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Education is essential for students’ success and social progress, and one of the largest impediments to achieving these things is chronic absence.

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When a student misses several days of class each month, they can fall behind in their classes, Kidsburgh wrote in a recent article. Then, teachers have to juggle the challenges of helping them to catch up while teaching new material to them and the rest of the class.

In the article, education advocates noted that the Pittsburgh region has a large nonprofit and philanthropic community that can help families connect to resources on such issues as food insecurity or child care to enable older siblings to focus on their own education.

Attendance Works, an organization that focuses on ensuring that all students attend school regularly and participate in learning, wrote an article on the root causes of absence from school. It argued that understanding why students are absent as well as what motivates them to attend is important in creating a system of support.

Attendance Works wrote that reasons for absences typically fall into four categories:

• Barriers to attendance
• Aversion to school
• Disengagement from school
• Misconceptions about the impact of absences

Within these categories, various reasons were included – such as chronic illness, family responsibilities, or poor transportation (barriers); struggling academically or unwelcoming school climate (aversion); lack of challenging or engaging instruction (disengagement); and losing track and underestimating total absences (misconceptions).

Attendance Works included a worksheet that educators can use to mark the reasons why students in their district are absent.

To view the entire list of reasons for absence by category, visit Attendance Works’ website.