It’s time to treat chronic absenteeism as a community crisis

The Beacon’s Counterpoint columnists—liberal Rick Dollinger and conservative Geoff Rosenberger—tackle the issue of students who are chronically absent. They agree that showing up for school is so fundamental that it doesn’t lend itself to debate.

GEOFF: Rick, take a look at The Children’s Agenda Sept. 21 report on K-12 student absenteeism across Monroe County. The numbers are mind-numbingly bad. During the 2024-2025 school year, Rochester City School District students missed, on average, 35 days of school while suburban students averaged 11 absences. That’s out of a 180-day academic year. So, the average RCSD student was absent for 19% of the year and the average suburban student missed 6%.

For high school alone, the numbers are even worse, with the average RCSD high school student absent for 46 days (25%) and the average suburban high schooler missing 13 days (7%). And, these are just the averages across the entire student body. Fifteen percent of Monroe County’s suburban students were chronically absent, defined as missing 10% or more of the school days, along with 58% of RCSD students. No wonder only 48% of New York State 3rd through 8th grade students met the state’s ELA proficiency standards last year and only 57% were proficient in math. It’s pretty hard to learn if you’re not there! 

This doesn’t bode well for the future. 

RICK: The numbers are tragic and frightening. It seems the older you get, the less you go to school—no matter where you go to school, suburbs or city. What to do? If we can’t make a change—fast—where do we end up?

GEOFF: Rick, I don’t want to sound preachy, but I think it has a lot to do with the demise of “shame” and “personal responsibility” across society in recent years. Perhaps that’s an assertion worthy of a future debate. But I see the decline in school attendance as just one manifestation of those changes. Our respective parents felt a personal responsibility to ensure we weren’t truant. Can you imagine the response we’d have gotten if we’d announced “I’m not going to school today. I’m taking a mental health day.”

The attendance numbers in the Children’s Agenda study clearly demonstrate there’s no stigma, or at least a dramatic reduction in the stigma, attached to truancy.  We need a cultural reset.

RICK: A cultural reset is not enough and won’t happen soon enough. By neglect, we are chaining a huge portion of the next generation into perpetual poverty. What strikes me is that there was a time, not all that long ago, when parents had children to help them in the fields. Children were necessary for a family’s survival because they provided additional help to families in an agrarian economy.

Now, children are still needed to take care of their parents, and to provide the economics to support their parents in retirement, and as they further age. Children, without an education, will never be able to support their parents. Parents need to convey that message to their children and their children need to listen. Go ahead, my conservative friend, call me old school. But how do we translate that message into action now?

GEOFF: Rick, this is supposed to be a debate. We aren’t supposed to be singing from the same hymnal. But we are. That’s because this isn’t a Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal issue. We can debate phonics versus whole language (I vote phonics), whether standardized tests are good or bad (they’re good) or the merits of charter schools vs. traditional schools. We can debate whether restorative justice is a preferable alternative to student suspensions. There’s plenty for us to disagree on educationally. But showing up for school is so fundamental that it doesn’t lend itself to debate. We tried online instruction during the COVID shutdowns. The evidence is overwhelming. It didn’t work.

Perhaps the answer is peer pressure. Students who are in school need to lean on their friends who aren’t to start showing up again. Perhaps state school aid should be tied in some way to student attendance. Lower state aid translates to higher local property taxes to make up the funding shortfall. That would likely create parental peer pressure to encourage their friends to ensure their kids are in school because their truancy would drive up your property tax bill. I’m open to pretty much any ideas designed to swing the pendulum back.

RICK: Peer pressure? No chance for it work. Many of the “peers” are absent from school. If anything, the peer pressure goes in the opposite direction and aligns with staying home or hanging out.

Tie school aid to attendance? How can a school—with fewer resources—devote new resources to efforts to end truancy? How do you account for one school, in the same district, that has a high attendance record and another school in that district that does not?

Child neglect proceedings for failure to attend can easily become destructive and tie up the courts and social service agencies. The school districts and the counties—including Monroe—have worked this angle for years, but, as you would no doubt notice, it is has not worked to stop the tide of absenteeism.

What if we tie access to health care to some form of parental accountability for school attendance—if your child fails to attend school, you lose some health insurance coverage? I do not like the notion of imposing a cost, but somehow, someone needs to get the parents—the entire family—to wake up to the long-term damage to a child who does not attend school. Some parent, some family leader needs to drive home the message. 

As I see it, we need the mayor, the county executive, leaders at all levels of the community—heck, Josh Allen—on TV, social media, Facebook, Instagram, telling families to get their children to school.

Remember the old TV line on one of the local channels—”It is 11 p.m., do you know where your children are?”

Why not a new ad: “It is 9 a.m. on a school day, are your children in school?”

Rick Dollinger is a retired Court of Claims judge and a former state senator who lives in Brighton. Geoff Rosenberger is retired co-founder of Clover Capital Management Inc.

The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].