Chronic Absenteeism Guide: Truancy Laws, Attendance Policy, Causes and Attendance Interventions for K-12 Schools

Chronic absenteeism means missing so much school that a student’s learning is at risk. The usual threshold is 10 percent or more of school days for any reason, excused or unexcused. The U.S. Department of Education puts that at “approximately 18 days in a year,” and its figures show the national rate reaching about 31 percent in 2021–22 and falling to 28 percent in 2022–23. The rate before the pandemic was about 17 percent in 2018–19, according to a joint fact sheet from the Departments of Education and Transportation. Newer state data show slow progress. The American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn tracker, updated October 16, 2026, estimates that the national rate rose from 15 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent in 2022, was still 24 percent in 2024, and improved by less than 1 percentage point in 2025 across the 45 states with 2025 data. In the 31 states that had released school-level data for 2024–25, Attendance Works and Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center reported in June 2026 that more than 20 percent of students were still chronically absent and 46 percent of schools had chronic absence rates of 20 percent or higher.

This guide to chronic absenteeism explains what the term means and how it differs from truancy, how large the problem is and how the national figures are counted, why students miss school, what research says about the effects of absences, how attendance policies treat excused and unexcused absences, what state truancy laws require, which attendance interventions have been tested and with what results, how federal ESSA accountability uses chronic absenteeism, and how punitive and supportive approaches compare. It is written for district and school leaders, attendance and family-engagement staff, counselors and teachers, with a section for families. It covers K–12 schools in the United States. Each section links to edCircuit’s more detailed coverage.

Updated October 2026.

In this guide

• The basics: What chronic absenteeism is · Chronic absenteeism vs. truancy · How big the problem is
• Causes and effects: Why students miss school · Effects on learning and graduation
• Policy and law: Excused and unexcused absences · Truancy laws · ESSA accountability
• What works: Attendance interventions · Student attendance data and early warning · Punitive vs. supportive approaches
• People: Families · Questions to ask

What is chronic absenteeism?

Chronic absenteeism is a measure of lost instructional time: a student is chronically absent when he or she misses 10 percent or more of the school days for which the student is enrolled, counting every kind of absence. The definition has three features that matter in practice.

• Every absence counts. The measure does not ask why a student was out. Federal report card law describes chronic absenteeism as “including both excused and unexcused absences” (20 U.S.C. 6311(h)(1)(C)(viii)). A week of flu, a medical appointment and a skipped afternoon add to the same total.
• It is a percentage, not a fixed number of days. Ten percent of a 180-day year is 18 days, which is why the Department of Education uses that figure, but a student who enrolls in January reaches the threshold after fewer days. Two absences a month across a school year is enough.
• It is defined differently by different agencies. In federal data, chronic absenteeism is the unduplicated number of students absent 10 percent or more of school days during the year (ED Data Express). Attendance Works notes that the federal collection counts students enrolled at least 10 days and treats missing half a day as an absence, while some states count only students enrolled for longer and so report slightly lower rates. When FutureEd reviewed all 51 state ESSA plans in September 2017, it found that at least 27 states using the measure defined it as missing 10 percent or more of enrolled days, five more measured the inverse (attending 90 percent or more of days), two set tougher standards and three counted a set number of days (FutureEd, Who’s In).

Because states set their own counting rules, Attendance Works advises against comparing chronic absence rates across states, even while tracking each state over time. Some states also count hours rather than days. Ohio, for example, measures absence against the minimum instructional hours in the school year; edCircuit’s Ohio School Attendance Law Shifts Focus to Support explains how that state’s thresholds and family notices work.

The value of the measure is that it is early and neutral: a school that tracks only unexcused absences can miss a student whose absences are all excused but who has lost a month of instruction. edCircuit’s introductions to the subject:

• Chronic Absenteeism Is Undermining Student Success
• The Impact of Chronic Absenteeism on Students and Schools

Chronic absenteeism vs. truancy: what is the difference?

Chronic absenteeism counts all missed school, while truancy is a legal status that applies only to absences without a valid excuse, defined separately by each state’s compulsory attendance law. A student can be chronically absent without ever being truant, and a student can be truant without being chronically absent. A third term, school refusal, describes something different again: a student’s emotional difficulty attending school.

