I skipped a lot of school back in the day. A lot of school. I would pick up my best friend Patricia and head to school — only to make a left instead of a right and head out for the day. We weren’t Thelma and Louise, we were Ferris Bueller. And we had a lot of fun. Because, although we missed every other Tuesday all through junior and senior year, we got good grades, went home to nice houses, ate dinners with our (intact) families and eventually went to college. So what’s all the current fuss over truancy?
The fuss is that while skipping school has been around as long as the schoolhouse, chronic truancy has been shown to lead to school disengagement and, if continued unchecked, to dropping out of school entirely. In fact, missing school has become such a problem in this country that one of the four primary indicators by which most school principals are measured is their student body attendance.
Presumably monitoring student attendance was implemented in an effort to nudge school administrators and teachers to look at things like the quality of instruction, school environment and student support so that any necessary changes could be made and students would either reengage or stay engaged with their dynamic learning environment.
[For more of this story, written by Jessica Pinson Pennington, go to http://jjie.org/the-impacts-of-truancy/107642/]
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