Editorial: What can Pennsylvania do about truancy?
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Schools can be caught in a no-win situation when it comes to getting kids in the doors.
Students are required to attend school until they turn 18 or graduate. It might be a public or private or charter school, but they have to be learning to read and write and do fractions somewhere. For 180 days — or a comparable number of hours per year — they have to attend school.
But what if they don’t?
Truancy is not absenteeism. It carries the stigma of willfulness. It isn’t just that someone didn’t come to school because of illness or inability. It speaks of laziness and defiance.
And that is why traditionally it has been handled like misbehavior at best or criminality at worst. Skip school, and you could receive punishment such as detention or in-school suspension. Skip school chronically, and your parents could be hauled into court — which likely would have repercussions at home.
After the pandemic, many districts are seeing steep increases in truancy. In Western Pennsylvania, the state Department of Education shows a jump from 8% habitual truancy in the 2019-20 school year to 17% in 2022-23. It varies by district, with some even more dramatic. Allegheny Valley School District sits at 27%.
But while the rules about inattendance come from the state, so does a newfound push not to punish it.
“There’s a lot more of an approach of really trying to get to the root cause,” Kiski Area Superintendent Jason Lohr said.
As with other problems like addiction or mental health, truancy could be something that doesn’t respond to punishment. A child might miss school for reasons that could have practical causes, like illness, homelessness or a parent’s job. Those aren’t things that can be easily solved by detention or a fine.
But they could be solved by more social outreach and service-driven responses. It’s a similar drumbeat to what has been said about policing in schools. Perhaps the better way to approach problems is by solving the puzzle that is creating them.
However, it is important for the state to not just leave the school districts to figure it out on their own. If the districts are to support the families, the state has to support the district. That may be with dollars — or it might just require better planning, better guidance and fewer obstacles to finding services for the students and families.
Truancy might not be the illness keeping kids home. It might just be a symptom that schools can’t cure on their own.