2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

272 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
What Contributes to Chronic Absence?
Chronic absence reflects the degree to which schools and preschools,
communities, and families adequately address the needs of students.
Attendance is higher when schools and preschools provide a rich, engaging
learning experience; have stable, experienced, and skilled teachers;
and actively engage parents in their children’s education. Chronic
absence decreases when educational institutions and communities
actively communicate the importance of going to school regularly to all
students and their parents starting with the entry to school, and reach
out to families when their children begin to show patterns of excessive
absence. Attendance suffers when families struggle to keep up with the
routine of school and lack reliable transportation; work long hours in
poorly paid jobs with little flexibility; live in unstable and unaffordable
housing; have inadequate health care or suffer from a prevalence of
chronic disease; and experience escalating community violence.
Taking time to unpack why students miss school in the first place is
essential to developing effective solutions. Attendance Works has found
it helpful to classify the reasons students miss in terms of three broad
categories:
• Myths. A number of common and pervasive myths about attendance
make it less likely that going to school every day is made a
top priority. Often, good attendance is seen as a matter of complying
with rules rather than a matter of providing children more and
better opportunities to learn. Consequently, missing school is only
seen as a problem if a child skips school without permission. Often
families and educators do not realize that too many absences, even
if they are excused, can quickly add up to so many that they hinder
learning and just missing two or three days every month is a problem.
Many of them do not recognize that poor attendance as early
as preschool and kindergarten can have a detrimental impact on
their child’s ability to succeed in school.
• Barriers. Many students can’t get to school as a result of chronic
health conditions or inadequate access to medical, mental health,
or dental care; unstable housing; unreliable transportation; or a
lack of effective family and community support and service delivery.
These barriers are especially critical for children involved in
foster care or the juvenile justice system. An analysis by the Uni-