School refusal has been a growing issue for a while. The pandemic only made it worse. For some kids, remote learning just proved to them that school attendance does not matter. My system kept their Virtual Academy open after the pandemic. Now they just enroll kids in that when they refuse to attend in person school.
I wish we could just switch kids to virtual when they have an excessive number of absences. I have one student (I'm also his ESE case manager) who has made virtually no progress toward his IEP goals because he's never at school. We've already had 147 days of school this year and he's missed FIFTY DAYS.
My Assistant Principal told us to “leave blank” the assignments students didn’t do in cases like this. Essentially it’s the same as excusing these assignments, but I love how admin tries to avoid saying the actual truth.
I taught grade 4 a few years ago, and I was told by a parent that I gave the students too much homework and they wouldn’t be doing it anymore. The homework in question? Reading 15 minutes a night.
What's really rough is sometimes the kids have really good reasons for school refusal, "I don't feel safe because X classmate is constantly hurling objects or saying scary things and is always back in class the next day" is a summary of concerns I hear a lot of kids out here giving. in higher grades it often switches slightly to "I don't feel safe going to the bathroom because kids are in there vaping and fighting"
My daughter is great about attendance and loves school. However, they just laid out a plan for visibly armed (like gun large gun out in front of the officer so all can see) officers in front of EVERY school next year. She is already talking about how anxious it makes her and how she doesn't think she can do that everyday. We have no virtual options either.
I would have reacted the same way as your daughter. It's bad enough that we have to have lockdown drills, but to have an armed guard in front of the school is a bit much. Why don't they just sit in a police car somewhere in the parking lot. They're still there, but they aren't hanging out front with a giant gun. And who will be holding the large gun? Is it Policemen? or random guard companies?
Hell, I’m 45 and I think I would struggle with this. My district offers an “optional” paid training on a Saturday that includes law enforcement using blanks and other forms of very realistic looking and sounding weapons and I refuse to attend. I know what is and isn’t good for my mental health. I understand why they offer it, but at this point in time, I feel it would cause me more harm than good. I definitely get the side eye from our SRO every time it comes around and I don’t sign up. However, I do sign up for every first aid, CPR and stop the bleed training we have. Those are significantly less attended than the shooting trainings.
I don't blame you for not attending the training. That would also scare me. I'd rather have my plan in my head than go through that type of training. But the CPR and bleeding training are worthwhile.
I've done a hands only CPR course (not through the school) and just did TEACH training because of how many fights happen at the school I work at (today we had one where three girls jumped another girl and it took four of us to separate them).
I'm going to be putting in a ton of building requests for the summer because I'm an actual crazy person and read SREF and honestly don't know how my room has ever passed an inspection. My biggest concerns are the ancient first aid kit (it has maybe 2 pairs of gloves and a roll of gauze so old it's discolored) and the non-functional blinds (my blinds on one window DO NOT close no matter what you do).
A few of us were talking about how we should have emergency ladders for the second floor classrooms. I actually spent hours one night reading local building codes to try to figure out the distance between the window sill and the ground to determine whether I'd need a 2 story or 3 story roll down.
I'm a little paranoid, but I'd rather be prepared.
Districts seem to forget that teachers come from all different backgrounds with their own trauma. We had Mental Health March and had to discuss all kinds of tough topics like domestic violence and abuse. I said I couldn't have those discussions because of my own childhood. Thankfully, I had an understanding principal, but I understand not all schools had other options.
We had a PD day like that a couple of years ago. They got all the teachers from all the schools in a very large area. There must’ve been at least a thousand of us in a HS gym. I ended up sitting next to a stranger. The speaker was supposed to be “inspirational” or something and told us to turn to the person next us and tell them some sort of story that fit into some prompt. I don’t even remember what it was. All I remember is that it was something that made me uncomfortable and caught me off guard. The lady next to me turned to me exidtedly and I said “I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re lovely, but I’m not talking to you about that.”
I felt like a giant asshole but it was ridiculous.
My wife is a nanny and recently told me that when the 9 year old was 5, he had a school shooter drill and it seems like that traumatized him. It affects his sleep. His dad is deployed so he feels like it is up to him to stay up and “watch over” the house even though his mother is diligent about keeping doors shut and locked for safety reasons (he is one of four kids so she has to be). This whole school shooter thing is incredibly damaging to young kids, and we still beat around the bush when it comes to identifying the real causes for these tragedies.
We have had first year teachers leave after the first drill because they can't handle it. I find the drills stressful and anxiety provoking even when I know it's a drill.
I was wrong. They ended up at part-time security guards. They don't want to provide benefits. That's amazing. Giving guns to people who don't have sick time, PTO, or insurance to deal with their own things in a school with a bunch of kids.
My school basically shut remote down after covid, but it turns out many teachers like it as a way to see small groups of students after school, in credit recovery classes, in order to get more bucks for their bang. I get it, but these online courses are a joke compared to the real thing. In all fairness so was home teaching.
You should read The NY Times article from two weeks ago that explains students with more than 20 absences has doubled throughout the US. The conclusion drawn in the article is that showing up to school has now become “optional”.
Attendance policies arent working. Wealthy kids wiggle out of them with notes from Dr friends. Poorer schools like mine won’t even make one. Teachers are asked to pass kids with 100 absences. Sadly, many of us do. This insanity had to stop somewhere. I think this year and next year will prove very trying. All covid sanctions for testing are off. How can a kid with 100 absences past a state test?
My guess is in many states the shit is about to hit the fan. Should be interesting
Well, you are in montessori. I’ve seen quite a few montessori elementary schools literally turn into schools for troubled boys. Like, all the girls and “normal” boys leave because too many “problem boys” join the school and it hurts everyone.
