SMITHFIELD, Utah — Some Utah schools have seen the number of chronically-absent students quadruple since the pandemic, but why are there so many empty desks in classrooms?
“[Students] definitely miss more days. It's more accepted, I think, and easier for them to do it from home because of the digital opportunities there,” said parent Sarah Vasicek.
A mother of two children attending elementary school in Lehi, Vasicek says families are valuing education less.
“My kids, I always thought they would go to college," she said. "Recently, she said that she didn't want to go to college.”
Ben Horsley, the spokesman for the Granite School District which educates students across Salt Lake County, says there has been significant chronic absenteeism.
“In some places as bad as 30 percent of students have chronic absenteeism, which is classified as having 10 absences or more,” Horsley explained.
According to the Return to Learn Tracker, attendance improved in the Carbon and Tooele school districts between 2019-23, while all other school districts had an increase in chronic absenteeism during the same time period.
From the San Juan County District where it increased 11 percentage points, up to the Box Elder District where a third of students were chronically absent last year, double the rate before the pandemic.
A third of students were also absent last year in the Granite District.
“And let's be clear, teachers are accountable for the testing and the outcomes of those students, regardless of whether they're in the classroom or not,” added Horsley.
Some families are more diligent about keeping sick kids at home, Horsley said. Other times, parents just take children with them on vacations or for other reasons, assuming the students can make it up later. But student performance declines with absences, Horsely claims, so schools are trying to persuade children to come to school and parents to send them.
“We see some schools using interventions to incentivize, like pizza parties or things like that, competitions between classes,” said Horsley.
Students themselves say many of their classmates are gone on any given day.
“But it's mostly because they don't want go school or like they're sick,” said Kairie Jensen-Page, an eighth grade student in Smithfield. “This one girl, she doesn't go to school at all and she's supposed to, her mom lets her stay home all time.”
Kairie's sister, Isla Platt, says she and her friends encourage each other to go to school.
“We text them like 'Hey, are you okay? Where are you?' And then they're like, 'Oh, I'm sick' or 'I didn't feel well,'" said Platt.
Utah law has a process for prosecuting a student for truancy, but that process doesn’t begin unless the student is at least 12 years old, has already missed five days, and if other intervention efforts have failed.
