Indiana Senate Bill 282, which addresses school absenteeism and attendance, was enacted on July 1, 2024. With this new mandate, lawmakers have taken significant action to address the school absenteeism crisis in our state, and the new law will influence attendance policy and enforcement at MCCSC almost immediately.
Once MCCSC’s new attendance policy is adopted as a result of Bill 282, any student in the district with 10 or more unexcused absences during the school year will be considered habitually truant and, therefore, subject to intervention and referral to the local prosecuting attorney. In addition, the update includes verbiage about students who are chronically absent being unable to participate in extracurricular activities “unless in accordance with an IEP, 504 Plan, Service Plan or other comparable plan to meet legal duty to a student with a disability under federal or state law.”
When asked about her reaction to the changes, junior Ella Smith said, “I do not like [the policy] at all. Last year I missed [around] 17 days because I was sick a lot. People get sick unexpectedly and you can’t expect kids to be here all the time because we have a life out of school, and there’s a lot of family stuff going on.” She elaborated, “It will [probably] affect stress levels and mental health, because some people take mental health days from school. I feel like people just are different and have different immune systems, so they can’t help sometimes how often they are at school. I think it’ll affect students a lot.“ Smith estimates that she misses “at least a day a month, maybe half a day every two weeks.”
The push behind this new law is that chronic absenteeism has become a significant challenge for Indiana schools, and this problem is increasingly threatening the educational futures of students. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school days during the year, whether the absences are classified as excused or unexcused. This equates to missing approximately 18 days throughout the school year.
According to the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE), our state’s statistics are troubling. The state’s chronic absenteeism rate for the 2023-2024 school year was 17.8% of students. This means nearly one in five students missed 18 days, or about three and a half weeks of school. Chronic absenteeism is highest in high school, specifically in grades 11 and 12, with nearly one in three Hoosier students being chronically absent in their senior year.
Although the state’s chronic absenteeism rate is heading in a more favorable direction and is down from a high of 19.2% in 2022, it is still markedly higher than pre-pandemic levels, which hovered around 10%.
For reference, according to the Bloomington High School South “School Performance Report,” available on the school website, 60% of South students had a 94% or more attendance rate in 2023. This means 40% of South students missed more than 10 days of school last year. This places South in the 52nd percentile among all Indiana schools. And while the performance report doesn’t indicate whether the absences are excused or unexcused, the average number of days per student is still troubling.
In a press release dated Sept. 11, 2024, Indiana Secretary of Education Dr. Katie Jenner said, “Although we are seeing improvement in Indiana, we must continue to link arms to do everything we can to ensure our students are coming to school. This means working together with parents, educators, and community partners to focus on community-centered solutions that ensure our students are in school every day.”
The critical issue of absenteeism is particularly alarming because of its disproportionate impact on low-income families and students with health conditions. Absenteeism has been linked to lower academic performance, social difficulties, decreased college-readiness, and increased likelihood of dropping out. All of these outcomes contribute to the widening of the achievement gap. The legislative intervention provided by Bill 282 aims to implement comprehensive strategies state-wide that monitor student attendance, create a process for targeted interventions, engage families and the community, and provide supportive measures to support success.
What is included in Indiana Senate Bill 282?
The law does include specifics, but it also allows schools to have some freedoms regarding how they will implement the policies. The goal is to address attendance issues through improving attendance tracking and ensuring students are attending school.
Schools must implement enhanced attendance tracking which will provide the ability to more clearly identify when a student is displaying a pattern that would categorize them as at risk of chronic absenteeism. In addition, schools must enact intervention strategies and plans through an absentee prevention policy that is designed to support students who are struggling with absenteeism.
The new law states that if a student in grades K-6 misses five days of school that are unexcused within a 10 week time frame, parents will be notified and required to work with the school to create a plan to correct the problem. An effort will be made to address the root cause of chronic absences, whether it is health, family-related, or not being engaged in academic pursuits. As part of the intervention, the school may involve wrap-around services, including social services or counselors.
