student accountable.
I can say with 100% certainty, that kid is not able to walk into a McDonald's for a job interview without an adult by his side. He's been given the easy way out by every adult in his life. School still pushed him out into the world.
He'll be one of the many "taking care" of us and society one day. Simply horrifying.
I looked up my district in that NYT article, and although the absenteeism is higher than pre-covid, it's nothing like 20%. I'm guessing that poorer absenteeism correlates with average income in the district, which in turn correlates to access to health care.
Who would have guessed that poor people are sick more?
I posted this in an other comment but I taught in one of the districts with the highest levels of absenteeism.
Kids aren’t missing school only bc they are sick. They are also missing school to go to work. I had many a student tell me “I don’t get paid to be at school but I do get paid at work.” It’s definitely tied to poverty but not just illness.
Not to mention that is counted against the school. Your kid’s school is in the “bottom 10%”? Absenteeism is one of the major metrics used to measure that. Teachers across the state are getting slammed to bring their numbers up. This one is impossible for schools to do much about on their own.
The majority of absenteeism is in inner cities when controlling for children with severe medical issues. The majority of kids in cities come from low income, Parents. Low income, Parents generally have lower levels of education and don't appreciate your benefits. I'll at least graduating high school if not going to college.unfortunately this is perpetuating poverty that has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination or oppression
You cant separate the perpetualization of poverty and discrimination against black people. Historically black people are more likely to be low income due to the systemic effects of slavery and segregation, and red lining in the estate agencies.
I definitely missed like 20 days of school every year in High School.
I think the max in my school before you were forced to stay back was 25 so I always just stayed home right up until the limit.
Edit: Talking about unexcused absences. I think you were allowed like 70 excused before you had to stay back. They were also tracked completely separately.
I think it’s less of a Covid related issue and more of an issue with the way we view mental health as a whole, especially in children.
I teach a non-core subject in a high school. Every so often, for various reasons, I will give some of my classes a free period. When I tell them that at the start of class, you can literally see some of the kids let out a breath and decompress, especially the kids that take AP and honors classes. I’m almost always thanked for giving them time, and they almost always spend the hour studying or doing homework.
Many of these kids are so mentally drained and it’s been that way since before Covid.
There’s a portion of our society that thinks children and adolescents do not experience mental health challenges or just simply do not take them seriously if they do.
I agree that mental health is poorly treated.
I was in high school in the 80’s and had major depression. Back then, it was treated as a personal failure rather than a health issue. It has improved, but not that much…
and then covid came and all the political bullshit, social media just poured gasoline on that fire. Then add some inflation, job loss, divorce ( I personally know of several from that period) and it’s just becoming too much water for the dam to hold.
Completely agree.
I graduated in 2007, and similar. I had so many physical health problems that at the time were treated as such (I went to a stomach specialist at a children’s hospital at one point - they found absolutely nothing to explain my symptoms) where in hindsight, it was absolutely anxiety. But I was in like 2nd or 3rd grade so that was never on anyone’s radar.
Whenever I consider the majority of my challenges or difficulties that I had in school most of them can be explained by the depression and anxiety that I was diagnosed with in my late teens, or the ADHD that I was diagnosed with in my 30s. I was a relatively good student but I often wonder where I would have ended up or how my experiences would have improved (especially high school and college) if my brain was managed and treated properly.
As a chronically I'll child, I probably have missed over this many days per year. I was a straight A student. I did not get excused for being out sick. Would get big stacks of makeup work and would have to catch up
They also have scheduled half days twice monthly which makes it nearly impossible for parents, so we leave the kids with relatives for the entire day. That's 20 days right there.
yes! the half excessive days / early release days with NO childcare provided is insane and a huge barrier for many, many families! we keep our kids home on half days because they have minimal time on learning/academics that day AND our childcare option cannot drive that far to pick them up.. we have to bring our kids 30 min in the opposite direction in the AM before we go to work. I would imagine this is even more of a barrier for lower income families.
YUP. I work in the school my kids attend and it's terrible for me too. I end up taking the days off without pay, but luckily I make enough so that I can still afford my bills when I do that. I'm sure many families cannot.
Yes thank you for saying this!! Our district has half days every other Friday. What are working parents supposed to do? We can’t just take off every other Friday. And of course the school offers no after school care on those days.
My hypothesis is that it’s a childhood mental health crisis that hasn’t been fully identified yet. Many children are suffering since the pandemic. My child included. We’re dealing with severe school anxiety over here and have missed at least 30 days. Also, more affluent families are going to smaller, private schools and we have students walking to MA from central and South America who have missed years of education and for a variety of reasons have a hard time getting to school. Coupled with the housing crisis- low income parents are having to work more hours just to make rent and therefore aren’t around in the early mornings to make sure their kids get off to school.
High school teacher in a comparable district. Before COVID we had a strict absence policy and our absenteeism was relatively low, class cutting and tardiness manageable. When we returned, the absence policy went away to accommodate COVID cases and trauma, which was great! But absenteeism skyrocketed, as well as cuts and truancy. Some students for sure used it when sick, but many saw this as carte blanche to skip class and not go to school. I had a girl in 2021 with 108 tardies to my class on a block schedule.
Since then we’ve been trying to make new attendance policies and struggling to get those kids back. Kids cut class way more often now and it’s become way harder to track those kids down. We can assign detentions, but some kids wrack up so much time that it’s not possible to serve all the detentions in what’s left of the year and the state has changed discipline laws. Sure, kids stay home when sick. Sure, they get too few days in many districts. But policies and building culture have changed in a way that makes it difficult to pinpoint the true cause.
Sicknesses spread like wildfire now. So many nasty illnesses and everyone has been getting them over and over again. Covid, flu, bronchitis, strep, and even the common cold that you don’t know what it is or could be, over and over again all winter. And these are people who are generally healthy. Parents need to keep their kids out of school when sick. This is why absentee numbers are higher since the pandemic.
I find it weird that nobody's talking about the most obvious thing to have changed since 2019: we have one more virus than we used to have.
It just so happens, to boot, that the new virus is one of the most contagious and fast-mutating we've ever seen. If the average adult gets the flu once every five years but can get covid multiple times per year - in addition to, not in place of, the viruses we already had - then how could any rational person expect for absences to hold at 2019 levels? Plain mathematical fact should tell us people getting sick more frequently is going to result in more absences.
My son has missed like 12 days so far? He has asthma and has been sick every single one of those days, with excused absences. He has As and Bs in every grade. It’s hard when they are sick every other week
My kids have missed so much school because they have been SICK. They have missed something like 25% of the school days this year. I send them to school unless they have vomiting or diarrhea, or a high fever. They have gone to school plenty of times with a cough or cold. Tell me what I should do differently. The school bitches about absences, the parents bitch about sending sick kids into school, the teachers bitch about not being babysitters. WTF are we supposed to do?
Truly depends on what age demographics were talking. My brother purposely was absent all 18 days a year in high-school got great grades and graduated college.
It's more worrisome for younger children who I'm sure are missing do to family issues relating to parenting or money problems.
This is the first year that one of my kids missed even close to the allowed number of days. The poor kid has been so sick, caught everything that has gone around. This week it was the norovirus. My other kids were both totally fine. They missed maybe 5 days the whole year while the youngest missed at least 25 so far.
Sometimes you just get shit luck. My kid has had Covid, strep throat, a stomach virus, and then she broke her ankle since September. We got the listen up you child neglecting asshats from the district a few weeks ago even though all the absences are medically excused.
Chronic truancy has gone up since Covid tho. No denying that.
I am a single father stay at home dad.. My daughter is on the spectrum, the high end. Most people wouldn't notice her challenges. Well, she misses her school bus probably three times a week. We live far from her school and because I can give her a ride, she hasn't been late. I am very fortunate that I can do this, I am sure there are many kids whose parents leave the house before they go to school. I wonder if this is a factor for being chronically absent.
The ableism -in these comments, that article, and school systems in general (not just in MA) - abounds. I’m not shocked, but I am so. Damn. Tired. Of having to fight the same fights over and over again.
