What is Chronic Absenteeism?
Chronic Absenteeism is when a student is not in school for 10% or more of the time. Per the suggestion of the Johns Hopkins report, we measure chronic absenteeism by lumping excused and unexcused absenteeism together.
A typical school year is 180 days so chronically absent students miss at least 18 days, or almost a month of instruction or more.
Chronic absenteeism is not the same as "truancy". Legally, "truancy" involves only unexcused absences (and therefore misses the cases of families making false excuses for the child). Truancy laws vary from state to state, even district to district. Some states have no such laws at all.
RI students are legally truant when they've missed 10 days or more of their schooling. Also, RI law considers 4 incidences of tardiness to be 1 day of absence.