Schools will place a strong emphasis on open communication with parents and guardians about attendance. The bill promotes engaging families in discussions and solutions to help foster a unified relationship with the goal of improving the student’s attendance.
Importantly, the law dictates that there are to be consequences for students and their guardians if they continue to be absent without changing the behavior. Part of the law mandates that if a student of any age is identified to have 10 or more days of unexcused absences, then the student is considered to be habitually truant. As such, the school corporation is required to file an affidavit with the prosecuting attorney in the jurisdiction where the child resides. Prosecutors would be required to notify guardians that a referral has been made regarding their student’s attendance. Ultimately, parents could be held accountable to prosecution if the situation does not improve.
When asked about the new law from a teacher’s perspective, Dr. Kirstin Milks shared, “It’s a difficult tension. There are students that I serve and people that I know across the country who have students that aren’t coming to school, and we know that learning happens best for students in community [settings].” Dr. Milks emphasized that, “In-person school is set up to be in person. It’s a lot harder to make up work if you miss it.”
At the same time, Milks recognized the challenges that exist with getting an absence excused. “There’s a healthcare burden to get an excused absence. You need to have a [guardian] to take you if you’re sick, and you need a [reason] that a doctor will see you for, and you need to be able to get in the same day, and you need to be able to have an adult who will take you there, and that’s not fair.”
Overall, Milks mentioned families being at the heart of the topic. “I do understand that attendance is a really big issue, and also we need to think about ways to make sure that the policy is not a burden on our families who [are] already the most under-resourced.”
“It’s a complicated issue, and I’m interested to see, once the district attorney begins to get a sense of how many cases [there are], [if] they think they’re helping students overcome barriers that are keeping them [from attending school]. So it’ll be interesting to see,” she concluded.
How is MCCSC implementing the new law?
In response to the passage of Bill 282, Indiana schools, including MCCSC, are making adjustments to their attendance policies. At the last school board meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, Dr. Chris Findlay, Director of MCCSC Health and Safety, presented the first reading of the “Student Attendance and Truancy Prevention” Policy 5200. The new policy expands upon the previous “Attendance” Policy, which was last revised in August 2014.
MCCSC’s updated policy includes and addresses the specific provisions outlined in the new law, and provides a step-by-step account of how the Corporation plans to prevent and address chronic absenteeism.
When asked about how MCCSC is integrating the new state law, Interim Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Alexis Harmon stated, “Attendance is hugely important for students’ success in school. Concerted efforts to encourage and support regular attendance at school have long been a part of our regular practice. This law clearly articulates practices to put in place, many of which we already do. The goal of the law is to intervene earlier with families, and the law establishes different timelines for contact. We are having more proactive communication and meetings with parents as a result of the new law requirements, and our existing practices enabled us to enact the changes fairly easily.”
Within MCCSC’s revised policy a list of exempt absences are included, which do not count against a student’s total number of missing days throughout the year. Examples of these absences include: serving in the National Guard, testifying in court, and exhibiting in the Indiana State Fair.
Missing school for exempt reasons differs from absences related to documented illnesses, accidents, deaths in the immediate family, appointments, religious observations, and college visits. These are examples of excused absences that do count against a student’s number of total missing days with respect to the school corporation’s attendance rates.
Excused and exempt absences don’t count towards the 10 day unexcused limit. An unexcused absence is an absence from school not authorized by state law or Corporation policy.
The second reading of the amended policy will take place at the October Board Meeting on Oct. 22, 2024. Any policy adopted by the School Board must be read twice and voted on by the members.
What’s next?
Also on Sept. 11, 2024, the IDOE unveiled the new “Attendance Insights” dashboard as a method to highlight how critical student attendance is in long-term success. A public dashboard will be available later this Fall on the State of Indiana’s EdData page, and will highlight attendance at the grade, school, and corporation level. The dashboard will categorize types of absences, as well as chronic absence statistics, and information by student population. The information will be updated annually after schools have certified their data. The goal is to help schools and community leaders be better able to analyze data, identify trends and root causes of absenteeism, review policies, set goals, and evaluate how current efforts are improving attendance numbers.