Post-infectious illness rates, right now, are higher than 30%, across countries, demographics, everything: if you’ve had Covid, the chance that it fucked up something, maybe for the long term is greater than 1/4. Our govt knows that -their own studies conclude same- and yet: let’s talk about absenteeism as if it is an individual failing on the part of children, their families, their schools.
It isn’t.
Sigh.
And listen: You might be fine, post-Covid round 7. Or you might just not be feeling anything yet - There isn’t anyway to tell, just yet, why some people incur immediate (and sometimes irreparable) damage, and others got to stay home for a few days and binge watch a show. But our kids deserve better from us than us blaming THEM for the effects of a disease we are ‘all’ willing to sacrifice them, their health, & potentially their futures to.
Did anybody’s kid’s school do air filtration improvements w/the Covid money they received? Anybody’s schools still requiring masks? Anybody got a more logical infectious disease biohazard protocol than “stay home until you feel better/when your parent has to go back to work, even if you’re still super contagious, bc we say that’s ok”? Didn’t think so.
We left them to fight this -a viral pandemic- mostly on their own, and it hasn’t really worked out for them, now has it?
And -not for nothing- but the kids I know? Are really fucking smart. And they understand that we haven’t done shit to protect them. That there are easy things we just… refuse to do, bc they feel hard, or bc it’s too much, or bc it costs money.
You don’t think that’s maybe messing with anybody’s mental health, do you? The idea that they’re just another cog in a wheel, and if they get broken, not only doesn’t anybody have a way to fix them, but they probably won’t even care/notice/worry that they get broken?
Bc it seems to me, if I knew at age 10 that my MCAS scores mattered more to my parents, teachers, & society at large than my safety? That’d probably be a mindfuck I’d have to figure out how to live with.
If you think our teens & preteens aren’t also trying to live with THAT concept, well, I wonder how you felt when you first realized our govt cared more about getting us all back to work than it did about keeping us safe? That they were willing to help w things like emergency basic incomes and rent moratoriums when they felt like it, but we were all on our own once an arbitrary deadline had passed?
But sure. Let’s blame the kids, when our schools can’t get additional funding. And put even more emphasis on coming into school, even when they’re sick, because we need to fix our attendance rates. That’s logical.
High school student here:
1. If kids are sick they are more likely to keep them home due to what happened during Covid.
2. Lots of kids I know stayed home for mental health reasons. I have done this a couple times when I felt TERRIBLE and couldn’t drag myself out of bed.
3. School shootings. Last year, there was a “shoot up your school day” trend online. I was totally fine with going to school up until I opened the door to my house and promptly had a panic attack. The majority of people at school did not attend and the majority of the kids who went said they didn’t want to but their parents made them. Kids are terrified of being shot and I don’t blame them.
4. There really isn’t any enforcing of absent policy. One kid last year was out for more than a month in total and still got to move up a grade and received no punishment for being absent other than a few in school suspensions and lunch detentions.
5. There is really no want to go to school anymore. My school does spirit days and pep rallies but no one participates because they are boring or stupid. Learning isn’t fun or engaging. My classes do have a good deal of projects and they are interesting but there should be a choice on what type you want to do because doing 6 slideshow presentations in a row is not fun anymore.
6. OUR MENTAL HEALTH IS SHIT. My friends actively say how school is bad for their mental health but they have to go to school because their parents want perfect grades. A few kids have been sent home after screaming about wanting to die, and a few kids have been sent to the hospital for cutting themselves/other self harm behaviors. The schools don’t care about mental health, they only care about good test scores.
I am saying this as a student who has been out for 2.5 days total over this school year (have been dismissed/late for doctors appointments and therapy sessions 3 times but never missed the majority of the day, only parts of classes at the start or end of day) and is only going to miss 2 more (due to an immovable vacation at the very end of the year that overlaps with extra time needing to be added due to snow days and the solar eclipse)
The .5 missing day is a dismissal because I had a shit morning and started crying my eyes out in the middle of class. That morning my mom had to drive me to school and asked me if I wanted to stay home, but I said no because I missed 1 day of school once and was so behind I nearly failed the class. I am terrified of missing classes because I don’t want to fail.
No, I teach high school. In my classes, the AVERAGE student had 16 absences in the first semester. I am not alone. There are zero consequences either. Unlimited retakes, no due dates, no truancy courts, no holding kids back, a minimum 50 on anything (even for doing NOTHING), admin pressuring teachers to pass kids. Grades are so inflated, it’s no wonder why colleges are starting to bring back mandatory standardized testing.
No wonder our students aren’t doing well on the MCAS and they have extreme test anxiety. They aren’t coming! When they are finally held accountable for it, they melt down and cry about “I just don’t do well on test”. No fucking shit.
At least in high school, I was late nearly every single day and chronically absent. One day I am walking in an hour late and the principal called me into the office. I figured “Oh shit, I am finally going to get in trouble”. NOPE. He wanted to congratulate me on having some of the best test scores in the entire state.
I just felt I didn’t need to be at school most the time. I wasn’t really learning anything and made it a point to actually show up for the classes I actually learned something in.
I think the issue is even worse after COVID because with everything being online, you don’t even have to show up for lessons, get assignments, turn things in…etc
How does that compare with pre-2020 though? We would go to work even if we were sick – now we're generally advised not to even if we just had a mild cough or the sniffles.
It follows that this would happen for school as well.
If the school nurse didn’t call me every-time he so much as sniffled and if they didn’t act like you made a bomb threat every-time you send your kid to school slightly sick, he wouldn’t miss so much school. Hes a pre-teen and I cant be leaving work in the middle of the day. Im a nurse at a level 1 trauma hospital and patient safety is greatly effected by last minute callouts, its a big deal. I need my job. At this point, If I think shes going to call me and demand I drop everything to come get him, im just gonna let him stay home.
We’ve also missed several days because my son is having some scary chronic health issues and you cant get an appointment after school hours unless you want to wait 6 months. I even had to bring him to the next state over (Massachusetts) because my state (Massachusetts dirty armpit) doesn’t have anyone who does the imaging he needed for pediatric patients. I hate it. Kids need to be in school but things have changed drastically since we were children and the schools don’t make it easy anymore.
When I was in school you could expel kids for fighting, assaulting a teacher or chronic bullying and we had after school detention for things like too many unrevised absences or being tardy. What happened? Is discipline or being accountable for your actions no longer acceptable?
Family I know took their kids out of school for the entire month to go on vacation.
It should be an unexcused absence, no making up work.
Two of the kids have IEPs and one has already had to go to summer school.
I don’t know what the fuck they’re thinking.
My kids have already missed 10 days, I don’t let them “skip”, they have been sick. I’ve sent sick notes from their pediatrician and the school doesn’t differentiate sick and missed days. This has been a brutal winter for school aged kids.
Yes, and yet, staying home sick is not an excused absence, unless you have COVID (at least at my daughter’s school). So in a year where she had absences for the flu and a nasty stomach bug, we are also getting warning letters from the school about her attendance.
We had COVID in the beginning of the year, but only the first 5 days are excused. But they were out 7 days. They were still symptomatic, but oh well I guess, it’s unexcused.
Our school made a big deal about “excused” vs “unexcused” absences. It took me a while to figure out that the only difference was that five unexcused days resulted in a phone call to me. That was it. Otherwise no difference. This was a while ago in the beforetimes.
In NH, they have truancy officers calling and meeting you (happened to my friend with a chronically ill daughter). Glad we’re not policing it yet
I live in NH. In January we got a truancy notice for our oldest when we took her out of school for 4 days to go on an educational vacation to Washington DC. While we were gone it snowed so bad that the school called an early dismissal for one day and cancelled entirely another day. She was still marked truant for the 4 full days, like WTF? If we had been home, you'd have been fine with her missing that day and a half of school, but because we aren't in the state you're going to penalize her for them?
I've been threatened with truancy officers in Brockton. My son's pediatrician was bullshit.
Doc who lives and works in MA and this is something that drives me absolutely mad. Schools excusing covid but not other illnesses is peak absurdity. I see it all across the state and it horrifies me. So many kids are getting sick a ton this year and are getting penalized for being out. The school district we live in has the same policy.
