Larry Moore doesn’t work in a school, but he knows why so many students skip class. On any given day, neighborhood kids relax in the chair and talk as he cuts their hair.
It’s hard to get moving in the morning when there’s nothing in the fridge, the children tell Moore. Nobody is making us go. I feel like the teachers are constantly judging me. They think I’m dirty, and I think they’re boring. Why spend year after year there if it doesn’t get me anywhere?
“I always tell them—people will help you, but you gotta want more for yourself.”
Low incomes and high crime rates correlate to the school district’s chronic student absenteeism problem.
Just over half the students in the district missed 10 percent or more of instruction time in 2023, or at least 18 of 180 school days in one academic year.
Moore says low morale among parents, teachers, and students plays a role in the attendance problem.
“We had it better, and our parents had more,” he told The Epoch Times on Sept. 10. He is a 2001 graduate of Syracuse’s Nottingham High School.
“We’re not teaching the next generation to be stronger.”
Chronic absenteeism at Syracuse schools rose from 36 percent in 2018 to 60 percent in 2022 before decreasing to 51 percent in 2023, AEI’s data shows.
Shalanda Graham, Syracuse City Schools attendance coordinator, told The Epoch Times in a Sept. 12 email that her team will help improve attendance rates this year by conducting daily morning checks to see who is absent and try to get those students into school that day if possible.
Graham said shifting students from their homes to a more restrictive, structured environment is challenging.
Her team will also communicate with families who are struggling with attendance and make van transportation available to children who can’t get a ride or walk to school.
School absenteeism can be a problem for many reasons.
Districts that receive state aid based on both enrollment and average attendance risk losing funding if a significant number of students continue to miss days.
Students with poor attendance can fall behind, fail courses and grade levels, not graduate on time, or even lose their motivation to attend school entirely.
Tending to absentee students who need to make up schoolwork takes teachers away from the other learners who attend class more regularly.
Syracuse’s situation isn’t unique.
According to the AEI, rates for many districts across the country last year remained well above the national average, including Hempstead Union Free in Long Island, New York, at 52 percent, and Chicago at 40 percent.
The tracker listed Oakland Unified in California at 53 percent, but John Sasaki, district communications director, said the figure is higher—61 percent—because of a May 2023 teachers strike that caused most students to stay home for eight days.
Without the strike, he wrote in a Sept. 10 email to The Epoch Times, “it would have been much closer to our 2023–2024 rate of 31 percent, which is, of course, still far too high.”
The Epoch Times also reached out to Hempstead Union school officials.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) emphasize that its rates of both chronic absenteeism and truancy, where students skip school without an excuse from a parent or guardian, are steadily decreasing despite additional barriers like homelessness and family mental health problems.
CPS press secretary Evan Moore said his district has several community-wide initiatives that seek to improve communication with families and result in better student attendance.
It has also added more after-school programs to help working parents with childcare challenges.
“CPS has not used a truancy officer model for more than two decades and does not plan to reinstate the truancy office, preferring instead the continued implementation of our comprehensive holistic approach to supporting students,” Evan Moore said in a Sept. 10 email to The Epoch Times.
Some states favor stricter enforcement measures.
Carter Nordman, a Republican assemblyman in the Iowa Legislature, introduced his legislation after teachers complained of continued poor attendance years after the height of the pandemic.
Some days, he said, more than half the students in a classroom were absent.
“It puts the teachers in a bad place because they’re constantly playing catch up,” Nordman told The Epoch Times on Sept. 10. “We wanted a process that involves parents.”
The vast majority of those surveyed said measures aimed at improving attendance, like early warning systems for monitoring students who frequently miss school, haven’t been successful.
The report also said most school district leaders identified the cause of the problem as a “cultural shift” where children and families see school as optional and attendance won’t improve unless instruction becomes more engaging.
Rhode Island has had a significant improvement in student attendance with its Attendance Matters campaign.
That initiative includes a “nudge tool” that texts parents or guardians when their children are not at school, data analytics to identify absenteeism rates at the neighborhood level, and businesses that might be employing students who are skipping school.
Victor Morente, speaking for Rhode Island’s Department of Education, said this initiative resulted in about a quarter of a million fewer public school absences within three years.
“Rhode Island’s attendance efforts are garnering national recognition,” he wrote in a Sept. 4 email to The Epoch Times.
Todd Rogers, faculty director of the Behavioral Insights Group at Harvard University, began researching chronic student absenteeism in 2014.
Before, during, and now well after the pandemic, he has found that the most effective tool for nudging parents to get their kids back in school is “social artifacts,” or mailed letters with a friendly reminder noting how many days of school a child has missed.
“People put them on their fridges, their kitchen counters and share them with everyone,” Rogers told The Epoch Times on Sept. 9.
He said mail dominates in this case for two reasons: Parents are already overloaded with texts and emails—even from schools—and digital messages are rarely saved.
There is also the “formality” effect, where people pay more attention to things that come from official channels, like the U.S. mail.
“Think about it,” Rogers said. “Would you reply to a text from the IRS?”
Back outside the Mary Nelson Youth Center in Syracuse, youth advocate Larry Moore said he’s aware of the school absence problem in his neighborhood and around the country.
Text messages, home visits by school staff, and stricter laws are a step in the right direction, he said, but they don’t attack the root of the problem.
He points to the narrow alley overgrown with knee-high weeds between his youth center and a small convenience store protected by a metal gate and still not open at 10 a.m.
Several families live in the apartments above the store, and Moore suspects that some of those children are skipping school.
Then he points to two churches down the street where basketball hoops were removed following loitering complaints.
“The troubles start early when there’s no place to play,” he said.
Moore, a divorced father with children in suburban schools outside the city where he grew up and still works, believes family values, humility, mutual respect, and self-discipline in communities have eroded over the past two decades.
Many of the kids skipping school have parents who are young, immature, and probably unmarried, he predicts.
On a good day, parents behave like an older sibling, he said, and on a bad day, they’re absent.
Discipline is also absent for much of a child’s young life, he said.
When another adult in their life takes corrective actions, the child and their parents automatically view it as outrageous and unfair.
“The kids don’t have structure,” Moore said. “A lot of things have to change.”