The state definitions read for this guide show how much truancy rules vary. In California, a student is classified as truant after three full days absent without a valid excuse in one school year, or three tardies or absences of more than 30 minutes without a valid excuse, and must be reported to the attendance supervisor or superintendent (Cal. Educ. Code 48260). California deems a student a “chronic truant” after unexcused absences on 10 percent or more of school days (48263.6). Illinois defines a truant as a student absent without valid cause for more than 1 percent but less than 5 percent of the past 180 school days, and a chronic or habitual truant as one absent without valid cause for 5 percent or more of the previous 180 regular attendance days (105 ILCS 5/26-2a). Washington defines an unexcused absence as failing to attend the majority of hours or periods in an average school day, or a stricter district policy, without meeting the district’s policy for excused absences (RCW 28A.225.020(2)).

The school refusal column draws on a 2015 Campbell systematic review, which describes school refusal as distinguished from truancy “in part because of the severe emotional distress” involved and estimates that it occurs for about 1 to 2 percent of young people (Maynard et al., 2015). The distinction matters because the same absence data can describe very different students, and a response built for one does not fit the others. edCircuit’s I’m Not a Truancy Officer: Reshaping the Home Visit Through Possibility describes how families can hear any attendance contact as an enforcement visit.

How big is the chronic absenteeism problem?

Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled during the pandemic and has fallen only partway back: the best available estimates put the national rate at around a quarter of students in 2024 and a little lower in 2025, compared with about 15 to 17 percent before 2020. The main sources:

• Federal data, 2018–19 to 2022–23. The Department of Education’s chronic absenteeism page, last reviewed August 21, 2025, reports a national rate of about 31 percent in 2021–22 and 28 percent in 2022–23, and says 20 states reported that more than 30 percent of their students missed at least three weeks of school in 2022–23 (U.S. Department of Education). Secretary Miguel Cardona’s March 22, 2024, letter to chief state school officers said more than 14 million students were chronically absent in 2021–22 and that the rate nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022 (letter).
• Return to Learn tracker, 2017 to 2026. The tracker, which collects district data from state agencies, estimates the rate at 15 percent in 2018 and 2019, above 28 percent in 2022 and 24 percent in 2024. Of the 45 states with 2024–25 data, 38 showed declines; 21 states had posted 2025–26 data by October 16, 2026 (Return to Learn).
• School-level data, 2024–25. In the 31 states analyzed by Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center, 46 percent of schools had high (20 to 29 percent) or extreme (30 percent or more) chronic absence in 2024–25, down from nearly two-thirds of schools in 2021–22 and compared with about a quarter before the pandemic in 2017–18. The share with extreme levels fell from 41 percent in 2021–22 to 23 percent (Chang, Balfanz and Byrnes, June 2, 2026).

The sources differ partly because they count differently. The table below summarizes how:

Federal data also lag: Attendance Works notes that they have typically been released every two years and are now further delayed by reduced federal staffing, so the most recent national estimates come from state data.

Who is most affected. The increase was largest where students already faced the most barriers. In the Return to Learn data, chronic absenteeism in high-poverty districts rose from 19 percent in 2018 to 36 percent in 2022, against 10 to 21 percent in low-poverty districts; in high-minority districts it rose from 17 to 32 percent, against 13 to 23 percent in low-minority districts. Students experiencing homelessness are chronically absent at about twice the overall rate: 50.8 percent in 2021–22 and 47.7 percent in 2023–24, according to the federal National Center for Homeless Education’s February 2026 data summary. Recovery has been uneven too: in Georgia’s statewide data, Black and Hispanic students and students experiencing homelessness remained well above pre-pandemic rates in 2023 (Graham, Welsh and Choi, EdWorkingPaper 26-1509).

For edCircuit’s coverage of the scale of the problem and how districts are responding, see Addressing Chronic Absenteeism: Six Key Elements Every School Leader Should Include in Their Plans and Fighting Absenteeism with AI and EdTech.

Why do students miss school?