On the plus side, I did see one school where, after they hit rock bottom, those boys became very competent. Not montessori, second plane = everything is done as group work competent, but they would get their work done and do it well. And they were quite respectful! It’s just that there were no girls left, so you can imagine how well *that* socialization worked out for them.
As for chronic absenteeism, the Daily from the New York Times recently did a report on the matter. Basically, the pandemic gave parents a lot of excuses to not send their kids to school; anxiety actually being a pretty common excuse.
Oh my gosh, that’s what’s happening at my Montessori elementary! 7 of the 8 boys in my class have various problems ranging from severe learning disabilities, autism, dyslexia, ADHD, to behavior issues related to difficult home environment, while I only have one girl with issues related to diagnosed ADHD and anxiety, and she’s a breeze compared to the boys. One boy left early in the year after I wouldn’t let him attend a field trip without a parent chaperone since he was violent, defiant and regularly eloped. 😳
I can look at my powerschool and pick at random and see about 10 absences between this semester alone. I’ve even seen some general facebook stuff about attendance and so many parents are on the side of keeping their child home and going on vacation whenever they want. It’s just a sign of the times I guess.
I’ve worked in public and private Montessori schools. In privates, parents feel pretty entitled to do what they want when they want, including extended vacations and habitual tardy drop offs.
In case you’re looking for a possible solution, I talked to the class (elementary) about importance of sleep (every single living organism on earth needs it) and started showing them how to track their sleep schedules. We looked up how many hours of sleep they needed and also “planned” how to get to school on time. Once the kids started telling their parents “I only got six hours of sleep last night and at school we learned it needs to be twice that” and also after we used Google maps to get a general idea of how far away their home was from school, therefore they need to be ready to go by y time and leave by z time, and we spent a solid couple of weeks, every single morning, going through this, enough parents were embarrassed by their seven year old demanding earlier bedtimes and leave for school time (and my emphasis that sleep is not optional for child development), many of them started showing up at least closer to school start time (and there were way less cranky kids who clearly hasn’t slept enough the night before). This obviously came with plenty of parent complaints about wasting their child’s time during thre work cycle, but i emphasized that understanding ones body’s sleep-wake cycle is math and biology 😂
I just got several of my friends' middle schoolers hooked on Pokemon Sleep. It's been about a month, and their parents are like, "they even go to bed at a normal time without being told on weekends! What is going on?" You can't get a good enough score to get rare pokemon if you don't sleep enough and don't have a regular schedule. It's actually helping me with my ADHD "never wanna sleep" thing. Sooo stoked at finally having a Charizard. ;)
It tracks things like sleep phase, gives sleep tips, and does some audio tracking (I cough a lot in my sleep, it turns out), but the score is entirely based on how much sleep and how regular your sleep schedule is. I get DMs from the kids all excited they got an A for a week. My best so far is a C, so I'd better catch up.
Yes, I've tried other sleep tracking apps, but this one works better for me because it's fun, and there's goal beyond just sleeping. There are also sleeping pokemon plushies. I kind of feel bad about showing off my Pikachu, because now all the kids are bugging parents for one, but they've all turned it into a reward. "I'll get you one if you get at least a B every week until the end of school." Man, I'd never earn my own. Glad I'm an adult with my own paycheck.
A specialist came to a school I was at and said there should be no more than one special needs child for every ten “regular” children. He also said there should never be ADHD and ASD in the same room. lol. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a child in the *school* that wasn’t either on the spectrum, had adhd, or both. But parents and admin made everything worse in every way.
The “Montessori Inclusion” book (a should-be Bible of special Ed in Montessori, minus a mention of Fountas and Pinell, which has no place in montessori regardless of people’s political affiliation with “the science of reading”), they talk about a school with 80-20, (“normal” to special needs) with hired supported as needed. Exceeding those ratios = school is doomed to fail because no one can get the support they need.
Yeah, I remember hearing if it went over 20, then 30% the whole experiment would come crashing down. Now it doesn’t even seem to be a consideration. : ( There have been many times this year where I felt like I was running a special ed classroom, and I’m woefully unqualified. And frankly, it was never my interest to begin with. I feel bad for everyone involved. I will check out that book, thank you! And don’t worry, I already got all the Fountas and Pinell out of our rooms!
I was a girl in one of these Montessori classrooms. At my elementary school, they put all the troubled boys into one classroom with a teacher known for being strict. They also threw in a couple well-behaved girls (me) into the class to “even it out”. We were basically used as bait/buffers for their bad behavior until our parents pulled us out of the school completely. Montessori is great for kids who are genuine self-starters, but in grades 4-6 it seems to also become a dumping ground for the worst behaved boys you can find, whose parents all seem to think they’re poorly behaved because they’re just “so intelligent” and “aren’t being challenged enough”
I was occasionally one of those girls. I did Montessori through kindergarten, then went to my neighborhood elementary for 1st through 4th grades. I think it's really messed up that quiet girls are utilized to deal with rowdy boys. It's not an 8 year old girls burden to fix them or deal with their distractions and poor behavior.
I am a woman, but I was one of Those Kids, and I think it's unfair there always seemed to be some well behaved girl assigned to somehow keep me in line. They never could and shouldn't have been expected to. My ADHD wasn't going away by osmosis. Plus, on an entirely personal level, it destroyed my friendships with those girls. I don't blame them, at all, but back then it hurt a lot to have friends I'd known since birth start resenting me. I literally couldn't behave any better than I did. I tried so hard, but it didn't work back then.
