Truancy reaches crisis level

In the past year, approximately one million elementary school students were truant in California. According to the Attorney General’s 2013 Report on California’s Elementary School Truancy and Absenteeism Crisis, emergence of this tendency to cut school at such an early age not only harms the state’s budget, but also affects the students’ school behavior in the future. Students must adopt healthy school attendance habits at an early age to prevent chronic truancy in their following academic years.
California considers truancy as three unexcused absences or tardies of more than 30 minutes during the school year. After the first truancy, the school notifies the parent or guardian responsible for the student’s attendance. The state may take further measures such as prosecution if they fail to ensure the child’s attendance, which results in fines and parent education and counseling according to the California Department of Education.
According to Dana M. Nichols and Roger Philips on Recordnet, parents also often misjudge the value of the elementary school day. By allowing their children to miss a day of school, parents encourage the development of poor attendance habits and contribute to the school districts’ loss of $1.4 billion per year, according to the Attorney General’s 2013 Report.
At such a young age, children adopt a habit of truancy and bring this behavior to middle and high school, where the abundant workload is more difficult. A tendency of chronic absences can lead a student to fall behind on school work and the Attorney General’s 2013 Report states that students who develop absenteeism at an early age are “more likely to struggle academically and, in later years, to drop out entirely.”
“All the honors and AP [classes] can become too much and management of time is one thing you can get out of [Peninsula] if you learn to keep up,” junior Henry Han said.
Students who struggle academically also turn to skipping a few classes of the day to catch up on sleep or unfinished homework due later in the day.
“I had to catch up a lot,” Han said. “I [eventually] just dropped it [so that] I [wouldn’t] have to skip classes anymore.”
Early intervention is the only way to stop this domino effect; the earlier the students adopt the mindset of avoiding truancy, the more successful they will be in the long run.