My it's Diane on my mind how to keep kids in school. Millions of American children are regularly skipping class. It's a problem educators have faced for years, but it's gotten much worse since the pandemic. Today is some estimate that nearly

one in three students are chronically absent meaning they miss more than 10% of the school year.

Educators around the country are facing a question of what to do about it.

The loss of this habit, the sense that it's not that big a deal,

if you miss a day or two or three,

has really spread all over the place.

Alec McGinnis is a reporter for ProPublica.

It focuses on gun violence, economic inequality, and the pandemic era school crisis.

You can find his piece about this issue in the January 15th New Yorker.

Alec, tell us how chronic absenteeism

is actually defined. It's defined as missing 10% of school days. So in the typical

school year that would be missing 18 days of the year, then you're chronically

absent. And how many kids, nationally, are chronically absent? Before the

pandemic it was only 15%, 1 5, 15%.

That was still quite a lot, but no, we're close to what we're dealing with now.

After the pandemic, it shot up to 28%, so it almost doubled. Those

rates have come down slightly in some places that have reported more recent

numbers, but they're still way higher than they were before the pandemic.

And when did we start keeping records of chronic absenteeism?

You know, that's a good question. It's only more recently that that it's come into

favor as the best way to keep track of absenteeism that for a long time it was more

a matter of just tracking what the percent of kids in school on a

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