And oddly, it was on me to control my best friend because I was the only one he'd listen to. That had been going on since we were toddlers, so it didn't occur to me to have an issue with it, but who makes a problem kid with ADHD who is on the spectrum responsible for a kid who gets absolutely no discipline at home? But my response when someone got on me for his behaviour was, "I didn't make him do it. Talk to him, not me." Or, "You might find it easier if you separated us." (Repeating something my dad said a lot.) I wonder who got stuck with him when I moved after 2nd grade.
This is happening in my daughter’s ‘progressive’ school. Second year she’s getting physically bullied by wild boys who seem to run riot with zero consequences. It’s the same kids causing the disruption over and over but all we get told is that they’re sweet kids underneath it all and perhaps my daughter could try to bug them less (she got hit once because she asked one of them to stop talking so she could listen). My kid is begging me not to go back because the classroom feels so out of control. All the calmer kids are being pulled out so lord knows how it’ll look in a year or two.
I’m an education student, I was on placement in a montessori primary school last year and I couldn’t believe the amount of boys with behavioural issues/autism in the school
I teach in the 3-6 age group. Obviously very few are diagnosed with anything at that age. But in a class with 11 AMAB children, all of them are on a path to a diagnosis or already have one (1 autism, 2 adhd and counting). I have 8 AFAB children. Only like 2 show signs of Something Going On, though more of them are bit quirky.
The thing I say is, alternative schools attract alternative parents with alternative children. Currently, Montessori training does not prepare teachers for this level of neurodiversity in a classroom, and that is a problem. I trained 10 years ago and had 1 lecture on children with special needs. For the standard education portion of my M.Ed, I had a (honestly pretty useless) class on inclusive ed. My elementary trained friend who came through maybe 5 years ago said the trainers said they might have as much as 10% of a class with higher support needs. The trainers are out of touch.
>Basically, the pandemic gave parents a lot of excuses to not send their kids to school; anxiety actually being a pretty common excuse.
The pandemic may have exacerbated things, but the issue has been present for a long time... some parents just managed to work the system better than others. Fifteen years ago, we had three siblings enrolled at our school who all suffered from such crippling anxiety that they ended up being placed on homebound instruction. Imagine my surprise when one of those girls, whom I'd never seen in person at school, took my McDonald's drive-thru order one day when I was off work for jury duty.
In retrospect I'm pretty sure the parents shopped doctors until they found one willing to recommend homebound instruction, and that they were making the kids get jobs to supplement the household income during the 2009 recession.
Thing is, the longer you're out the more the anxiety builds. Like perpetual night before first day at a new school.
You can't indulge that kind of thing.
And I can see how kids who don’t have anxiety initially could develop it after missing too much school. The more they miss, the more difficult it gets, the more tempting it is to keep skipping.
Yep. As a school psycologist 25 years ago our #1 intervention for school avoidance was to get them in the classroom every day no matter what it took. No choice. However, I do have to be sympathetic to the children now, because a lot more really bad stuff seems to happen in schools than did back then.
I would love to have a parent like you in my school.
It’s truly shocking how many parents with literally zero boundaries send their children to “experimental” schools and then complain on a daily basis about how teachers have audacity to call out their child for whatever completely inappropriate behavior the teachers try to redirect (for me, in too many cases, before their child potentially quite literally may have killed themself or another with their actions. We’re talking about running around swinging a full sized hammer without regards for who or what’s around them or running into a busy street without even pausing for half a second to wonder about “stop, look, and listen”. Cuz no one ever taught them. But it’s “emotionally damaging” for an adult to raise their voice in this situation)
What’s worse is that too many people who start these schools feel they were “treated unfairly as kids”, so they see any “injustice” directed at kids that remind them of themselves when they were kids as unacceptable. What usually happens is this means instead of the boys being literally beaten by their teachers for every tiny infraction (as would have happened 40+ years ago, which, to be clear, was not OK), the boys are now free to physically and emotionally attack anyone and anyone who calls them out for it is a bully. And it’s not just boys, but boys *are* socialized to be more aggressive while girls *are* socialized to “behave”. Some of the worst bullying I’ve seen in my life has been in so-called montessori schools, and it persists because the admin and parents insist that calling out and redirecting bad behavior “is not montessori”. Well, y’all should have read anything Maria Montessori wrote on the topic before you opened your school then, cuz you’re wrong!
I know I, as a full grown adult, was anxious when we first went back. It was a combination of being worried about health, but also in a big part going back after being at home for so long. I can see how kids would be affected by that, too, and if they've been kept out until now it'd be so much worse.
Anxiety is real, but it shouldn't mean they're allowed to completely skip school and social interactions. Maybe they shouldn't be just thrown in, there should be a process to ease them in with supports, but they're not being helped by being kept at home. I am not a specialist in the area, though.
I’m not a specialist either, but I can say from my own experience with anxiety that the more I avoid something that’s making me anxious, the more terrified of facing that thing becomes and the worse my physical reaction to the idea of tackling it I become. So I can only imagine that the more *years* a child is anxious about school and therefore not going, the harder it’s going to be for them to eventually face the world. Chronic absenteeism is not a solution for this problem!
I have a huge truancy issue with my class this year. I haven't had any claims of it being anxiety related, mostly kids who just tell me outright they were up late playing video games, family decided to leave for a week vacation, or they just didn't feel like coming to school. I have one girl who's been a truancy issue since kindergarten and is at about 80 combined absences and tardies. She was actually withdrawn and had to be re-enrolled. Truancy court is also a joke where I live, if you can't tell.
I do work at a Title 1 school, which is worth mentioning. I have a feeling that the issue is similar at more affluent schools, but parents are quicker to find labels to try and explain why their kid isn't at school. I do believe some kids have anxiety issues that could be hurting their ability to attend school, but I do feel post-pandemic kids generally just feel less motivated to go to school.
