Hi on point my name is Dan Yurgert and I'm a high school teacher on the

outskirts of the Denver area in a town called Brighton.

Hi there Dan I'm Megna Chakra Bardi and this is on point.

Now Dan is one of the slew of listeners who had stories to tell.

When we asked you if you'd seen an increase in chronic absenteeism in your schools.

One of the things that I discovered through some attendance data

is that at my high school where we have about 1,700 students,

we had about 800 students last semester in the fall 2023 semester that qualified

as chronically absent.

And a lot of those students were almost never at school at all.

So some quick math here, that's 47% of the students at Dan's school.

They were chronically absent in the fall of 2023. 47% which by the way

means those 47% were missing at least one out of every 10 days of school.

It's a huge number.

In fact, the number of chronically absent students

nationwide is twice as high now, twice as high

as it was before the COVID shutdowns. And you guessed it, poor attendance

is linked to every sort of educational risk you can think of, higher dropout

rates, reduced career prospects, higher probability of being arrested.

So here's more of what you've seen, teachers and parents in your schools.

I have been at first grade teacher for this is my 30th year in northern Idaho right now.

Absenteeism is huge. The kids miss out on key learning, their friendships, their, you know, recess and lunch and PE, and parents aren't always seeing it quite as important as they used to.

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