Students miss school for many reasons, often several at once, and the research points to health, disengagement, barriers such as transportation and housing, and the lack of supports that would help a family overcome them. The Department of Education summarizes the research as pointing to “student disengagement, lack of access to student and family supports, and student and family health challenges” as significant drivers. Its 2024 letter added that high school students are more likely to cite competing demands, such as caring for younger siblings or a sick family member, or working to support themselves or their families. The evidence on specific causes:

• Physical illness. Illness is the most ordinary reason for absence and the one families can least control. Asthma is one well-measured example: in the National Health Interview Survey, 49.0 percent of children aged 5 to 17 with asthma reported missing one or more school days because of it in 2013, down from 61.4 percent in 2003, and children with asthma missed a total of 13.8 million school days that year (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Those are the latest national figures on that page and are now more than a decade old.
• Mental health and feeling unsafe. In the CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey of high school students, the share who missed school because of safety concerns at school or on the way rose from 9 percent in 2021 to 13 percent in 2023, and the share bullied at school rose from 15 to 19 percent; 40 percent reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness (CDC, 2023 YRBS results). The survey measures safety-related absence directly; it does not measure how much of overall chronic absence is caused by sadness or anxiety. For a small group of students, anxiety becomes school refusal, discussed in the previous section.
• Transportation. The federal transportation fact sheet lists factors from access to school buses and reliable public transit to distance, neighborhood walkability, community violence, mismatched work and school schedules and families’ ability to keep a vehicle running. In a study using the national Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 2010–11, children who rode the school bus to kindergarten had fewer absences and were less likely to be chronically absent than children who got to school any other way (Gottfried, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, April 2017). The finding is an association, not a randomized comparison.
• Housing instability. The near-50 percent chronic absence rate among students experiencing homelessness reflects frequent moves, long commutes from temporary housing and the time families spend meeting basic needs. Federal funds that can pay for their transportation to school are described in the ESSA section.
• Disengagement and school climate. Students who feel disconnected from school, who are behind and see no way to catch up, or who are bullied, are more likely to stay home. This is the cause schools can influence most directly, through relationships, instruction and climate.

The reasons differ from school to school and student to student, so a district’s own data and conversations with families matter more than a national list. Attendance Works reports that a deep dive into why students were not attending, through surveys, focus groups or interviews, was the strategy principals used least. The causes are not the student’s or family’s failings: edCircuit’s account of one Virginia district’s interviews with chronically absent students and families found transportation, work, housing and trauma behind most absences. edCircuit’s coverage of causes:

• When Data Isn’t Enough: What Ethnographic Research Taught Us About Chronic Absenteeism
• High School Student Depression: What Principals, Counselors, & Educators Must Know
• Bullying Prevention: Building Safer Schools Together
• Why Students Need Relationships Before Rigor

How do absences affect learning and graduation?

Absences cause measurable harm to achievement and later attainment, and the best studies find that the harm grows steadily with each day missed rather than starting at the 10 percent line; but the size of the effects is moderate, varies by setting, and appears to have shrunk somewhat since the pandemic. Much of the widely quoted evidence is correlational, so it is worth separating the kinds of studies.

Associations. The Department of Education states that children who are chronically absent for multiple years between preschool and second grade are “much less likely to read at grade level by the third grade,” and that falling behind in reading has been shown elsewhere to make students four times more likely not to graduate (U.S. Department of Education). Findings of this kind show which students are at risk. They do not by themselves show how much of the risk comes from the absences, because the same circumstances that keep a child home, such as illness or an unstable home, also affect learning directly.

Causal estimates. Researchers have tried to isolate the effect of the absences themselves:

• Liu, Lee and Gershenson (2021). Using records of the date and class period of every absence in middle and high school, and comparing the same student’s absences across subjects, the authors found that missing 10 classes reduced math or English language arts test scores by 3 to 4 percent of a standard deviation and course grades by 17 to 18 percent of a standard deviation. Ten total absences in ninth grade reduced the probability of on-time graduation and of ever enrolling in college by 2 percent. Absences after the state testing window did not affect test scores, a check that supports the design (EdWorkingPaper 19-125, May 2021).
• Yaow, Gershenson, Blazar and Hutt (2026). Using data from Maryland, North Carolina and a large urban district, the authors found the effect of absences on test scores was about 5 to 20 percent smaller in 2022–23 than in 2018–19 but still practically and statistically significant. The harmful effects were “approximately linear,” with little difference by race and gender before the pandemic. In Maryland, the effect of tenth-grade absences on graduation and two-year college enrollment was about 40 percent smaller after the pandemic, while the effect on any college enrollment rose slightly (EdWorkingPaper 26-1490, May 2026).

