Present, Engaged, and Accounted For The Critical Importance of
Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades Publication Date:
September 2008 At the core of school improvement and education
reform is an assumption so widely understood that it is rarely
invoked: students have to be present and engaged in order to
learn. That is why the discovery that thousands of our youngest
students are at academically at-risk because of extended
absences when they first embark upon their school careers is as
remarkable as it is consequential. Schools and communities have
a choice: we can work together early on to ensure families get
their children to class consistently or we can pay later for
failing to intervene before problems are more difficult and
costly to ameliorate. Common sense and research suggest that
attending school regularly is important to ensuring children
develop a strong foundation for subsequent learning. During the
early elementary years, children are gaining basic social and
academic skills critical to