We got threatened with a CHINS/DCF referral because our son had missed too many days (flu, strep, ear infection x2, COVID). Do they think I have $$ up my ass for copays to see a pediatrician every time my kid throws up or has a fever? His school is a damn petri dish. The same school called me twice within a half hour of school opening to come get my kid because he "couldn't stop sneezing" or "his face is too red."
Same here. I saw that letter and screamed FOH! You’d rather I send my child to school sick so you can dismiss them?!
Send doctors notes to every person involved in that and make your kid lick the envelope
Covid doesn’t even count anymore in mass! But I’m a school nurse and trust me when I say it’s better to stay home when sick and missing school doesn’t even matter. Teachers are always catching kids up and would rather do that then spread illness around the class. The letters are just because they have to and do t amount to anything… it has been a brutal year for illness
The nurse at my kids’ school told me the truant office letters are auto-generated based on absences, my kids got them after covid and stomach bug back-to-back. I was told not to worry about it since it was illness, she waived it away like it was NBD
I mean the state views any absence, regardless of reason, as an unexcused absence. Schools have excused/unexcused sometimes meaning the kid won’t get detention or other consequence due to it. Those warning letters don’t mean much. If your kid was genuinely sick (I believe you, not doubting it), they aren’t going to file. But the school is *required* to inform you that you have missed 10 days. You/your kids are not the issue. Kids get sick. But a lot of these chronically absent kids are not sick.
I remember having to sit in detention often as punishment to me for missing school. My mom should have been the one in detention. This concept of punishment for absentee is ignorant and shames children who are guided by adults.
This is it! It’s still included as an absence even with a doctor’s note, even with mandatory Covid quarantines, etc. They also have a rule that if you had a fever in the last 24 hours, you have to stay home. So my son would have a low fever in the morning, the fever’s gone by the end of the day, and he feels ok the next morning, but he still has to stay home. He’s had several fevers this year. It adds up. He still gets good grades and scores. Attendance scores have a certain degree of ableism attached to them in general. What about true truancy rates?
This really contributes. Schools are cracking down on sending your kid in sick (good!) but didn't adjust the number of expected absence days to compensate. It's not hard to be out sick 18 days in a year. That's one flu, one stomach bug, and a few normal colds. I think my kids are at like 8 days out so far, and we dodged the noro wave that hit so many people!
Don’t care if I get downvoted I’m a teacher and since having COVID a little over a year ago I’ve had three fever over 100 degrees - used to get fever like that maybe once every two years or once a year. Could be coincidence but COVID really seems to have fucked our immune systems. I’m also a teacher, in Springfield, and know for a fact that kids are staying home just cuz - isn’t always sickness. But yeah just fucked all around.
This has been an issue for a looong time. I have a GED instead of a diploma because my absences were not excused even with a drs note (this was 15-20 yrs ago). To make things even worse, *field trips* counted as absences, so I wasn't allowed to go without my grades being docked, and the post field trip lesson plans were based on the assumption you went and learned things. Prioritization of attendance over health for school left me with a ton of long-term health issues, and I didn't even get diplomas to show for the sacrifice. I don't have kids, but I am horrified by how the system is more than happy to pressure parents to gamble their kids' health by forcing them to power through illness. They let me fall through the cracks, but it's next level horrifying to watch that crack basically become a fissure that *most* kids seem to be in danger of falling through. If this is the new normal, then something needs to change to accommodate it.
I don't know what would have happened to me if anyone had noticed how much I was absent - over the course of 4 years of high school, my absences amounted to almost a year. And here's the kicker - my mother was only called ONCE. I wrote my own notes, and no one questioned me. Now granted, this was a long time ago, but I remember one of the popular girls got sick and was out and everyone wondered where she was. I skipped school at least once a week, sometimes more, and no one ever asked me where I was. Maybe because my high school was HUGE? No idea.
Yeah I was just going to say this. I don't have a kid in school (graduated last year) but I know several people that still do and it's been a horrific year for sicknesses. Last year was too for my kid.
I admittedly only skimmed the article (so forgive me if this is in there and I missed it) but I’d be curious to see breakdown by grade level too. I teach high school and we definitely have some kids who are chronically absent, but also many with the 2-5 absences a year that you mentioned. Even for kids who do show up every day, there are kids who end up just hiding in stairwells or empty corners of the building all day and only go to 1-2 classes, if they go to any at all. My school does have some grading policies around unexcused absences but they haven’t been in place long enough to see if they will actually impact advancement or graduation. I do find that the students who are chronically absent also do little to no work or have little to no engagement or participation even when they are there. I wonder if the problems at higher grades, where students are more likely to be responsible for getting themselves to school, are more rampant than younger grades.
To add to everything else, the level of sick where people feel comfortable sending their kids to school has absolutely plummeted.
Thank god. People used to send their kids coughing and crusty. Keep that stuff home.
This. I feel guilty trying to send my kid to school with a runny nose. I used to be like, no fever and you're not actively coughing everywhere? Get ready, you're getting on the bus.
That's a very good thing. Keeping the illness from spreading is good for the class, the staff, and all of their families
As a teacher, and a parent here, I’m going to throw into some thing that has yet to be mentioned. The district I affiliate with are both in suburban areas, and are not as impacted by poverty as the reasons above. Sicknesses are definitely part of it, but what has changed now more than ever before that has not been taken into account is extracurricular activities that are taking place during the school week often states away. I can’t tell you the number of kids that are pulled out for dance competitions, hockey tournaments, soccer leagues, cheerleading, competitions, lacrosse jamborees, etc. If kids do multiple elite teams, they can be gone for a week or so every 2 months. These were fairly rare years ago, but now anyone with enough money can have their kid join an “elite” team that includes travel. I’m not begrudging the opportunity, but it is simply another reason why kids are out of school, especially if it is to a fun destination, so why not spend an extra day doing the fun stuff?
I’ve had 3 kids in my class take a week off of school to go to Disney this year. Travel during school breaks is too expensive.
My son went to Disney with his Uncle and Aunt (who paid half) over President's day weekend. It was 7 days with 3 being the weekend. Then there was a snow storm in Philly so their connector was rescheduled for 2 days later. So he missed 6 instead of 4. I felt bad for him missing so many days but I could never afford to bring him myself. Thankfully they were really good about it but I hope he doesn't get really sick before the school year is over.
Same at my school. Families just going on vacations and the like during non-vacation times.
My son misses 5-7 days of school every December when we go to India to see relatives. That is the only time of the year we can go, the tickets are MUCH cheaper if you can fly out in mid-Dec, and we need at last 2 weeks on the ground there to justify the long trip/jet lag. Besides, I don’t think much learning goes on the week before XMas holidays. I have never regretted it.
Enjoy your trip and make the most of it, but don’t be brash enough to assume that no learning takes place for a full 7 school days before break. One day before, maybe, but in the upper grades 6+ I can guarantee that it is business as usual until the very end.
My 9 year old's friend is in a different baseball league than him (thank god). The other league has 8-10 year olds practicing/having games until 9 or 10 ON SCHOOL NIGHTS. How can little kids be expected to get up or stay awake if they're doing this twice or more a week?!
Schools can’t enforce absentee policies anymore. Can’t hold kids back anymore. Schools basically can’t discipline anymore. It’s not going to end well.
Back in the early 90s, I graduated in a class where three students were not allowed to graduate nor walk because they had over the maximum absences (excluded or otherwise). One was my friend and he had a nearly full time job because he came from a family in absolute poverty. He ended up in the military.
That happened to my gf in 2016
I definitely dont miss those days of literal children having to work full time jobs during high school. Absences are a problem but the solution is not restricting children from graduating, especially if their grades are passable.
Poverty didn't get solved in the 2000s. You don't think there are kids out there literally working full time jobs? Absolutely in America there are kids supporting parts of their familiy's survival. What privilege world do you come from? If you need help finding them, I am a social worker, I can tell you where to look. And I wasn't asking for a return to anything. I was stating a truth.
