TEMPE, AZ — As Arizona schools work to battle chronic absenteeism, one Valley school district is implementing a campaign aimed at making a difference.
On Monday, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne called absenteeism a "disastrous" situation impacting schools and called for schools to adopt stricter measures regarding absences and tardies.
Being chronically absent means a student misses 10% of school days in a year; that amounts to 18 days for Arizona students.
“The idea that a third of our students are missing 18 days of school or more is a real catastrophe and an emergency for our state," Superintendent Horne said. "We need radical efforts to solve this problem. We have to create a motivation for parents to be sure their children go to school. Parents don’t want their kids to fail courses or to miss out on graduating on time, and if schools would adopt those kinds of policies, we would see the parents motivated and a radical drop in absenteeism. As a result of that, we would see better academic results.”
Data shows that the rate of chronic absences has gone up after the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent Helios Foundation report shows "absenteeism rates for all grade levels of approximately nine percent during the 2019-20 school year compared to 30 percent from the 2022-23 school year," according to education officials.
See more recent data on absenteeism by school district, race, and more here.
While many schools and districts are working on solutions to the problem, Kyrene Elementary School District created a task force last year to look into the issue and is now working on implementing its attendance initiative, encouraging students – and their parents – to get into the classroom.
ABC15's Elenee Dao talked with a Kyrene Elementary principal part of the task force about the new initiative and how they hope it helps bring students into the classroom day after day. See the full report in the video player above.