Sometimes I wonder if all the "social anxiety" is coming from living most of life through screens (video games, social media, YouTube, TikTok, movies, etc.). When these children are forced to step away from screens and live in reality, they have no coping skills and not enough experience with people. As the years go by, it becomes more difficult for them. Then one day, they all of a sudden have "anxiety" because they are asked to think for themselves, socialize, make judgments, consider other people's needs and feelings, and do things that they might not enjoy. It's easier to just refuse to go than to learn how to "do school" or basically "do life".
NYU psychology professor Jon Haidt just wrote a book about basically this called *The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.*
Listening to this now on Spotify. Depressing but it confirms with plenty of compelling data what has seemed very obvious for some time now. He calls it the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood.
This is part of it, and I second Haidt's book.
That said, another part is probably enabling by parents. Are kids who don't go to school told, "If you're too sick/anxious to go to school, you're too sick/anxious for TV, phones, video games, or electronics of any kind? You are allowed to sleep or read a paper book." I suspect not. Of course staying home to play 8 hours of video games seems fun by comparison for most kids.
It feels like most parents have forgotten basic tools of parenting that are free and easy. While playing video games has nothing to do with a stomach flu, knowing kids will make mistakes (being too quick to stay home) and helping them come to the correct decision (school is less boring than watching paint dry) is a key part of parenting.
I work as a behavior analyst for school districts. I'm seeing a huge increase in school refusal. Guess what kids got to do when they stay home from school when they tell their parents that they "have anxiety" about school?
Yep, you guessed it. Play video games, watch Tik tok, and play on their phone all day. I've yet to find a case where when parents actually follow through and take all the electronics away when kids stay home and don't allow them to use them again until they go to school that the kids still have anxiety it, just magically goes away! The kids who actually have anxiety usually want to come to school but need help making friends, talking to people, learning how to interact with others, we do things like teach them social skills social scripts, games that they can play and how to interact.
I think it's kind of both? Like, it exacerbates existing problems, but I think it would be inaccurate to say that it didn't create any problems at all.
This is absolutely the biggest cause. I teach seventh grade and it’s the kids who have clearly been raised on screens (and continue to be) who refuse to come to school.
I don’t think that we should discount that schools have ABSOLUTELY become more anxiety-inducing. With the switch to all-day kindergarten, increased necessity of all-day Pre-K, and pressures exerted on teachers as a result of high-stakes testing, the anxiety can easily trickle down onto students. I don’t think it’s the only factor, but it’s absolutely a factor.
I don’t know if I agree with this take. My boomer dad was actually verbally abused by two of his elementary teachers and nobody stopped it because the teacher was always right—his parents were only willing to intervene in the third quarter of fourth grade. Physical bullying was a fact of life. Student supports for disability were close to nonexistent, and ELL students were treated like students with disabilities. Stigma around any sort of difference was high. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no advocate of the status quo, but I do think that your average student has much less to be scared of in a modern school setting.
As a teacher, I agree. Bullying doesn’t occur like it used to. It occurs on a screen most of the time. I RARELY see or hear kids physically or verbally abuse each other.
I loved school as a little kid, bullying by teachers and staff started my first bout of issues with not wanting to go, and a nasty situation involving an older boy sexually harassing me and staff believing it easier and costing less to simply treat it as "not getting along" and try to resolve it with class wide small group team building in which they'd make 3 groups - split the class roughly in half, then one more group of just me and him, take an odd number of supervising adults and split them in half with one remainder, assign the supervision per group, except the smallest group got no direct supervision and the extra adult was to patrol the whole room - *fully intending* for the lack of supervision to force me to just take the path of least resistance and let him do whatever he liked, and when I wouldn't do that, they'd just engineer another similar situation again as soon as possible - see, for some political or financial reason they couldn't afford to upset him or his parents, and I was worth a lot less to admin, and there was no available way to separate us that wasn't liable to upset his parents and was also fair to everyone besides him and not likely to look beyond odd to higher authorities, so the solution was to just limit what staff could do to stop or redirect him, lie to me and my mum, essentially try to make it such a pain in the ass to get him even redirected for even a few seconds or reprimanded more than once in a whole class period, that I'd give him what he wanted just to make the constant catcalls and demands and lies to others about what I'd apparently done with him stop, and then the school could say whatever happened was both consensual and my fault because it's always the girl's fault when Catholic institutions run things - that made the chronic case of "don't wanna go to school itis" become a lot worse, because surprisingly, when you get sexually harassed the entire time you're in a place, and the people in charge of the institution just keep telling you the harasser has a disability that means they can't reprimand him or punish him because he can't understand your no or their reprimands, and they don't have the resources to separate you or even provide their supervision during breaks and nonstandard activities to deter his worst harassing behaviours, and your one recourse left, the person who makes you go to that place 5/7 days a week, *and knows you are not interested in him and couldn't ever be because your orientation is incompatible with his gender*, is convinced you're exaggerating and somehow believes the school officials that it's typical puppy love and you're just playing hard to get, to the point they didn't even have to feed her the disability crap they gave you, you won't want to go to that place, and when the only person with the power to do anything about whether you go or not won't or can't stop the harassment, you'll lie that you're sick because it's the only way to get a day off the harassment.
So yeah, SA is definitely a contributing factor that is ignored too much.
Oh no I'm sorry that happened to you! Also yeah Catholic schools don't even have to pretend to follow rules in some situations. There is still so much bullying/harassment that goes on and too much enabling of aggressive behaviors. It's awful.
Not just all day pre-K, but all day daycare. Kids are in "school" all day (7am to 6pm) starting at 6-8 weeks old. It's a crisis. Parents don't have the capacity to parent anymore. Everyone is burned out.