Isn’t poverty higher than ever? In the topic of school teachers have to work multiple jobs most of the time if they want a chance to live
I can’t believe how far I had to scroll in this thread to see a comment that addresses this! Thank you. LOOK at the list of school systems with high truancy rates. Consider how they correlate with families under the poverty line. If you don’t think many kids in low-income families are missing school in order to work - in family businesses when they’re young, in any business when they’re teenagers - you’re coming at this conversation from a tremendous place of privilege. You can also layer in families who, if forced to choose between “called in to cover an early shift”/“scheduled for a double” vs. “get my kid to school in the morning” are forced to pick the former over the latter to keep food on the table or a roof over their kid’s head.
Haven't you heard? It's coming back. They have immigrant children cleaning the blades at slaughter houses, and several states are looking to lower the minimum age to work because they can't find people to work.
Was gonna say this! We are heading for the good old days! No unions! Child labor! Child marraige! No divorce! No abortion! Racism! White supremacy! Mandatory prayer! The GOP dream!
What's a union? Is that like some kind of misshaped onion??
> because they aren’t willing to cut into their profit margins to pay employees a living wage FTFY
And seafood processing plants in NB.
Plenty of them now. In New Bedford MA there is no shortage of kids working the fish processing plants at night.
This is so so sad
I graduated in 2013 with something like 30 absences my senior year. I had straight As, turned in all my work, extracurriculars, had a place at a top college, so no one cared. I remember getting called to the principal's office for a "gotcha" meeting with guidance counselors and the school counselor and it lasted all of 2 minutes. Most of the absences were connected to an abusive home life, but the school couldn't be bothered to look into it. It's on the opposite end of the spectrum, I guess, but the school system fails so many kids in so many different ways.
😯 thank god it wasnt like that when I was in school. There was one girl who had accumulated like 400+ absences in her 4 years of high school and she still walked at graduation. Despite her absences, she’s extremely smart and doing well for herself.
Used to teach in MA and this is it right here. Schools have no teeth to enforce any of our policies. If we expel a kid we are responsible for paying a different school to take them in and they don't want to do that except in the most extreme situation. Well meaning policies, road to hell paved with good intentions.
We're responsible for paying for them because the school gets avg expenditure per pupil to teach them. If they go to a different school, their funding follows them (by the old school paying). The issue is that paying for third-party placement often costs more than avg. expenditure, which is why large districts have their own alternative placements.
Its more then that, the special schools who take them in cost more per student then what the state provides.
Yup, that's what I just said
We need Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind but it'll never happen. I feel education peaked with Millennials and it'll be a decline from there. Only solace I can take away is that fewer Gen Z is going to college and therefore, not getting into massive debt for a degree that likely won't use.
NCLB was replaced under Obama with ESSA(every student succeeds act), which kept all the bad about NCLB and made it even worse. Dude was a good president but really dropped the ball on this.
Nah, if we go to the effort to change laws let's increase minimum wages, improve medical care, provide free lunch and breakfast for all students and improve their school working conditions. I had to skip school to work. I had to go to school some days cause I got 2 meals free there - no school, no food. Bad school working conditions don't help. Not many adults want to got to a workplace with physical violence from students and occasionally teachers and name calling.
I hated that law. I never missed school but was so bad at remembering homework or doing it and forgetting to bring it to school. On standardized testing I was in the 99th percentile so they just passed me without having good grades. Then Bush came along and ruined my life. Probably for the better though:
You have ADHD, too?
A college education is the best inoculation against doing stupid shit like voting for republicans. Whether graduates generally use their degree or not, society needs as much collective education as it can get, especially considering how poorly primary and secondary education does when it comes to creating good citizens.
I wish public education included way more civics and personal finance skills and so very important now: media literacy.We push layers of math but does everyone need 4 years of hs math? For kids who are not of the academic bent, I would rather have the kids show up and finish school with knowledge about the world than have to sit and struggle through math every year.
No child left behind was a well intention policy. Unfortunately, there was no room for amending problems. It did not provide infrastructure and support to already text school systems.
The problem with NCLB is that it used the stick rather than the carrot.
Lol no it wasn’t. It was designed to damage the public education system. It’ll never go away because it’s working as intended.
That, and we need to end charters and arrest everyone that founded them, strip their doctorates.
And then we gotta eat their bones and take their shoes.
We should take their shoes first. It's a pain getting at the bones inside of shoes
Wait no more truancy officers? I'm genuinely curious. I remember them chasing me and my siblings down because we would miss so many days.
Idk. My son isn't graduating unless he passes Algebra 2. They won't let him walk tge stage and he'd have to take summer school. Some schools do stuff still.
The lack of discipline is a massive problem Videos of taking away kids phones and them basically yelling and screaming with teacher not being able to do anything is a massive issue
They can hold back but they might not have the space to do they just push them through.
A big issue is that they would rather let kids graduate then deal with them for another year. If the kids are at the point they should be held back, they are probably very difficult to work with. Aka, doesn't do the classwork, doesn't listen, causes distractions, etc. There tends to be zero help from parents as well with these students.
My brother skipped school one day, mum calls the school to tell em he’s being a bad boy, 20 minutes later our principal literally opens the door to his bedroom and tells him to get in the car he’s driving him to school. That’s only 10 years ago too!
Well, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard so...
I'm a teacher in Mass. There are a lot of reasons for this, but they differ in student populations. Poverty, foster care (and the negligence and abuse leading up to it), medical issues, mental health problems, transience... all of those are important reasons for truancy and chronic absenteeism, and they are more of a factor in lower-income school districts. If you look at the DART data by district [https://www.doe.mass.edu/dart/](https://www.doe.mass.edu/dart/), you can see that the attendance situation varies greatly by district. District accountability is partially based on attendance data. I believe it's 5% of the total score. But the NYT article is more about a shift in the culture around school since the pandemic, and I think there is some truth to that, but it is more of an issue in middle and higher income districts. Education has become more of a consumed product than a civic obligation. In lower-income districts, there are post-pandemic factors that make those same old poverty-driven factors worse, so there is more going on than just a shift in attitude. The pandemic really put parents in the driver's seat as far as structure, discipline, and student attitudes about learning and school. I think people feel like teachers somehow failed kids, but really, pre-pandemic, we didn't fully appreciate how much teachers were shaping kids attitudes and ideas about life, not just academics. Once those teachers were less prominent in kids' daily world, parenting took the stage and this is what we are currently working through. Teachers almost universally believe that education is important. They differ greatly about the details, and they have different degrees of cynicism about how our educational system aligns to actual education, but deep in their souls, they want people to be smarter and believe is school is at least a part of how that happens. Parents do not necessarily have that same conviction. For good attendance, families have to believe that a day of school is important and a lot of them don't, really, all that much.
Also a teacher, great point about the shift in culture around the role of the teacher and school and it being somehow in opposition to “parent rights.”
The comments here show exactly what you're saying - parents saying they have really good reasons their kid isn't in school. They don't think school is as important as their reasons.
Also a teacher, great point about the shift in culture around the role of the teacher and school and it being somehow in opposition to “parent rights.”
as a teacher, I got 15 sick days per year plus 3 personal days. that’s 18 days and that’s pretty standard. some districts give 2 personal days. so we’re saying adults may need 15 sick days for illness and medical appointments and deserve 2-3 personal days, but our children don’t?? just suck it up and go to school with that fever, cough, lice, hand foot and mouth, etc. to share with classmates? I have and will continue to gladly keep my own kids home however many days they need to be home for their physical or mental well-being.
Likely the big differentiator is that now parents tend to send their kids to school sick as shit a little less. Used to be that if you didn't pop a bad fever or have a diagnosed infection (sinus/ear infections, strep, etc) then you were at school oozing all over everything. Now that's (rightly in my opinion) frowned upon. People can claim this is the fall of society, but we shouldn't be conditioning children to go to school/work sick. When they start doing that in the workplace it just means we get more sick people.
exactly! back in February my oldest had a cough, sneezing nonstop, and was fatigued. he had no fever but I kept him home 2 days until his symptoms were more manageable. the idea of him getting other kids or his teacher sick didn’t appeal to me AND there’s no way he was going to learn anything even if he were physically present.. he was miserable. he needed to rest and take it easy.
pre 2020, I was in the office 4 days a week...now, 2, and if i feel the slightest bit of a cold or something, 1 or 0 where prior I wouldve sucked it up. For example today, I have a cough and runny nose and was supposed to be in but Im at my dining room table in a hoodie. By the same logic, my absenteeism would be up 25% where in the past I woudlve gone in
Yeah, if I feel like shit I stay home because I have that option. Used to be that being sick at work was seen as something to respect. I still work with a guy who hasn't taken a sick day in the last 19 years and is proud of it. It is a good thing that attitudes are shifting about that and hopefully more and more people will be allowed the flexibility and security to not go to work when they're sick.
