Lawrence school board to review truancy plan, continue discussion of chronic absenteeism

Lawrence school board members will review an attendance and truancy plan on Monday and hear more details about chronic absenteeism — a description that staffers say applied to nearly 50% of the district’s high school seniors last school year.

At its meeting, the board will review the plan and continue a discussion it began at its meeting on June 26. At that meeting, board members heard in a presentation that in the 2022-23 academic year, 29.7% of the district’s students were chronically absent — defined as missing 10% or more of the school year for any reason.

That was down from the previous academic year, when 34.11% of students were chronically absent. But the presentation showed that 39% of high school students — and 49% of seniors — were chronically absent in the past school year.

In June, some board members wondered how useful the chronic absenteeism statistic was. Board member Shannon Kimball said that because excused absences count, the category can apply not just to students with real attendance problems, but also to students who are doing well in school, like one of her children, who was gone “for a bunch of days” because of college visits.

“Those are excused absences, but the state requires you to pull those and basically count them against the district,” she said.

Board member Ronald “G.R” Gordon-Ross agreed that the data didn’t have much to say about how students were performing in school.

“When we sit up here at a board table and talk about an increase in graduation rate, and then present me a piece of data where almost 50% of our seniors qualify for chronic absenteeism — those two pieces of data don’t line up with each other,” Gordon-Ross said.

The report in June said that average daily attendance districtwide for the 2022-23 school year was at nearly the same level as the previous year; it had fallen by less than 1%.

In other business, the board will:

• Receive a final presentation about the district’s needs assessments, which are state-mandated reports on the needs of students at each individual school building.

• Consider approval of a settlement agreement in a class-action lawsuit against Juul Labs. According to the agenda packet, the district is eligible to receive $85,573 from this settlement.

The school board meets at 6 p.m. Monday at district offices, 110 McDonald Drive.

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