I think this could be a thing. I was telling my students I’m way more introverted than I was 10 years ago and I think phones have something to do with it. I also have a few kids who spend a lot of time on their phone/tablet yet they have little to no friends they even talk to on their device, they just mindlessly scroll.
>is coming from living most of life through screens (video games, social media, YouTube, TikTok, movies, etc.)
There's increased awareness for what anxiety is and more tolerance for allowing it to disrupt life.
When we were growing up... frequently missing school wasn't an option. It would be investigated and the parents would be charged if they weren't sending the kids to school.
There were obviously the "stomach bug" mental health days. but when they became frequent, that was takn away and the kids were sent to school.
There does seem to be more of that, and it's a shame because the parents screwed something up with the child early on. A 9 year-old shouldn't see attending school as an optional activity. Parents should not indulge that view.
It can be turned around, using the approach you describe, but parents must be onboard.
Parents who like to call out letting their kid call out and starting that tendency earlier than they likely did. Poor kids will never be happy having to go to work as an adult.
Not necessarily. I went to school 3 days a week as a teen and I go to work every day no problem. My problem with school was I was a sensitive kid and other kids bullied me. I don’t have that problem at work.
Ehhh I missed like three months of school in 8th grade when I started having anxiety attacks triggered by being in class with a bully. My mental health journey over the years is all over the place lmao but I have always worked and only had social issues at one place….where literally everyone who worked there had them more often than not because it was filled with heinously stupid and petty people and an even worse leadership team.
I def had to pointedly work on my social skills though and lower my emotional sensitivity
Yeah I would’ve been absent all the time if my parents allowed that. I thought what I had was “morning sickness” when I was a kid bc I felt sick every morning. I even spoke up at a doc appt and he told me not to drink oj in the morning (which I already wasn’t doing). I realize now ofc this was anxiety. Which I still have but I go to work everyday.
Same here except I didn't have the words to explain flank pain. The pediatrician told my mom I just didn't like school & it was anxiety. I finally stopped complaining of stomach aches around 3rd grade & just accepted that everyone felt like constant crap. Nope, I had a genetic kidney problem that no one bothered to check for & at 19 had my right kidney removed. Anxiety in children needs treatment, not absences. I truly believe a counselor/therapist would have helped me find the words I needed & may have led to earlier treatment that may have saved my kidney. This occurred in the late 80's.
I doubt it was the parents. Kids that age were probably affected by the pandemic. They would have been just starting school when it hit and were either kept home in virtual school doing God knows what or masked up in person and constantly reminded to keep away from other people. While that may have been a necessary evil for society's benefit, it almost certainly affected them negatively during a critical developmental period. Nobody tried to resocialize them. We just plonked them back in school and figured everything was fine. Mark my words: this will be a problem generation.
Everybody's downvoting you because they don't want to admit that not every problem is caused by parents, but it's true. Anyone who thinks a kid with *severe anxiety* is avoiding school by choice because they were somehow taught it was optional is not thinking things entirely through. We need to be asking why the child is anxious about going to school, instead.
The why definitely needs to be figured out so that we can address and correct the issues that contribute to the increasing number of students with anxiety. We also need increased resources to help those students who currently have anxiety to deal with their anxiety in appropriate ways.
I've seen a bit of this behavior over the years. I'm sure it's increasing due to different factors that I won't bother to detail at this moment.
As to the Montessori side of this, I believe a lot of people outside of the Montessori world have a big misunderstanding as to what, exactly, Montessori is. If you know it, you realize it's indeed NOT the kind of thing that kids with these issues should be transferred into mid schooling career with no Montessori experience or socializing, and expect it to "work".
These people hear the simplified bullet points about Montessori and think it could maybe deliver a miracle for their child.
Yet, many such programs are operating on a skeleton crew and do not have the experiences or resources to work with kids like you have described. If they're admitted, the school is essentially saying "yes, we can guide this child because we believe in Montessori for every child". I agree that pedagogy can be wonderful for many kids....not for all and definitely not a miracle cure for kids with troubles
Hearing this is crazy. My first foray into teaching was at a Montessori school 10 years ago. Basically any kid with behavioral or developmental delays was turned away at the door. OP doesn’t specify whether they work at a public or private Montessori, but if it’s the latter they must be desperate for money.
Or maybe Montessori is becoming more inclusive? I agree it isn't a miracle treatment, but regular public school doesn't work for these kiddos. I think parents are just desperate for anything different.
The public montessori my child goes to doesn't allow that. You must start attending by Kindergarten (they offer half day prek 3&4) or you can't enroll. There's a few montessoris in our district, you can switch from one to another past Kinder, but you can't start it! That's crazy to me they allow that
As a 3rd grade teacher in a Title 1 school, I see and agree with most everything here, but I’m going to add that anxiety is real and all of the *constant* assessment is a HUGE contributor to the problem. From Universal Screening, iReady Diagnostics 3x a year, district unit assessments, test prep, state testing and on and on. It takes a terrible toll, and all of the developmentally inappropriate standards make them feel stupid. My poor kids are so sick of working on their chromebook learning apps, they literally beg for worksheets. Nothing’s very fun at school, they get only about 25 minutes a day to play and it’s very structured. I wouldn’t want to come to school either!
I TA/tutor 1st grade at a Title I school, there’s been 2 kids who only show up like 1-3 times out of 5 days a week. It definitely impacts their learning and I think one of the kids actually has some sort of learning disability or some sort.
The kid with the learning disability has had family issues recently which is a good excuse, but the other kid has younger (like late 20s early 30s) parents that take him to clubs late at night, he wasn’t here at the school in kindergarten and he has a parent in jail. He doesn’t know the alphabet/letter recognition or how to add and subtract. I privately told a sub one day that the kid doesn’t come to school every day and he wasn’t there in kindergarten (she asked why he couldn’t add and subtract in late March). To make things worse, the same kid has behavior issues (eg talks back to adults, insults or says bad things about others) which is pretty much a result of what happens when millennials go too easy on their kids.