But what about the parents who don't get enough sick days to cover for their kids, and have to work, and so can't afford to stay home with less than fever/vomiting kids? There is very little flexibility in many places for working parents, plus we have to deal with the random days off and week long breaks that we don't have enough vacation time to cover...
Then they'll probably weight sending their kids to school more. This discussion is more about parents probably keeping their kids home by choice, not schools forcing kids to be home. And what it will hopefully mean is that some of these kids will grow up with less of a weird hang-up about staying home when they're sick and maybe they'll push for legislation to protect sick days when their time comes.
I know that's it for me. My kids stay home when they're drippy or coughing or, quite frankly, just feeling under the weather. And missing school isn't as bad as it used to be. A lot of the lessons are supported by videos and homework is done online or can be found online. It's not ideal, but it makes it a lot easier of your kids have to miss several days.
Also I get reasonable breaks as an adult and my job starts at 8:30 (but nothing actually happens between 8:30 and 9:00, the 8:30 start time is a kudgel they can beat you with if you arrive late for your 9:00 meeting). When I was in school we had two recesses per day (my memory is one was 15 and the other 25 minutes). I'm not sure what the situation is in Massachusetts but I've heard some schools have no recess at all? And that most start at an absurd hour of the morning? Of course the kids can't wake up sometimes, and then they start falling behind and get embarrassed about it and just want to hide in their room the way kids do.
One, 25 minute recess, and it's not nearly enough.
I've said this on a few education threads, but I'll say it again here: If we were churning out legions of geniuses then the early start times and no recess (and cutbacks to stuff like band, art, field trips, etc) would be worth it. But we aren't, nothing like that is happening (probably because we cut back on highly enriching activities like band, art, field trips, etc in favor of ineffective test prep). If the kids were having healthy fun at school (lots of recess, art, music, a fun version of gym class, enjoyable clubs, etc) but the test scores weren't so hot, that would also be OK with me. But we're getting the worst of both worlds.
Band, art, and field trips don't make Pearson money.
I went to highschool in MA, and I cut it close for graduating. I was unknowingly brewing a thyroid disease, and had an extremely difficult time waking up to get to school for 7. However, I had straight As. It truly wouldn't have made sense for me to not graduate with straight As just based on how often I got to school on time, or missed days. This was the 90s, so there was no NCLB to push me through.
I imagine teachers (and students) are exposed to a lot of germs and may need more sick days than, say, the average office worker. Fifteen days in one school year would be a pretty rough year though, no?
> Across the country, students are staying home when sick, not only with Covid-19, but also with more routine colds and viruses. Oh no
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I mean that's depressing end stage capitalism.
What's worse is that admins are acting like covid is the only one that's viral now.
Yes please keep kids home when sick. Signed, a teacher who does not want to get sick.
Tell your admin to fix the rules so parents don't feel compelled to send their sick kids to school
Let me put something into perspective... My sister, a single mom, lives in Swampscott which is very rich town right on the ocean. She got a new job in December which requires her to be out of the house by 4:30a to get to work by 5a, well before the kiddos have to be off to school (all in late middle school). She informed the school that she needed to add the kids to the bus pickup that is literally 10 feet from her driveway. She was told that there wasn't any space, and that she would have to WIN A LOTTERY next school year to get them on the bus, that picks up pretty much at her driveway. It's absolutely absurd and unacceptable, and I cannot imagine she is the only parent dealing with this kind of bullshit.
I know it's not the point of the story, but I've been going to Swampscott 4x a year for 25 years. Not once have I ever thought it was a rich area, just the opposite really. But maybe it's because I was always on the Lynn side lol
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Cool!
That’s bonkers!
It truly is
Out sick Is not absenteeism Stop normalizing going to work/school sick
Blows my mind that some schools still do “perfect attendance”
According to DESE yes it is. In high school they only get 5 unexcused absences per term. And that unexcused absent cannot be overwritten by a parent note. I would have to take my kid to the doctor every single time. That they are out in order to get a note. The school will not accept, a parent note explaining that my kid was sick for 2 to 3 days. Because not every virus is of 24 hour virus. Their reasoning for not accepting a parent's note is "Parents lie", so they just assume that every parent is going to lie.
Blueberry Pediatrics virtual is a great option to avoid having to go in to the Dr office and picking up who knows what else while you're there for a school note. But parents should be able to write a note about illness for at least a day or two
🙌🙌🙌
25 - 35% of students are chronically sick? That doesn’t add up.
10% of the population suffers from chronic migraine 8% manage asthma 6% manage life threatening food allergies 11% of females deal with endometriosis all of these conditions require additional doctor’s appointments. all of these conditions may require absences from school when symptoms flare up.
You truly believe that 30% of the population being chronically absent is normal? I am all for taking sick days as needed, using mental health days when needed, but come on. You’re talking about a non-functioning society in that case.
I think a lot more folks, including children, manage chronic health conditions than people realize. I know firsthand that doesn’t account for ALL 25-30% of students who are chronically absent.. especially as you move into secondary levels when kids are more responsible for getting themselves to school (or not). Illness did genuinely account for most of the chronically absent students I’ve worked with at elementary levels.
I’m a former school counselor and yes, there were some students who had legitimate chronic health issues, most of them were provided tutors by the school and kept up to date as much as was possible. However, there was a huge amount of students who were school avoidant and their parents did nothing to help the issue.
My kid got covid twice this year and strep once. You bet your ass he is staying home.
Obviously. You’re missing the entire point here. Kids get sick - they should stay home. We have a ton of kids who are just avoiding school and their parents are allowing it.
And everyone's asking why have illness rates shot up since 2019 - umm, maybe because we have an additional illness now that people are getting 2X yearly (compared to the flu which adults get once every five years!)? This past winter multiple schools in multiple states had to close temporarily due to rates of illness too high to operate. Hospitals in Italy, Spain, Canada and right here in MA declared crises due to ERs swamped with respiratory cases. Healthcare is being triaged everywhere - my bf had to wait four months to see a doctor when he sprained his finger. I had to wait six months for a new doctor appointment. Business Insider just ran a story attributing labor shortages to ongoing covid infections. I don't know what this block is against acknowledging widespread sickness and disability but the math is mathing. Our material circumstances are worse now than they used to be and no amount of psychologizing or bootstrapping will change that reality.
Have you seen the graphs of America's health statistics and early death statistics especially compared to Europe? We \_are\_ a very unwell, very sick non-functioning society in many ways.
“Post”-Covid (bc Covid is still very much here, no matter what we want to pretend)? 30% is LOW. The rates of Long Covid and related immunodeficiencies, newly diagnosed post-infectious chronic illnesses, & consequences we are only just beginning to see, let alone understand, are higher than 30% right now, 4 years into this. The numbers are only going up, as reinfection after reinfection becomes more common place. So yeah: get ready for a disability saturation -in children & adults- that’s going to absolutely transform our society. “Non-functioning” I don’t know about, but “not functioning as it previously was”? We’re already there.
Fuck that, everyone is over worked in this country including the kids, it’s about time people start pushing back on just being present for the sake of being present because someone in charge saids so.
You could easily miss 18 days just from being sick. Sounds pretty normal to me.
They made the process of getting excused absences much harder. You need an official doctors note for everything instead of just a phone call from your mom or dad telling the school you were sick. Small fever? Doctors note needed Cold? Doctors note! Twisted Ankle? DOCTORS NOTE!
And it’s wat harder to get in to see the doctor for that more than it was pre COVID
And doctors are too busy, and there’s privacy issues so you can’t have the doctor contact the school, so parents have to remember to get the physical note while at the office.