A linear effect means the 10 percent threshold is a reporting line, not the point where harm begins; a student at 8 percent deserves attention too. And a smaller effect after the pandemic, while still significant, is consistent with schools getting better at helping absent students catch up, though the study does not establish why. The working papers have not all completed peer review, and effects in other districts may differ.

Effects beyond the absent student. Attendance Works argues that when 20 percent or more of a school’s students are chronically absent, classroom churn makes teaching harder for everyone. For edCircuit’s treatment of consequences, see The Impact of Chronic Absenteeism on Students and Schools; for missed work, see 3 Strategies for Handling Make-up Work for Absentee Students.

Excused and unexcused absences: how does attendance policy treat them?

An excused absence is one that meets the reasons listed in state law and the district’s attendance policy, and an unexcused absence is one that does not; the difference decides whether an absence counts toward truancy, but not whether it counts toward chronic absence. That split is the source of much confusion among families, who may hear from the school about absences that were all excused.

State laws list the valid reasons and leave districts room to add others. Illinois is a detailed example. Its “valid cause” for absence includes illness, “including the mental or behavioral health of the student,” a verified medical or therapeutic appointment, an appointment with a victim services provider, a religious holiday, a death in the immediate family, attendance at a civic event or a family emergency, along with other situations the local board determines or that cause a parent reasonable concern for the student’s health or safety (105 ILCS 5/26-2a). Illinois also allows absence for a student’s mental or behavioral health for up to five days without a medical note, with the chance to make up missed work, and after the second such day the student may be referred to school support staff (105 ILCS 5/26-1). Washington allows up to two days a year of absence for reasons of faith or conscience, with a parent’s approval, without penalty (RCW 28A.225.010), and leaves the rest of the excused-absence policy to districts.

A district attendance policy usually settles several further questions that state law leaves open. Each one changes the numbers a school reports and the messages families receive:

• Partial days. Whether tardies and early dismissals count, and how many minutes make a partial absence. California, for example, counts an unexcused absence or tardy of more than 30 minutes toward truancy.
• Documentation. When a parent’s note is enough and when a medical note is required.
• Make-up work. Whether students can make up work for excused and unexcused absences alike. Penalizing grades for unexcused absences can turn an attendance problem into a course failure.
• Notices. When families are told about accumulating absences and in what tone. Several states now require early notice; Ohio requires family notification before a student reaches the chronic-absence threshold, as edCircuit’s Ohio article explains.

Excusing more absences does not reduce chronic absence; it only changes who is labeled truant. For students with disabilities, see edCircuit’s Special Education Guide: IEPs, 504 Plans, IDEA and Parents’ Rights.

What do state truancy laws require?

Every state has a compulsory attendance law, but the ages covered, the point at which a student becomes truant, the steps a school must take and the role of the courts differ from state to state; there is no single national truancy rule. The four states below show the range. Each summary is drawn from the statute itself, read in October 2026; leaders should read their own state’s current law and agency guidance.

The Washington law shows how detailed the required steps can be. Between the second and seventh unexcused absences, the school’s data-informed steps must include, in middle and high school, the Washington Assessment of the Risks and Needs of Students (WARNS) or another assessment; for a student with an IEP or Section 504 plan, a meeting of that plan’s team to consider the reasons for the absences; and, where appropriate, interventions such as adjusting the student’s program or helping the family obtain services. A petition must list every intervention attempted (RCW 28A.225.030).

Illinois also limits enforcement against parents. A district may refer a parent to a local public entity for a fine only after all appropriate supportive services have been offered; for a homeless student, those include a meeting with the district’s homeless liaison to remove barriers related to the student’s living situation. A truant minor may not be administratively withdrawn unless the student has 15 consecutive days of unexcused absence and cannot be located or persuaded to return, and only after at least three documented attempts to notify the parent (105 ILCS 5/26-12).

