It’s a common refrain among educators: Even as schools focus time and resources on driving down rates of chronic absenteeism, some parents make the uphill climb even steeper by pulling their children out of class for non-urgent family trips.
Since the pandemic, families appear more relaxed about missing two or three days of school so they can take a trip to Disneyland or go skiing, they say. And it doesn’t take long for those missed days to add up, landing a student at or near the 10% of missed school days necessary to be considered chronically absent.