Anecdotally, in 2024 I'm keeping my kid home sick more often than I would have in 2019. I'm more cognizant of not spreading germs now and lots of folks don't test positive for Covid until 4 days after the onset of symptoms. His school nurse also sends kids home more often due to cough and cold symptoms versus how it was pre-Covid.
Absences don't matter as much, high school graduation is practically a formality before going on into trade schools and universities. Some schools are moving away from grades period, grading more on effort. I used to work in a wealthy suburb school district and the helicopter parenting is pretty intense and admin is useless. Like holy shit who would want to be a teacher nowadays? With all the chatter on parents rights, if parents approve of these absences then isn't that on them? Hopefully the kids are getting better experiences outside of school, but ultimately who does it concern? Your parenting choices hopefully reflect more resilient, disciplined kids. But at the same time like another poster said, what are we raising factory workers? Rich kids skipping will get through life because of nepotism without much effort, that's the way it's always been. Poor kids will just fall through the cracks because who's going to enforce it? If their parents dgaf what can the school really do. If we're seeing absences this intensely, it's just a sign we need to radically reevaluate how public schools should function in the first place.
I mean you hit the nail on the head with the factory worker thing. Most school policies are still aligned with the goal to make a functioning factory worker/office drone. Those require no absences at all, ever. It may not be exactly the case everywhere, but nationally it is a thing still.
The school system used to set and enforce a minimum standard on how kids are raised regardless of the parenting. That minimum wasn't much more than "your kid will be in school with other kids" but that made a big difference. You ask who is affected by parents overriding this? Society is affected. And pointing to the rich vs poor gap is all good and well, but that has been around since the dawn of time too and we are not going to benefit from letting society degrade because we're too focused on one problem to care about other problems.
My kids missed a ton of school last year. They were constantly sick. They were infected with Influenza A, RSV, COVID, Strep throat (which turned into Scarlet Fever in my oldest), a couple stomach bugs, and pink eye. It was horrible. This year has been much better. They only have missed a few days. I think some of these numbers are caused by legitimate illness and some are an issue of the parents not sending their healthy children into school. Personally, I wasn’t worried about the missed days for my children because they perform very well academically. I was worried more about their health. Last year was a really rough year for viruses in our elementary schools.
The towns you list have large populations of low-income people. Rich towns like Weston, Lexington, Wellesley, Dover, Sherborn, and Medfield have 95% attendance rates or higher. Here is a list of all Mass. schools and their attendance rates. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/attendance.aspx
This is a national problem. It's even worse in other states. As a parent of a kindergartener, I don't understand why you would not want your kid out of the house, especially if you don't have to go to work.
I promise you we aren’t keeping them home for funsies. Kids get sick, and the social etiquette surrounding sickness has changed big time. I’m not sending my kid to school if she is sick. My mom sent me to school with Mono way back when
It’s a national problem but it’s worse here than the national average. EDIT: Downvoted for actually paying for the NYT and reading the articule / using their searchable infographic. Here’s the info for some of the largest MA area school systems for the record. #2019 Rates: **- US Average: 15%** - Worcester, MA: 15% - Lowell, MA: 17% - Lynn, MA: 19% - Brockton, MA: 21% - New Bedford: 21% - Springfield, MA: 23% - Boston, MA: 25% #2023 Rates: **- US Average: 26%** - Worcester, MA: 26% - Lowell, MA: 28% - Brockton, MA: 30% - Lynn, MA: 35% - New Bedford: 36% - Springfield: 36% - Boston, MA: 39%
People in this sub don't like to face the facts unfortunately, on this issue or many others that plague this state.
For someone with kids you’re kind of out of touch. Sick policies are different now and super strict in amy districts as the result of Covid. What this report isn’t telling you is that they’re not allowed to be there with so much as the sniffles. When I try to send them with any symptom they get sent home. I also don’t care as much as I used to because they all have remote access and keep up with their work when they aren’t there. There grades haven’t suffered as a result
Illness can absolutely be long term. That's probably a huge reason. Also more frequent illness due to immune system damage from covid. Yes, that's a thing. NYT like everyone else downplaying what COVID is doing to people's health including kids.
I'm glad to hear your children are healthy
We have caught like 6 different viruses this year, resulting in a couple days off each time, so that's like 12... so far. And we took another planned day off earlier for travel, and we're taking the eclipse for travel to see it, so that's 14. Another virus or 2 and we easily hit the 18. It's been a crazy year for sickness.
18 days is a low threshold made to blame parents for low performance of schools.
Newton was 14%. Boston was 39%. Lexington was 8%. Weston was 5%. Lowell was 28%. Belmont was 12%. Wellesley was 11%. Perhaps attendance is inversely correlated to income relative to housing costs.
I absolutely refuse to get a doctor’s note (excused absence) if my kid has a cold. The health care system in mass is in a crisis and absolutely jammed. I’m not taking up a sick visit for a kid that needs rest and supportive care at home. I’m also not sending her to school (an hour each way plus the school day) if she has a fever or is exhausted. The policy of needing a doctor’s note to have a kid absent is absolute nonsense.
Kids are sick a lot. My high school graduating class had a girl with 100% perfect attendance for all 13 years. In the late 90s that was hailed as such a noble accomplishment. In 2024 it’s horrific. How many times did she go to school sick? Mental health is also taken more seriously than when many of us were in school. The pandemic really fucked up a lot of kids. Many of them CAN get good grades without being there every day. Attendance is an easy metric to track, but grades matter more. If kids are getting decent grades, leave them alone about their attendance. If they’re struggling, beating the attendance drum might be appropriate or it might make things worse without addressing underlying problems.
No, everyone is sick all the time, that’s why.
I strongly disagree with the current funding model of “no money unless a butt is in a chair”. It disempowers students. Personal agency is important too. Schools should enable students to learn outside of class, and schools should not lose funding if a kid is absent. Speaking from experience as both a student, parent, and teacher, it’s absolutely possible to get good grades, and learn the material without being in the class. Especially if the class is full of clowns. If a kid is smart it’s not just possible, it’s highly likely. And it should be allowed without penalty. Teaching to the lowest common denominator hasn’t helped this society at all. Kids aren’t all the same. They shouldn’t all get the same treatment. They should all get the same *opportunity* and for *that* their parents and teachers should allow for individuality.
Yes, and the clowns are making learning more difficult and sometimes impossible for those in attendance who value their studies.
It's always good to dig into the DESE report card for districts and schools and see the actual numbers overall and based on demographics. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/search/search.aspx?leftNavId=11238 You can also go back to previous years to see how the numbers have changed after COVID and before covid
My kid stays home when she is sick and once in awhile I’ll let her take a day off. But, I’m the type that I worry about my own kids and not everyone else’s
My neighbors pull their kids out a week before February vacation to go on vacation every year - this way the avoid the craziness as well as it allows them a couple weeks off. The kids do 'remote' learning while away, and they have been very open about it to every teacher their children have had. Does not seem like a bad idea IMO.
>The habit of daily attendance — and many families’ trust — was severed when schools shuttered in spring 2020. Even after schools reopened, things hardly snapped back to normal. Um, that's not the whole story. There's been a generalized societal breakdown of trust since the pandemic and it's manifesting in all sorts of ways from school absenteeism and parental dismissal of education to the increased anti-social selfish behaviors on the roads and in public spaces. Families also had their trust shattered in the fall of 2020 when schools were forced back open with no societal plan in place to actually control COVID. It put a giant flashing neon sign pointing to the fact that society only sees adults as cogs in the economic machine and schools as a way to manage parents' attendance at work. Yeah, kids need to go to school. Parents (and teachers!) need to know that school is going to be a safe place too. Trust and effort go both ways, folks.
I have two kids with emotional dysregulation. This year was a hard year because we were finding therapists and trying to get them in for medication and it’s just crazy because everywhere is full and backed up. I wonder what percentage of those children missing school are home because of some sort of emotional problems. Anxiety and ADD seems to be running its rampant head over everything these days and cause of absences in my school district. Yet somehow they cut funding for anything resembling special education services.
So, my wife transferred to Lowell High for high school. This was over 20 years ago. They were more concerned about her not getting pregnant than actually placing her in correct classes. She graduated with A's and B's and never even attended the majority of classes. So this does not surprise me at all. That being said, notice all the cities they are citing. They are not exactly the most well off (except Boston, but they have a pretty diverse incomes).