The common thread in these laws is a sequence: notice, a conversation about causes, supports, and only then a legal step. The differences are in the numbers and in how far each state restricts the punitive end. edCircuit’s coverage of truancy and home visits:

• Ohio School Attendance Law Shifts Focus to Support
• I’m Not a Truancy Officer: Reshaping the Home Visit Through Possibility
• Could Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Happen Today?

What attendance interventions work?

The strongest evidence for improving student attendance is for low-cost, well-designed communication with families, early-warning systems that lead to action, and mentoring or case management for students who need more; most of these reduce chronic absence by modest amounts, and few have been shown to raise achievement on their own. Most districts organize the work in tiers, a structure Attendance Works and the federal Regional Educational Laboratories describe: schoolwide supports for every student, early intervention for students starting to miss school, and intensive, individual help for those missing the most (REL Southwest, Strategies to Address Chronic Absenteeism). The evidence by type of intervention follows.

Mailed and texted attendance information (“nudges”). Several randomized trials have tested telling parents how many days their child has missed, often with a reminder of why attendance matters:

These are large randomized studies, and the interventions are cheap. Their limits are as clear. The effects are modest in absolute terms, the IES study found no achievement gain after one year, and a message cannot fix a broken-down car, an untreated illness or a frightening hallway. Messages work best as the universal first tier, and as a way of finding the families who need a conversation. The Institute of Education Sciences has published a toolkit, How to Text Message Parents to Reduce Chronic Absence Using an Evidence-Based Approach, for districts building their own system.

Mentoring and case management. For students already missing a great deal of school, the evidence favors a consistent adult who checks in and helps solve problems. REL Southwest summarizes an evaluation of New York City’s Success Mentors program in which about 10,000 students with histories of chronic absence gained almost two additional weeks of school in the years they had a mentor, using correlational and quasi-experimental methods rather than random assignment. It also summarizes randomized trials of Check & Connect, in which a monitor reviews a student’s attendance, behavior and grades and intervenes when problems appear: middle and high school students who received it on top of Communities in Schools services had better attendance, grades and behavior than those who received Communities in Schools alone, and secondary students with disabilities were more likely to stay in and progress in school.

Interventions for chronically truant students. A 2012 Campbell systematic review of 28 studies from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia found a significant, moderate effect of truancy interventions, increasing attendance by 4.7 days per student by the end of the intervention. The review found no significant difference in effectiveness between school-, court- and community-based programs, between individual, family and group approaches, or between short and long programs, and it found no evidence that collaborative or multimodal programs did better. It cautioned that samples were small, longer-term outcomes were not measured and minority students were underrepresented (Maynard et al., 2012).

Treatment for school refusal. For students whose absence stems from anxiety or distress, the 2015 Campbell review of eight studies found medium-quality evidence that cognitive-behavioral therapy increases school attendance, but no significant effect on anxiety, and warned that risks of bias in most studies could inflate the estimates (Maynard et al., 2015). Schools usually reach this treatment through counselors, school psychologists and community mental health partners.

Home visits and family engagement. Home visits are widely used, but the evidence read for this guide is descriptive. Secretary Cardona’s 2024 letter reported that Los Angeles Unified staff conducted more than 19,300 home visits and that the district reduced chronic absenteeism by more than a third; that is a district result, not a controlled study.

Awards and incentives: a caution. Perfect-attendance awards are common, but a randomized field experiment with 15,329 students found that pre-announced awards did not improve attendance on average and were followed by lower attendance once removed, and that surprise awards for past attendance reduced recipients’ later attendance. The authors suggest awards may signal that perfect attendance is neither normal nor expected (Robinson, Gallus, Lee and Rogers, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, March 2021).

Combining strategies. Attendance Works reports that, in the Everyone Graduates Center’s forthcoming principal survey, principals of schools using five or more evidence-based attendance strategies were much more likely to report significant improvement than those using one or two. That is survey evidence, not a trial. edCircuit’s coverage of attendance interventions:

• Strategies for School Districts to Boost Attendance
• Addressing Chronic Absenteeism: Six Key Elements Every School Leader Should Include in Their Plans
• Family Engagement Is the Intervention

How should schools use student attendance data and early-warning systems?