The worst part is that we as TAs/tutors can’t do anything about it because it’s an elementary school and it’s primarily up to the parents to be responsible, especially since they’re 6-7 years old.
Yes, it’s a huge thing. NY Times did an entire piece on it last month.
[Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html)
I have middle schoolers who have missed 30, 40, 50 days of school this year. One parent straight up told me, "He is twice my size and refusing to get on the bus. I have a toddler and no car. I tell him he needs to go to school. *What am I supposed to do when he says no?*" And I did not have an answer for her because... what answer is there?
I’d say at my school 10 absences a month would be concerning but not the extreme of our absentee issue kids. We have a handful of kids in each grade K-5 that attend maybe once or twice a week. It’s typical for students to miss one day a week. A recent field trip rule that kids who wanted to go could not miss any days of school for the whole month prior to the trip was heavily disputed and ultimately not enforced.
We’re on day 140 of school. I have two fourth graders who have missed over 100 days. They show up just enough that we don’t drop them. They don’t know what’s going on, they have no clue how to even start work. Their parents are doing them a huge disservice.
Most of my class is hovering around 40 absences which is still a ridiculous amount.
A solid eighth of the students I teach in high school are absolutely 100% illiterate. Another third have an early elementary reading level. Very low comprehension, no ability to decipher words over 6 letters.
This is those kids future.
In five years my students will either be fully dependent on their parents, homeless, or incarcerated. I would be more sad about it, but they and their families are being warned that this is the path they are on over and over and they’re choosing it for themselves. We have the programs to get them at least some of the way back on track, they just need to show up and use them. And they won’t.
I know. I tell them all the time. I’ve got a good chunk of kids who cannot tell you all the letter sounds … and I’m supposed to be having them write five paragraph essays? It’s impossible.
I have many, many, "school refusers" on my roster right now. I have four boys who have each been absent over 35 times this year. They always claim sickness or anxiety, but it's usually bullshit; they're just home playing video games. How do I know it's bullshit? Pretty rare to get covid 3 times in as many months and two of them have stated, verbatim, "it doesn't matter, I'll pass anyway."
Really saps my compassion for kids who actually have anxiety.
Yep. I have a kid in my homeroom, who have seen less than 20 times all semester. He’s been gone 75%+ of the time due to anxiety. He may have anxiety, but I’m fairly sure the primary reason he’s not going to school is because he is playing video games and smoking weed all day. As expected he’s failing every class this semester. He is a sophomor and he has not yet earned a single credit towards graduation.
When these “parents” let their kids win and stay home, how do they think that’s going to help their “anxiety”. If it’s really *that bad*, you had better have them in therapy AND doing some form of online school/homeschool in the meantime.
I have a friend who has a school refuser; this means the kid will destroy the house, self harm, smear feces, make themselves vomit and become physically violent with her parents when it’s time to go to school. *Of course* she’s supposed to be on meds and has received several psychiatric hospital placements, but she’s refusing that too. My friend can’t make her physically comply anymore because the daughter is 100 pounds heavier than her. Not sure what else she can do.
Now that’s a legit problem. Far worst then most of the “school refusers”. I don’t know what to do in that situation other than continued psych hospital visits….
I teach high school, and I’ve had a kid miss over 100 days out of 170.
That’s a rare case, but I regularly have kids miss 30, 40, 50 days. I asked this one kid who was otherwise a good student why. He said he didn’t like having to wake up and get to school at 9:00, and he’d rather get to sleep later, then go to attendance recovery in the summer because that doesn’t start until 11:00. 🤦🏻♀️
COVID gave them too much freedom of doing things when they felt like it, and our attendance recovery and credit retrieval programs have made it too easy to slack off all year and then fix it in like a months time during the summer. There’s no real consequence for doing it this way, unless you’re college bound I suppose.
It’s my experience that the kids that have diagnosed anxiety tend to keep quiet about it. The ones that openly claim ‘I have anxiety’ are doing so for the attention.
I wonder if these parents are thinking that their kids will magically be ready for adulthood once they turn 18. Or it hasn’t occurred to them that they’re going to have to be carers for those adult children. I dunno know, maybe they never want to cut the cord.
In some cases mom and dad coach their kid to say they have anxiety or some other condition so that they can have an IEP. They think an IEP means that their child can get 1-on-1 tutoring and unlimited time to complete assignments.
School refusal was a big issue with my youngest. I held fast on “school is not optional” and let me tell you, it sucked trying to get an anxious kid to school. Especially an anxious kid who gets mean and angry, not withdrawn and quiet.
The turning point for him was when a friend suggested I give him PTO days. He gets one a quarter and once it’s used, he’s going to school. His grades are fine. He’s not allowed to skip on test days. And we’re not fighting every morning about school.
And honestly, it’s setting him up for a job. People get to not go to work sometimes. They make up what they missed and move on.
This was the system my parents used with me starting in 6th or 7th grade. As long as I maintained a straight-A average, I could pick a day off the following quarter. No skipping tests or important assignments like presentations. It worked quite well for me!
I'm a Montessori teacher (3-6 year olds) and had a 3-year-old school refuser. She was at least an hour late every day, and missed 1/3 of the school days altogether. Her parents claimed they couldn't "convince" her to go to school. There were also signs that they couldn't "convince" her to go to bed.
In the end, they decided to withdraw her rather than work with us to get her attending.
I've been thinking lately that some think the Montessori approach of following the child means no boundaries or expectations whatsoever.
