Truancy is a growing concern in the United States. So much so that the percentage of truant students rose from 15% in 2018 to 28% in 2022. As a school professional, it’s normal to feel alarmed by this statistic. But we’re here to let you know that there’s still hope. By increasing levels of student engagement and improving behavioral health, you can make a real impact on truancy rates and create a more positive culture in your school.
Read on to learn more about truancy, where it stems from, and how it’s linked to engagement levels and behavioral health. By diving into these topics, you’ll learn how to grow a support system that has the potential to bring drastically lower truancy rates.
Understanding Truancy
Truancy often feels like a poor choice made by the students, but it’s rarely that simple. Instead, we see it traced back to one of three causes: family factors, school factors, or economic influences.
Family factors that can be linked to truancy include:
- Poor parental educational outcomes—high school drop-outs, no postsecondary schooling, etc.
- Lack of parental supervision—specifically, parents being absent after school hours.
- Household income—the lower the income, the more likely truancy becomes for the child.
School factors that can cause chronic absenteeism include:
- Unwelcoming school climate—where students do not feel wanted, seen, valued, or accepted.
- Safety concerns—truancy is more common when students don’t feel safe at school.
- Class sizes—the larger the class, the more common truancy becomes.
- Inability to meet diverse student needs
- Discipline policies surrounding truancy—any discipline or behavioral intervention causes truancy rates to rise.
- Lack of mental health and behavioral health supports—unsupported students who experience mental health challenges, substance abuse, low self-esteem, or a detachment from school are more likely to be truant.
- Classroom Management—chaotic or unengaging environments increase the likelihood of students feeling disconnected, unsupported, or stressed, making them more likely to skip class.
Economic influences may include:
- Student employment—students who work more than 5 hours per week are more likely to miss school.
Do any of these areas remind you of your school’s past chronically absent students? Try not to worry if you didn’t see the correlation. You’re now on a path toward discovering the stems of truancy in your community, making supporting future students in similar circumstances easier!
The Impact of Truancy on Student Engagement
On a lesser-known note, student engagement levels are also linked to truancy. The lower the engagement level, the more likely the learner is to miss school. This link has been spotted as early as the primary years.
Let’s peak into exactly how student engagement impacts attendance rates:
The positives:
Strong student-teacher relationships and extracurricular activities can increase engagement and decrease truancy rates.
The negatives:
Truancy lessens already-low student engagement and attendance rates by causing maladjustment, lower academic performance levels, higher dropout likelihood, delinquency, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy.
To put it simply, the more a child participates in and enjoys school, the less likely they are to become truant.
Behavioral Health and Truancy
What is one of the most common reasons students disengage in school? Poor behavioral health. You can naturally boost attendance rates by supporting students’ mental health and the behaviors that stem from it.
Here are a few mental health diagnoses and related behaviors that go hand in hand with truancy:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- ADHD
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Substance abuse
- Underage alcohol use
If students in your school experience any of these, extra measures should be taken to ensure they stay in school and to ensure staff have the capability and capacity to support these students.
Strategies to Address Truancy and Improve Engagement
What can you do as a school professional to improve student well-being and decrease truancy rates? Start by recognizing the cause of truancy using tools like the DESSA Universal Screener. By measuring key social-emotional competencies such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, personal responsibility, decision-making, goal-directed behavior, and optimistic thinking, you can identify areas where students may need additional support to stay engaged in school.
These insights allow school professionals to address the root causes of absenteeism, whether it’s a lack of connection, academic challenges, or unmet social-emotional needs. By understanding and supporting these competencies, educators can create targeted interventions that foster a positive school climate, ultimately helping students feel more connected and motivated to attend school consistently.
We encourage educators to start by implementing ideas from the following list to improve engagement levels and behavioral health. It’s an extensive list, so feel free to start with one change at a time. Remember: the more positive changes you make, the more students you can avoid truancy.
#1: Do your best to ensure every student in your school wants to be there.
- Focus on celebrating diversity regarding backgrounds, interests, abilities, etc.
- Encourage students to connect, make friends, find mentors, and join extracurricular activities.
- Keep school classrooms and grounds as safe as possible.
- Use counselors to track student engagement and attendance rates.
#2: Make a plan to prevent truancy before it begins:
- Collaboratively create and share a clear attendance policy with all stakeholders.
- Cultivate a positive school atmosphere with supportive student-teacher relationships.
- Invest in professional development to ensure staff is empowered to notice and address the root causes of truancy.
#3: Intervene appropriately once truancy appears.
- Communicate and collaborate with parents when absences (excused and/or unexcused) become chronic.
- Provide family counseling for chronically absent or truant students, building sessions around families’ strengths and resources and make the goal simply to increase student attendance.
- Integrate more robust behavioral and mental health services.
eLuma’s Solutions
Our highly qualified and empathetic teletherapists provide a behavioral health approach, complete with individual and group therapy, community collaboration and referrals, and progress monitoring to support at-risk students.
Preventatively, eLuma also offers universal screeners, school-wide mental health services, staff professional development, caregiver support lessons, and so much more.
Ready to put your school district to the test? Our free self-assessment is a quick and easy way to see where your school district stands based on five key areas:
- Teamwork and Leadership
- Needs Assessment & Resource Mapping
- Screening
- Tier 1 Universal Mental Health Services and Supports
- Tier 2 and 3 Mental Health Services and Supports
