Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource
Nearly a quarter of California’s K-12 students missed several weeks’ worth of school during the 2022-23 school year — a decrease of 5 percentage points in chronic absenteeism from the previous school year, but a sign of the lingering effects of the pandemic.
Even as schools re-opened for in-person instruction, chronic absences shot up from 12.1% pre-pandemic to 30% during the 2021-22 school year.
Such a sharp rise has increased discussion about why the absences are occurring. But having a certain number of absences in one school year can lead to various different outcomes for students, and potentially for their parents, depending on how they are recorded.
If recorded as unexcused, the student can be considered chronically truant. If recorded as excused, or as a mix of excused and unexcused, the student can then be considered chronically absent.
But what is the difference…