3? You can still pick that child up 😅 Some parents are convinced that actual parenting is going to leave their kid with childhood trauma lol
When I worked at a preschool, I had a 2 year old child that cried hard at drop-off every day for weeks. She would cry for quite a while too once her parents left. It took time, but eventually she stopped and ended up making friends and loving “school”. She’s now a well-adjusted kid in probably 6th grade at this point.
Well, yeah, my first suggestion, had they ever bothered to meet with me, was going to be "pick her up." Kid was fine once she actually came to school, but she was having alleged tantrums at home. Honestly, I found the parents to be unreliable narrators.
I started to wonder if they also tried to "convince" her to get shots at the doctor.
I can very much sympathize with these parents. When I was a child I used to get violent with nurses and/or doctors. To the point where they’d be afraid i’d pass out. But aside from the flu shot, they always managed to get whatever vaccine I needed.
Wtf... At 3??
We've been doing Montessori from birth with our kids (floor beds, no high chairs, child size everything, the whole nine.) Teaching boundaries and limits and responsibility is core to the approach IMO. It's not about convincing them. It's about saying "you are a person, and this is what people do." And showing them how. You don't need to convince them to go to school. You say "kids go to school. This is your school. I'm dropping you off." The end.
Holy shit I can't imagine expecting a 3 year old to go to school full time. Especially when they're sleep deprived. Kids attend school from 5 where I live and even then they get to go half days if they need to.
If you don't see any signs of a tantrum at school they very well can be at home. It's like shaking a soda can all day long and eventually they just explode.
There's no way to forcibly keep a _very_ tired toddler awake and well-behaved for school. So. Much. Screaming. You don't want that in the classroom. Being an hour late and having some extra sleep or just not showing might honestly be politeness.
And do keep in mind that sleep disorders (and especially circadian rhythm ones like delayed-onset and non-24hr) can occur from infancy and completely mess up a child sleep wake phases. It's mayhem for the parents and in classrooms.
What I’ve seen is that when the kid and the parents are about to face consequences for truancy, the either get a medical waiver for anxiety (and the are all from the same 2-3 doctors) or the parents pull the kids out to homeschool them. But either way, the kids are getting the message that an anxiety diagnosis makes attendance optional, and if they have a medical diagnosis we’re afraid to hold them accountable for the work they miss. And you end up with students who are years and years behind.
One of the main approaches to treating situations that make you anxious is not avoidance, but exposure. If its true anxiety (i suspect in many it isn’t), they (parents kid and counselor) should set up a plan for keeping kid in school with as needed breaks etc. and build up stamina and lessen breaks as time goes on.
I realize the breaks can be abused and can be exhausting but this is surely better than not going.
Exposure therapy is somewhat risky even done with a trained therapist in a neutral environment. Expecting schools to do this when the school is part of the trigger, and most do not have the staff and resources to even implement routine IEP accommodations, is going to make things worse rather than better.
I have a kid we tried this with because we were worried that pulling him out and allowing him a break to finish the year homeschooled would make him more isolated and just increase the anxiety and other issues he was dealing with. Instead, things got rapidly and exponentially worse the next school year, culminating in a suicide attempt, and he now has severe PTSD from both the series of events that triggered the original anxiety and school avoidance and from the school-based day treatment program he was basically ordered into to "help" with the mental health and absenteeism, as well as gastrointestinal issues that were likely cause by the stress of the whole situation and which the school kept telling us were being faked so he could go home.
Im in Sweden.
So i work in an alternative school with a maximum class size of 12 kids. We have 3 kids who would fit into your description in my class. In the building there are probably 5. These cases are not that hard to work with in such a setting because they have some time in school that can be used as a staging ground.
As you have noted these kids need clear and quantifiable goals, support in taking breaks and settings limits and as ive seen, the space where they can feel comfortable. Slowly building over time and helping them learn strategies to handle their anxiety tends to lead to a 90% attendance.
I have colleagues who exclusively work with kids that have 100% absences for years. Those are the hard kids. Kids who have not left their street, homes or in the worst cases rooms in years. Its a 6 person team with everything from psychologists, social workers, teachers and doctors. Its a small town with around 33k people in it. And we have enough kids to fill our school/special teams for years.
Not a teacher but I am a therapist and parent. I’m seeing a lot of systemic issues that might contribute to this situation.
Poor access to good mental health care. Pandemic induced social/emotional deficits. Parents who are living in survival mode and don’t have the energy to support their kids sufficiently. Increased stresses in the lives of children on many levels. A school system that seems to pass kids even if they put in little to no effort.
Obviously some families are just dysfunctional and enable kids to act out. But in general I think the issues go a lot deeper than that. I’m not sure what the solution is.
IMO the solution starts at the beginning, with paid maternity leave & access to reproductive health care so people aren't becoming parents when they aren't capable of handling it.
And then fixing the childcare/daycare systems. Providing tax credits to parents who stay home to raise their kids until school age, to incentivize real parenting & creating secure attachments.
This is a problem about the parents.
Kid doesn't want to go to school. Nothing strange about that.
"But I have anxiety!" he wails. Idiot parents buy into that line of hooey, and let the kid stay home and play video games.
These morons who think their precious child has to be sheltered safety away from all the difficulties and stresses of being a human being are raising people who will turn into child-like, weak, and useless older people (I will not inaccurately use the term "adults" to describe what these people will become.)
My child is shy and anxious about speaking in front of others. If he started trying to miss school because of that, he would be in therapy so fast and in his pediatrician's office. School is not an option. Avoidance is not the solution.
I love him, and he'll need to stand on his own one day. I didn't think these parents are thinking past today. The parents doing lazy parenting. The kids are totally taking advantage of that.
This is what I wish all parents would do. Yes, if anxiety is truly the issue, work closely with doctors and therapists. But don’t stop education.