Student attendance data are most useful when they are current, reviewed regularly by a team that can act, and paired with information about why students are absent; an early-warning system that only flags students changes little. The clearest test comes from a randomized trial of the Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System (EWIMS) in 73 high schools in three Midwest states in 2014–15, covering 37,671 students in their first or second year of high school. After one year (REL Midwest, April 2017):

• 10 percent of students in EWIMS schools were chronically absent, compared with 14 percent in control schools, a statistically significant difference of 4 percentage points;
• 21 percent of students in EWIMS schools failed one or more courses, compared with 26 percent;
• there were no significant differences in suspensions, low GPAs or the share of students with too few credits to graduate on time; and
• implementation of the system’s seven-step process was low in nearly all schools.

The authors note that the research linking these indicators to on-time graduation is correlational, so it is not yet known whether improving them raises graduation rates. Even so, the result is notable: a system implemented imperfectly still reduced chronic absence, apparently because schools set up dedicated teams to identify and support students.

Federal guidance and the research add a few practical points. Secretary Cardona’s 2024 letter encouraged real-time tracking and noted that Connecticut and several other states report chronic absenteeism monthly. Because harm grows with each day missed, a student on track to reach 10 percent by spring should be flagged in the fall. REL Southwest describes the standard early-warning indicators as attendance, behavior and course performance. And the Institute of Education Sciences reports that machine-learning models can identify students at risk of near-term problems such as absenteeism with moderate to high accuracy (IES); a flag is a reason to talk with a student and family, not a label, and districts should check a model’s accuracy for each student group before relying on it.

For edCircuit’s coverage of attendance technology and data, see Fighting Absenteeism with AI and EdTech and When Data Isn’t Enough.

What role does federal ESSA accountability play?

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires every state to report chronic absenteeism on school report cards and allows states to use it as the “school quality or student success” indicator in their accountability systems, and most states do. The law has two relevant provisions:

• Accountability. Each state must include for all public schools “not less than one indicator of school quality or student success” that allows meaningful differentiation among schools and is valid, reliable, comparable and statewide. The law lists measures a state may use, including student engagement, educator engagement, access to advanced coursework, postsecondary readiness and school climate and safety, and “any other indicator the State chooses” (20 U.S.C. 6311(c)(4)(B)(v)). The statute does not name chronic absenteeism here; states chose it.
• Report cards. State and district report cards must include measures of school quality, climate and safety, among them rates of chronic absenteeism “including both excused and unexcused absences” (20 U.S.C. 6311(h)(1)(C)(viii)(I)). Reporting is required whether or not a state uses the measure for accountability.

States moved quickly to adopt the measure. FutureEd found in September 2017 that 36 states and the District of Columbia used some form of chronic absenteeism in their ESSA accountability formulas, and that Rhode Island also measured teacher absenteeism (FutureEd). In March 2024, Secretary Cardona wrote that more than 75 percent of states used a measure of chronic absenteeism in the accountability systems they use to identify schools for support and improvement, and urged the rest to consider adding one (letter). This guide did not find a more recent national count on a primary source; leaders should check their own state’s ESSA plan.

Federal programs also pay for parts of the work. The joint Education and Transportation fact sheet notes that districts may use Title I, Part A funds for the added cost of transporting students in foster care to their school of origin, and Title I homeless set-aside and McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth funds for the added cost of transporting students experiencing homelessness, for example through transit cards, gas cards or mileage reimbursement.

Accountability carries a known risk: pressure to change how absence is counted rather than how often students attend. FutureEd warned in 2017 that without consistent definitions, realistic goals and adequate support, the measure could provoke a backlash. Auditing how attendance is recorded, including partial days, is a practical safeguard.

Punitive vs. supportive approaches: what does the evidence say?

The evidence favors supportive approaches that find and address the reasons for absence, with legal enforcement kept as a later step for persistent unexcused absence; punitive measures used first are not shown to work better, and some, such as suspension for absence, remove students from school by design. The 2012 Campbell review found no significant difference in attendance gains between court-based, school-based and community-based truancy programs; the most rigorously tested interventions, from mailed information to mentoring and early-warning teams, are supportive; and none of the trials read for this guide tested fines or court referral against them. Even positive measures need testing, as the attendance-award experiment showed.

