Pennsylvania School Attendance Improvement and Truancy Reduction Toolkit
The Pennsylvania School Attendance Improvement and Truancy Reduction Toolkit is designed to provide resources and strategies for educators, child welfare professionals and court personnel to effectively address truancy in their local community. The toolkit is web-based in order to enable for updates and changes in the future as required by any changes in the School Code.
All future updates and/or changes will be annotated with the effective date.
Targeting Truancy
An estimated 7.5 million students are chronically absent each school year, and high rates of truancy start as early as kindergarten. Every teacher knows that you can't teach empty seats. The U.S. Department of Education heard teachers’ concerns and issued guidance for how communities can improve student attendance. Among the ideas: implementing the Check & Connect program, looking deeper than attendance rates to figure out why students aren't coming to school, and encouraging kids to sign up for wake-up calls from celebrities to get them up and ready for the day.