Indiana lawmakers consider new legislative ideas to further address K-12 student absences

Roughly 219,000 Hoosier students were considered chronically absent during the 2023-24 academic year, according to data from the Indiana Department of Education. (Getty Images)

Why K-12 students don’t show up to school — and how to make kids and their parents more accountable — was largely the focus of an hours-long policy meeting held Thursday at the Indiana Statehouse.

It’s a conversation that’s increasingly come before Hoosier policymakers in light of state data showing that thousands of Hoosier students are missing multiple days, even weeks, of school each year. 

The latest attendance numbers released by the Indiana Department of Education last month reported that 17.8% of K-12 students — roughly 219,00 kids — were “chronically absent” during the most recent 2023-24 school year, meaning they missed at least 18 days.

The Indiana Code specifically defines chronic absenteeism as being absent 18 or more days within a school year for any reason — a higher standard than “habitual truancy,” which is ten or more days without an excuse.

It’s the second year in a row that the number of chronically absent students went down, dropping from 19.2% in 2023, and 21.1% in 2022. Even so, Indiana’s top education officials have conceded that too many Hoosier students are still missing a “significant” number of school days.

Thursday’s discussion could be the precursor for additional legislation in 2025.

State legislators responded during the 2024 session with a new law that prompts Indiana school districts to take a tougher stance on student truancy, though it’s up to schools to decide how to craft and execute local policies. 

But multiple school and district officials who testified Thursday described the law as an “unfunded mandate” that’s doing little to actually address absenteeism issues. Others said Indiana should instead focus on collecting data to better understand why students aren’t making it to class so root causes can be addressed.

A deeper data dive

Student absences have been on the rise since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indiana and across the nation. Chronic absenteeism surged during the pandemic, nearly doubling to peak at 21.1% in 2022, according to IDOE.

John Keller, IDOE’s chief information officer, noted during Thursday’s Interim Study Committee on Education that Indiana appears to be reversing from its high-absence period during the pandemic. He emphasized that all grades levels improved their chronic absenteeism rates in 2023-24 by one to two percent when compared to the year prior.

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According to the 2023-24 data, 23.7% of K-12 students who receive free or reduced lunch were chronically absent — nearly 11% higher than their peers. English language learners were also slightly more likely to miss class; 18.5% of English learners were chronically absent during the last school year, compared to 17.7% of non-English language learners.

“The numbers are pretty startling,” Keller said. “But one of the questions that we’re asking as part of this analysis is how chronic is chronic absenteeism? Because it’s easy to talk about improvement of a rate in year over year terms, but it’s also easy to lose a student in that conversation.”

Of the more than 28,000 Hoosier 12th graders who were considered chronically absent by IDOE during the last school year, nearly half of those same students were also considered chronically absent as 11th graders. Almost 9,400 of those students were additionally chronically absent in the 10th grade, and close to 5,000 were listed as such as high school freshmen.

“When you start to see this, you realize that there are probably some students whose absence from schools really could be denominated in terms of years, rather than weeks or months or days,” Keller said.

Educators around the state have pointed to family challenges some students face at home, along with hard-to-break tendencies to keep kids home when even mildly unwell — a habit borne out of the pandemic — as key factors. Some lawmakers — like Indianapolis Democrat Rep. Ed DeLaney — also pondered whether parents are more culpable.

“I think people are getting used to saying, ‘We’ll go two days early for vacation, or we’ll come back two days later from vacation, and Friday, we’ve got to go see grandma,’” DeLaney said. “One of my concerns is not just the schools, but we’ve got to get the message to the parents that you’ve got to get your kid in the seat.”

Schools are getting creative to try to combat the growing problem, like increasing communication with parents and incentivizing absence-prone students to come to class. 

That includes in New Castle, where local district officials used state grant dollars to employ an “attendance liaison” who’s specifically tasked with communicating with families of absent students and providing resources to prevent or reverse chronic absenteeism.

As a result, attendance among New Castle’s middle and high school students has increased by 20% since 2022, local administrators said.

Collecting better attendance numbers

Keller noted that chronically absent students “are more associated with disruptive behaviors in schools,” as well as lower performance on standardized tests, like IREAD.

“It’s a really integrated challenge. And so if we ever you know, we want to make sure that we’re not just talking about, well, kids need to be in school. Well, these are the whys that they need to be in school, right?

According to IDOE, roughly 7% of K-12 students — or 70,000 kids — had to sit out of the classroom for disciplinary reasons in 2022, an increase from 27,000 the year prior. In 2021, 850 Indiana students were expelled from schools. In 2022, that number jumped to 2,500.

Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University, said that responsive policies should focus less on consequences, though. He said current Indiana laws that “punish parents” for their student’s absences — like the recently enacted Senate Enrolled Act 282 — can instead lead them to “pull their kids from school and rely on homeschooling.”

Southport High School Principal Amy Boone, also representing the Indiana Association of School Principals, said she’s already seen that happen in her district.

SEA 282 calls for schools to intervene early when younger students have repeated absences without excuses. Parents of a student in grades K-6 who has missed five days of school within 10 weeks, without being excused, are to be notified by the school and required to create a plan to improve the student’s attendance. Boone said the policy is largely being implemented at the high school level, too.

But the five-day time limit often means no parent shows up for a meeting at all. 

“This lack of engagement is concerning and hinders our ability to provide the necessary supports to students,” Boone continued, adding that it also takes away time from “already stretched-then” school staff.

When asked by lawmakers, Boone agreed that the new law has become an “unfunded mandate — it’s more clerical than it is a direct impact on our kids.”

Skiba suggested a model chronic absenteeism policy recommended by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which calls for the creation of an early-warning system to help identify students who may be at risk for chronic absenteeism. Also cited is a “tiered system” to address absenteeism, and requirements for local school boards to adopt specific attendance policies and improvement plans.

Currently, it’s generally up to local school districts to decide when students’ absences are excused, though state law requires schools to excuse absences for certain reasons, including illness, mental or physical incapacity, required court appearances, helping in elections, service as a page for the general assembly, participating in the state fair and up to 120 minutes per week of religious instruction.

Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, Dean of the Founder’s College a Butler University (Photo courtesy Butler University)

IDOE officials are already working on a new “Attendance Insights” dashboard that breaks down weekly habitually truant and chronic absenteeism rates at the local and school levels. The state has already made the tool available to Hoosier school officials and plans to launch a public version Oct. 11.

John O’Neal, representing the Indiana State Teachers Association, added that students’ “behavioral problems” are a connected issue that also needs to be addressed, emphasizing that Hoosier teachers “are very concerned with some disciplinary problems in their schools.”

He pointed to a recent, first-of-its-kind IDOE report that logged 3,032 incidents during the 2023-24 school year in which school employees were physically injured on the job by a student. In 485 such incidents, an employee had to miss work because of the injury.

Still, Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, dean of the Founder’s College at Butler University, called the current IDOE chronic absenteeism data “not quite accurate.” She said the data “really only reflects students who are unexcused.”

“What we see right now in Indiana and across the U.S., consistently, is that we’re collecting these (absence) data points, but we have the front desk staff person inputting the reasons for why — not categorizing that data and not doing anything in terms of an intervention,” she tole lawmakers.

She recommended that school staff be trained to collect and report all excused and unexcused absences, along with “the reasons for those, in a categorical structure, that we can then take action on.” 

House Education Committee Chair Rep. Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, seemed open to the idea, but was concerned about the time it would take to see results.

“I agree with what you’re saying,” he told Gentle-Genitty. “But I don’t know how that’s going to help us today or help the kids out tomorrow, because it’s years before that’s going to have an impact.”