http://www.courant.com/education/hc-chronic-absenteeism-0825-20160829-story.html

Hartford Courant:

For years, school attendance supervisors like Joe Vaverchak in New Britain focused on what percentage of kids showed up each day.

But then Vaverchak learned that while some schools in his districts had high overall attendance rates — as high as 96 percent — there were pockets of students with high rates of repeated absences.

In fact, he found four years ago, that almost a third of kindergartners and almost a quarter of first-graders were missing more than 18 days of school in a year, which he conjectured might be linked to poor reading scores in third grade.

"You don't have to be a genius to figure out what was happening," Vaverchak said last week. "If the kids were in school they would be getting instruction to learn how to read better."

It was Vaverchak's introduction to the concept of chronic absenteeism — a phenomenon that Connecticut has been taking major strides to address in recent years.

Kathryn Scheinberg Meyer, Esq.
Director, SpeakUp Initiatives

211 State Street, Bridgeport, CT 06604  (203)335-0719

2074 Park Street, Hartford, CT 06105   (860)570-5327