In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”  

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.” 

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

Then the pandemic hit—and like so many other facets of family life in America, Dallas’ afterschool programs felt the effects, closing down or drastically shrinking as program staff quit for higher paying jobs in other industries and fear over COVID-19.

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With fewer spots available, children are now waiting up to 60 days to be enrolled. Another way to see it: For every child in an afterschool program in Dallas, there are three to four waiting for an available spot.

“We saw there was about a 45 percent seat loss in programs that were either no longer able to run, or that had to close,” said Dallas Afterschool vice president of program services Marjorie Murat. “These afterschool programs are really a lifeline for working families, and they exist to support the working families and sustain the family unit.”

The afterschool shortage in Dallas is not unique.

As the pandemic has continued, afterschool programs across the country are facing staffing shortages, forcing them to reduce the number of children they serve or close down completely.

COVID-19 has exacerbated the long-standing issue of low wages of afterschool staff, advocates said. Most afterschool care programs have a starting salary of $9-$12 an hour. Coupled with rising concerns about the virus and now the Delta variant, many are not returning to work, with some leaving for jobs that pay much more and are less risky.

The staff shortages have resulted in child care headaches for parents like Jessica Canales, a Dallas employment recruiter, whose kids were waitlisted for weeks after returning to school in early August. Pent up demand created a huge need for afterschool care.

For weeks, with no childcare in place, Canales was forced to leave work, picking up her children at 1 p.m., halfway through the school day. “My kids would miss everything else,” she said.

It took a direct appeal to the principal to finally get her kids off the waitlist and into the program.

“It was very frustrating,” said Canales, “especially when you have two parents working … I was so stressed out, I thought I had to quit my job.”

The issue of retaining afterschool workers is longstanding, advocates say.

“Before working during the pandemic, these jobs barely paid a living wage, let alone access to sick leave,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance. Once COVID-19 hit, she said, workers became fearful about showing up for work.

In at least one state, afterschool workers who refused to get vaccinated have continued to come to work and are wearing masks — prompting some colleagues to leave their posts.

There have been warning signs the worker shortage in afterschool has been getting worse in the last 18 months.

A national report by the Afterschool Alliance found more than half of summer programs (52 percent) — many of which also run afterschool programs — have waitlists compared to 40 percent last summer. Officials say the increase is due to staffing shortages created by the pandemic.

The workers have found opportunity and less risk during the pandemic: Within the last 16 months, afters school staff in some Omaha, Nebraska programs have been leaving for higher paying jobs at outlets such as Target and other businesses where workers start at $15 an hour compared to the $11.50 to $12 an hour offered to starting afterschool workers.

“We have sites that will not be able to open because they just don’t have the staff,” said Megan Addison, Executive Director of Collective for Youth in Omaha.

“We have sites that will not be able to open because they just don’t have the staff,” said Addison, Executive Director of Collective for Youth in Omaha.

In addition to low pay, advocates say workers have little room to grow.

“People have to look into other industries not only due to money but also due to the lack of social mobility within the sector. It’s very hard for people to grow and move on into other positions,” said Lissette Castillo, the Director of Community Schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “For example, educators can move from paraprofessional to educators to administrators, there is a lack of support for afterschool staff to have access to programming like that.”

With news of the Delta variant, other afterschool care programs are also struggling to navigate vaccine and mask mandates and protocols. In Nebraska, when educators were able to get vaccinated in early spring, only 50 percent of the afterschool staff at Collective for Youth programs did so.

“A majority of our staff are younger, and we also work with a lot of people of color who had some concerns regarding the vaccination. Some staffers also already had gotten COVID-19 and didn’t feel the need to get vaccinated,” said Addison. “Being a Republican state, and having many opportunities to get vaccinated, many of our partners are leaning towards optional, to not seem self-superior.”

Some Omaha afterschool centers are operating with non-vaccinated staff, but are still short staffed as workers fearful of getting sick leave their job, said Chief Operating Officer of Kids Can Community Center, Josh Gillman.

“We’ve been operating with 70 percent of our staff being vaccinated, and the other 30 percent who have declined even though they’ve been offered. We require all staff to wear masks presently at all times,” Gillman said. “Our normal daily service scope of students would be 800 if we were fully staffed, but right now we have 20 vacancies with our normal 70 positions…which reduces our capacity by a couple hundred of students we can serve each day until we wait to fill those positions.”

In Minnesota, an afterschool official in Saint Paul said the most alarming issue for afterschool programs is the lack of follow through with COVID-19 safety protocols, as administrators avoid having the corrective conversations with staff and students.

“People will say it’ll be safe if we all wear masks and stay six feet apart. But when you enter a building, and people aren’t wearing masks and aren’t six feet apart, those that are a little bit more sensitive to the health risks of COVID-19 don’t feel comfortable,” said one official. “And the principals and assistant principals in the past haven’t done anything, because we did go back to school last spring, and that was a big issue.”

As the United States intends to return to normalcy, with some delays due to the Delta variant, afterschool care programs will be integral to aid those with children in order to go back to work.

“Many people have no choice but to go back to the workforce and put their fears aside…there are many reports out there and research on the impact of afterschool and how it is an integral part of children’s learning,” said Castillo. “And yet the [afterschool care] staff at the frontline have been shamefully neglected and disregarded and the field itself has yet to receive the recognition and the respect that it deserves. Keeping in mind how families need to go back to work and the ones at the frontline will be on the line helping them get back to work.”

For her part, Canaldes knows she was lucky — lucky that she could leave her job and pick up her children early while she wanted for a spot in the afterschool program; and lucky she was able to finally get them into the program.

“There’s certain families who cannot wait three to four weeks to find afterschool care programs, especially with the epidemic and everybody going back to school. It’s an immediate challenge,” said Canales. “It is very frustrating.”