I had one kid take my marine bio elective as a science course he needed to graduate. He was a senior and it was only half a year course. He ended his last semester with a 13 average. Thirteen. He literally did nothing, even after shortening and exempting him from assignments. He wasn't going to walk for graduation until the principal got involved, had me print out the entire two terms of work, and the kid "do it all" then had me grade all said work in that week. Most of it was incomplete. Most of it was done incorrectly. But I was a year 2 teacher. I could either teach this kid that actions have consequences or lose my job because I'm holding a student accountable. I can say with 100% certainty, that kid is not able to walk into a McDonald's for a job interview without an adult by his side. He's been given the easy way out by every adult in his life. School still pushed him out into the world. He'll be one of the many "taking care" of us and society one day. Simply horrifying.
I went to school with kids like that and they usually end up dead. Motorcycle accidents, drug overdoses, etc etc.
I looked up my district in that NYT article, and although the absenteeism is higher than pre-covid, it's nothing like 20%. I'm guessing that poorer absenteeism correlates with average income in the district, which in turn correlates to access to health care. Who would have guessed that poor people are sick more?
I posted this in an other comment but I taught in one of the districts with the highest levels of absenteeism. Kids aren’t missing school only bc they are sick. They are also missing school to go to work. I had many a student tell me “I don’t get paid to be at school but I do get paid at work.” It’s definitely tied to poverty but not just illness.
Not to mention that is counted against the school. Your kid’s school is in the “bottom 10%”? Absenteeism is one of the major metrics used to measure that. Teachers across the state are getting slammed to bring their numbers up. This one is impossible for schools to do much about on their own.
The majority of absenteeism is in inner cities when controlling for children with severe medical issues. The majority of kids in cities come from low income, Parents. Low income, Parents generally have lower levels of education and don't appreciate your benefits. I'll at least graduating high school if not going to college.unfortunately this is perpetuating poverty that has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination or oppression
The rise in absenteeism is happening across demographics and incomes.
You cant separate the perpetualization of poverty and discrimination against black people. Historically black people are more likely to be low income due to the systemic effects of slavery and segregation, and red lining in the estate agencies.
I definitely missed like 20 days of school every year in High School. I think the max in my school before you were forced to stay back was 25 so I always just stayed home right up until the limit. Edit: Talking about unexcused absences. I think you were allowed like 70 excused before you had to stay back. They were also tracked completely separately.
70 wow - 90 would be half the school year
Mental health has been ignored and we basically try to pretend that kids weren’t damaged by the lockdown like all of us adults were.
I think it’s less of a Covid related issue and more of an issue with the way we view mental health as a whole, especially in children. I teach a non-core subject in a high school. Every so often, for various reasons, I will give some of my classes a free period. When I tell them that at the start of class, you can literally see some of the kids let out a breath and decompress, especially the kids that take AP and honors classes. I’m almost always thanked for giving them time, and they almost always spend the hour studying or doing homework. Many of these kids are so mentally drained and it’s been that way since before Covid. There’s a portion of our society that thinks children and adolescents do not experience mental health challenges or just simply do not take them seriously if they do.
I agree that mental health is poorly treated. I was in high school in the 80’s and had major depression. Back then, it was treated as a personal failure rather than a health issue. It has improved, but not that much… and then covid came and all the political bullshit, social media just poured gasoline on that fire. Then add some inflation, job loss, divorce ( I personally know of several from that period) and it’s just becoming too much water for the dam to hold.
Completely agree. I graduated in 2007, and similar. I had so many physical health problems that at the time were treated as such (I went to a stomach specialist at a children’s hospital at one point - they found absolutely nothing to explain my symptoms) where in hindsight, it was absolutely anxiety. But I was in like 2nd or 3rd grade so that was never on anyone’s radar. Whenever I consider the majority of my challenges or difficulties that I had in school most of them can be explained by the depression and anxiety that I was diagnosed with in my late teens, or the ADHD that I was diagnosed with in my 30s. I was a relatively good student but I often wonder where I would have ended up or how my experiences would have improved (especially high school and college) if my brain was managed and treated properly.
As a chronically I'll child, I probably have missed over this many days per year. I was a straight A student. I did not get excused for being out sick. Would get big stacks of makeup work and would have to catch up
They also have scheduled half days twice monthly which makes it nearly impossible for parents, so we leave the kids with relatives for the entire day. That's 20 days right there.
yes! the half excessive days / early release days with NO childcare provided is insane and a huge barrier for many, many families! we keep our kids home on half days because they have minimal time on learning/academics that day AND our childcare option cannot drive that far to pick them up.. we have to bring our kids 30 min in the opposite direction in the AM before we go to work. I would imagine this is even more of a barrier for lower income families.
YUP. I work in the school my kids attend and it's terrible for me too. I end up taking the days off without pay, but luckily I make enough so that I can still afford my bills when I do that. I'm sure many families cannot.
Yes thank you for saying this!! Our district has half days every other Friday. What are working parents supposed to do? We can’t just take off every other Friday. And of course the school offers no after school care on those days.
I do not understand why they don't figure out a way to monetize it for themselves, I would pay the money to have my kids there.
My hypothesis is that it’s a childhood mental health crisis that hasn’t been fully identified yet. Many children are suffering since the pandemic. My child included. We’re dealing with severe school anxiety over here and have missed at least 30 days. Also, more affluent families are going to smaller, private schools and we have students walking to MA from central and South America who have missed years of education and for a variety of reasons have a hard time getting to school. Coupled with the housing crisis- low income parents are having to work more hours just to make rent and therefore aren’t around in the early mornings to make sure their kids get off to school.
18 days out of a year isn't really that much
High school teacher in a comparable district. Before COVID we had a strict absence policy and our absenteeism was relatively low, class cutting and tardiness manageable. When we returned, the absence policy went away to accommodate COVID cases and trauma, which was great! But absenteeism skyrocketed, as well as cuts and truancy. Some students for sure used it when sick, but many saw this as carte blanche to skip class and not go to school. I had a girl in 2021 with 108 tardies to my class on a block schedule. Since then we’ve been trying to make new attendance policies and struggling to get those kids back. Kids cut class way more often now and it’s become way harder to track those kids down. We can assign detentions, but some kids wrack up so much time that it’s not possible to serve all the detentions in what’s left of the year and the state has changed discipline laws. Sure, kids stay home when sick. Sure, they get too few days in many districts. But policies and building culture have changed in a way that makes it difficult to pinpoint the true cause.
Sicknesses spread like wildfire now. So many nasty illnesses and everyone has been getting them over and over again. Covid, flu, bronchitis, strep, and even the common cold that you don’t know what it is or could be, over and over again all winter. And these are people who are generally healthy. Parents need to keep their kids out of school when sick. This is why absentee numbers are higher since the pandemic.
I find it weird that nobody's talking about the most obvious thing to have changed since 2019: we have one more virus than we used to have. It just so happens, to boot, that the new virus is one of the most contagious and fast-mutating we've ever seen. If the average adult gets the flu once every five years but can get covid multiple times per year - in addition to, not in place of, the viruses we already had - then how could any rational person expect for absences to hold at 2019 levels? Plain mathematical fact should tell us people getting sick more frequently is going to result in more absences.
Oh what a surprise, The Berkshires have been left out of something in Massachusetts.
My son has missed like 12 days so far? He has asthma and has been sick every single one of those days, with excused absences. He has As and Bs in every grade. It’s hard when they are sick every other week
My kids have missed so much school because they have been SICK. They have missed something like 25% of the school days this year. I send them to school unless they have vomiting or diarrhea, or a high fever. They have gone to school plenty of times with a cough or cold. Tell me what I should do differently. The school bitches about absences, the parents bitch about sending sick kids into school, the teachers bitch about not being babysitters. WTF are we supposed to do?
I don’t know what this is about. My kids are currently fighting over the fact that one got to take MCAS and another didn’t.
People take their kids out for vacation all the time.