State law has moved in the same direction, though not uniformly. Illinois bars suspension, expulsion or court action for truancy until supportive services have been provided, and bars schools from referring a student to police or a school resource officer for a truancy fine. Washington requires a documented sequence of conferences, assessments and interventions before a court petition. Ohio prohibits suspending or expelling a student because of attendance, as edCircuit’s Ohio article describes. Courts and fines remain available in these states; what has changed is the order.

Supportive does not mean permissive. A school can expect daily attendance, tell families clearly when absences are accumulating and still treat each absence as information. edCircuit’s Chronic Absenteeism Is Undermining Student Success and I’m Not a Truancy Officer describe districts reframing attendance work around support; edCircuit’s Social-Emotional Learning Guide and School Safety Guide cover the school climate and safety conditions that keep students coming.

What should families know about school attendance?

Families are the first and most important partners in attendance, and the research shows that many parents underestimate how many days their child has missed. Practical points:

• Count the days. Ten percent of the school year is about 18 days, or about two days a month. Families can check the school’s attendance portal or ask the office for the running total; in the Philadelphia trial, part of the effect came from correcting parents’ mistaken beliefs about how many days their child had missed.
• Excused absences still count. A school may contact a family about chronic absence even when every absence was excused. The contact is meant to start a conversation, not to accuse anyone.
• Plan what can be planned. Illness is a legitimate reason to stay home; routine appointments and trips can often be scheduled outside school days.
• Tell the school what is getting in the way. Transportation problems, housing changes, a child’s anxiety, bullying or a family member’s illness are all things schools can sometimes help with, through transportation, counseling, a homeless liaison or a change in schedule. For students experiencing homelessness, federal funds can help pay for transportation to their school of origin.
• Ask about mental health days and make-up work. Some states, including Illinois, now treat a student’s mental or behavioral health as a valid reason for absence; families can ask what their state and district allow and how missed work is made up.
• Ask for an IEP or 504 review if absences relate to a disability. When a health condition or disability is behind repeated absences, the student’s plan team can consider changes.

edCircuit’s Family Engagement Is the Intervention and Ohio School Attendance Law Shifts Focus to Support are written with families in mind.

Questions to ask about chronic absenteeism in your schools

For school and district leaders and attendance staff

• What is our chronic absence rate by school, grade and student group this year, and how does it compare with 2018–19 using the same counting rules?
• How many of our schools have 20 percent or more of students chronically absent, and do those schools have a schoolwide plan rather than a caseload?
• Do we review attendance data at least monthly, and do we flag students who are on track to reach 10 percent, not only those who already have?
• Do we know the main reasons our students are absent, from surveys, focus groups or conversations with families, or are we assuming them?
• Do all families receive clear, accurate information about their child’s total absences, in their language, early in the year?
• Which interventions are we using at each tier, what evidence supports them, and how are we measuring whether they work here?
• Does our attendance policy match our state’s truancy law, and does it put notices, conferences and supports before any legal step?
• How does our state use chronic absenteeism in its ESSA accountability system, and are we recording attendance consistently, including partial days?

For teachers and counselors

• Do I know which of my students have missed the most school so far this year, and has someone reached out to each family?
• When a student returns after an absence, is there a simple way to catch up, and does the student feel welcomed back rather than behind?
• Do I know the signs of anxiety or school refusal, and who to refer a student to?
• For counselors: are students with the highest absences connected to a mentor, a check-in system or outside services, and is anyone checking whether those supports are working?

Getting students back to school

Chronic absenteeism rose sharply during the pandemic and is coming down only slowly, with the slowest recovery among students who face the most barriers. The research gives schools a reasonably clear path. Absences harm learning roughly in proportion to the days missed, so early attention matters. Accurate, early information to families reduces chronic absence at low cost, and early-warning teams, mentoring and treatment help students who need more. Enforcement-first approaches are not shown to work better, and state laws increasingly require support before any legal step. The work is local and continuing: learning why students in each school are missing, matching responses to those reasons, and judging success by whether students return to school regularly.

Related reading

• Chronic Absenteeism Is Undermining Student Success
• Addressing Chronic Absenteeism: Six Key Elements Every School Leader Should Include in Their Plans
• Ohio School Attendance Law Shifts Focus to Support
• The Impact of Chronic Absenteeism on Students and Schools
• Family Engagement Is the Intervention

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