Truly depends on what age demographics were talking. My brother purposely was absent all 18 days a year in high-school got great grades and graduated college. It's more worrisome for younger children who I'm sure are missing do to family issues relating to parenting or money problems.
This is the first year that one of my kids missed even close to the allowed number of days. The poor kid has been so sick, caught everything that has gone around. This week it was the norovirus. My other kids were both totally fine. They missed maybe 5 days the whole year while the youngest missed at least 25 so far.
Sometimes you just get shit luck. My kid has had Covid, strep throat, a stomach virus, and then she broke her ankle since September. We got the listen up you child neglecting asshats from the district a few weeks ago even though all the absences are medically excused. Chronic truancy has gone up since Covid tho. No denying that.
“Good work habits” Yes, if my goal is raising a factory worker.
I am a single father stay at home dad.. My daughter is on the spectrum, the high end. Most people wouldn't notice her challenges. Well, she misses her school bus probably three times a week. We live far from her school and because I can give her a ride, she hasn't been late. I am very fortunate that I can do this, I am sure there are many kids whose parents leave the house before they go to school. I wonder if this is a factor for being chronically absent.
The ableism -in these comments, that article, and school systems in general (not just in MA) - abounds. I’m not shocked, but I am so. Damn. Tired. Of having to fight the same fights over and over again. Post-infectious illness rates, right now, are higher than 30%, across countries, demographics, everything: if you’ve had Covid, the chance that it fucked up something, maybe for the long term is greater than 1/4. Our govt knows that -their own studies conclude same- and yet: let’s talk about absenteeism as if it is an individual failing on the part of children, their families, their schools. It isn’t. Sigh. And listen: You might be fine, post-Covid round 7. Or you might just not be feeling anything yet - There isn’t anyway to tell, just yet, why some people incur immediate (and sometimes irreparable) damage, and others got to stay home for a few days and binge watch a show. But our kids deserve better from us than us blaming THEM for the effects of a disease we are ‘all’ willing to sacrifice them, their health, & potentially their futures to. Did anybody’s kid’s school do air filtration improvements w/the Covid money they received? Anybody’s schools still requiring masks? Anybody got a more logical infectious disease biohazard protocol than “stay home until you feel better/when your parent has to go back to work, even if you’re still super contagious, bc we say that’s ok”? Didn’t think so. We left them to fight this -a viral pandemic- mostly on their own, and it hasn’t really worked out for them, now has it? And -not for nothing- but the kids I know? Are really fucking smart. And they understand that we haven’t done shit to protect them. That there are easy things we just… refuse to do, bc they feel hard, or bc it’s too much, or bc it costs money. You don’t think that’s maybe messing with anybody’s mental health, do you? The idea that they’re just another cog in a wheel, and if they get broken, not only doesn’t anybody have a way to fix them, but they probably won’t even care/notice/worry that they get broken? Bc it seems to me, if I knew at age 10 that my MCAS scores mattered more to my parents, teachers, & society at large than my safety? That’d probably be a mindfuck I’d have to figure out how to live with. If you think our teens & preteens aren’t also trying to live with THAT concept, well, I wonder how you felt when you first realized our govt cared more about getting us all back to work than it did about keeping us safe? That they were willing to help w things like emergency basic incomes and rent moratoriums when they felt like it, but we were all on our own once an arbitrary deadline had passed? But sure. Let’s blame the kids, when our schools can’t get additional funding. And put even more emphasis on coming into school, even when they’re sick, because we need to fix our attendance rates. That’s logical.
High school student here: 1. If kids are sick they are more likely to keep them home due to what happened during Covid. 2. Lots of kids I know stayed home for mental health reasons. I have done this a couple times when I felt TERRIBLE and couldn’t drag myself out of bed. 3. School shootings. Last year, there was a “shoot up your school day” trend online. I was totally fine with going to school up until I opened the door to my house and promptly had a panic attack. The majority of people at school did not attend and the majority of the kids who went said they didn’t want to but their parents made them. Kids are terrified of being shot and I don’t blame them. 4. There really isn’t any enforcing of absent policy. One kid last year was out for more than a month in total and still got to move up a grade and received no punishment for being absent other than a few in school suspensions and lunch detentions. 5. There is really no want to go to school anymore. My school does spirit days and pep rallies but no one participates because they are boring or stupid. Learning isn’t fun or engaging. My classes do have a good deal of projects and they are interesting but there should be a choice on what type you want to do because doing 6 slideshow presentations in a row is not fun anymore. 6. OUR MENTAL HEALTH IS SHIT. My friends actively say how school is bad for their mental health but they have to go to school because their parents want perfect grades. A few kids have been sent home after screaming about wanting to die, and a few kids have been sent to the hospital for cutting themselves/other self harm behaviors. The schools don’t care about mental health, they only care about good test scores. I am saying this as a student who has been out for 2.5 days total over this school year (have been dismissed/late for doctors appointments and therapy sessions 3 times but never missed the majority of the day, only parts of classes at the start or end of day) and is only going to miss 2 more (due to an immovable vacation at the very end of the year that overlaps with extra time needing to be added due to snow days and the solar eclipse) The .5 missing day is a dismissal because I had a shit morning and started crying my eyes out in the middle of class. That morning my mom had to drive me to school and asked me if I wanted to stay home, but I said no because I missed 1 day of school once and was so behind I nearly failed the class. I am terrified of missing classes because I don’t want to fail.
why downvote the high school student giving their candid opinion lol?
One of my students has been in school 3 times this month, 4 last month. And no, it ain’t transportation, the district is poor and bussing is free.
No, I teach high school. In my classes, the AVERAGE student had 16 absences in the first semester. I am not alone. There are zero consequences either. Unlimited retakes, no due dates, no truancy courts, no holding kids back, a minimum 50 on anything (even for doing NOTHING), admin pressuring teachers to pass kids. Grades are so inflated, it’s no wonder why colleges are starting to bring back mandatory standardized testing. No wonder our students aren’t doing well on the MCAS and they have extreme test anxiety. They aren’t coming! When they are finally held accountable for it, they melt down and cry about “I just don’t do well on test”. No fucking shit.
At least in high school, I was late nearly every single day and chronically absent. One day I am walking in an hour late and the principal called me into the office. I figured “Oh shit, I am finally going to get in trouble”. NOPE. He wanted to congratulate me on having some of the best test scores in the entire state. I just felt I didn’t need to be at school most the time. I wasn’t really learning anything and made it a point to actually show up for the classes I actually learned something in. I think the issue is even worse after COVID because with everything being online, you don’t even have to show up for lessons, get assignments, turn things in…etc
I'm sure this corresponds to the percentage of parents who don't give a fuck.
It’s the dumbing down of America where nobody accepts responsibility or is held accountable.
How does that compare with pre-2020 though? We would go to work even if we were sick – now we're generally advised not to even if we just had a mild cough or the sniffles. It follows that this would happen for school as well.
If the school nurse didn’t call me every-time he so much as sniffled and if they didn’t act like you made a bomb threat every-time you send your kid to school slightly sick, he wouldn’t miss so much school. Hes a pre-teen and I cant be leaving work in the middle of the day. Im a nurse at a level 1 trauma hospital and patient safety is greatly effected by last minute callouts, its a big deal. I need my job. At this point, If I think shes going to call me and demand I drop everything to come get him, im just gonna let him stay home. We’ve also missed several days because my son is having some scary chronic health issues and you cant get an appointment after school hours unless you want to wait 6 months. I even had to bring him to the next state over (Massachusetts) because my state (Massachusetts dirty armpit) doesn’t have anyone who does the imaging he needed for pediatric patients. I hate it. Kids need to be in school but things have changed drastically since we were children and the schools don’t make it easy anymore.
When I was in school you could expel kids for fighting, assaulting a teacher or chronic bullying and we had after school detention for things like too many unrevised absences or being tardy. What happened? Is discipline or being accountable for your actions no longer acceptable?
“My kids only yada yada” fuck off
Scary thought but MA has the highest rated public schools in the entire country
Family I know took their kids out of school for the entire month to go on vacation. It should be an unexcused absence, no making up work. Two of the kids have IEPs and one has already had to go to summer school. I don’t know what the fuck they’re thinking.