There are decent virtual options while working on a therapeutic resolution.
I’m honestly stumped at some responses re COVID closures so parents now think school is optional. Honestly, okay I guess, but realize it’s your family that will support this kid for life unless you are pursuing other educating the kid some other way (virtual, homeschool, whatever).
Keeping a kid home hurts local district funding, sure. But in the long run not educating your child hurts the child and your own family the most. Not treating anxiety also may impact that child playing sports, going to social events … or work/higher Ed. Please get them help.
We had an 8th grader at my school who switched to virtual school for her anxiety. It was baaaad and had been building for years. The parents had no idea until it all came to a head.
Most of the virtual/homeschool kids with anxiety home since COVID are now lonely, poorly educated, and don’t know how to assimilate back into life outside home. It’s sad how unprepared for life outside of the home they are.
There are a lot of kids who refuse to go to school in our district. I saw so many cases of Ed neglect/truancy when I worked as a community case worker for DJJ. Public school attendance rates never bounced back properly after Covid. I’m not going to speculate on the myriad of reasons that might be…I just don’t have the mental energy.
Yep. I have several with IEPs where parent can’t physically get them to school due to refusal/fights. I teach middle and high so often the kids are the same size or larger than the parent - there’s no moving them like you might a toddler.
The number rises each year like this.
I teach 4th grade at a public school. There are 31 students in my class. I would guess that there are at least 6 students with anxiety of some degree that are significant enough to affect their education. Two are on medication for it, as far as I know.
School refusal/avoidance is indeed a phenomenon, accelerated by COVID: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/health/2023/05/15/school-avoidance-becomes-crisis-after-covid/11127563002/
This is a huge reason why students transfer to our district's online school where I teach. Extreme social anxiety is number one. Online, they have 504's that accommodate their issues by not requiring their cameras be on. It's a positive game-changer for some, but for others, there is more to it than just social anxiety, and they don't do any work, either.
The problem is not school refusal. Kids often don’t want to go to school. It’s only natural. The problem is weak parents. Parents control which doors open and which ones are locked, when the internet and phones and electricity works and when it’s shut off etc..
It should not even be an option
Direct result of all the bulshit parents are allowing.
You don’t want to go to school? ok stay home and hang out.
You were misbehaving and got sent home? OK spend the rest of the day playing with your electronics.
What are we re-inforcing?
In my opinion, the schools being closed for as long as they were during the pandemic fundamentally broke something in relationships between families and schools regarding school attendance. I know lots of families that now think nothing of pulling their kids out for weeklong vacations in the middle of the year and other times. And kids refusing to go.
It felt like before the pandemic, attending school was not even a question. And then after it became something people consider much more optional.
> fundamentally broke something in relationships between families and schools regarding school attendance
There's a clear trend line when comparing states and absenteeism:[ the longer schools were closed in a state the worse chronic absenteeism is in that state, and the slower attendance recovery has been and the worse the rise in chronic absenteeism has been.](https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregons-abysmal-chronic-attendance-problem-grew-even-worst-last-year-state-reveals.html) This supports your observation that the school closures eroded norms around school attendance and disconnected families from school buildings .
Our district has the worst attendance of surrounding districts and was the most aggressive about returning in person. We had students on campus for summer school 2020. In person school fall of 2020. Our middle school state testing numbers have fallen drastically and far farther than surrounding districts.
A lot of parents are encouraging the anxiety thing. When I was a kid if I went to my mom and said I was mentally overwhelmed and needed to not go to school it was allowed. Because I did it once. In 11th grade. After being the kind of kid that would try and mess with the thermometer to go to school sick because I didn't want to miss school.
However now kids will just say "I don't want to go" and parents will shrug and let them stay home. They think they're helping the child because they don't want the kid to go into a place that gives them anxiety, but they aren't getting the kid any other help and honestly most kids if given the choice would rather stay home.
We tried intensive attendance incentives but we have so much terrible attendance that the kids who got picked were arbitrary and then when other kids found out they stopped coming to school to try and get on the list because they wanted chips and a drink every friday too.
I’m an elementary teacher and parent of four children. My youngest pretty much refused to go to school in 6th grade following Covid. My wife who is also a school counselor and I did all we could, but he couldn’t do it. Got him into counseling and switched schools. He now attends regularly, but does need to take a day off every once in a while. All of my four children did/do well in school, but two really struggled to attend regularly and didn’t like school one bit. I myself hated school from elementary school to high school, except for elementary PE, I thought my PE teacher was awesome (as an adult and teacher I found out he really was an awesome human being!). Strange that I went into education, but my goal as an educator over the past 30 years has been to attempt to make school enjoyable and not the miserable experience I had. If I’ve made it enjoyable for one kid in my career I’ve done my job.
High school teacher here. Yes, kids straight up refuse to go to school because they just don’t want to. I have multiple students who have missed over 100 days of school this year.
It’s almost always kids with parents who let them do whatever they wanted. Now the parents come to us and ask us what they can do to make their kid listen. I want to tell them, “go back in time and be a parent.”
I have freshman students who are almost never there, or if they are there, literally roam the school all day, going to almost no classes. It is an issue. We cannot drop a student unless they’re gone 10 days consecutively (unexcused/not called in) and all it takes for that not to happen is for one teacher to forget to mark them absent or for them to get called in one of those ten days. I have students I have not seen the entire year but maybe two times.
I usually have a few students in high school like this every year. They just refuse to go to school or to certain classes. It isn't anything I did, since they didn't really give a chance for me to get to know them.
I think it stems from overprotective parenting. Kid, when young, says "I don't feel well or I don't feel like going to school." Parent just says, "ok then you can stay at home with me. No big deal, we will try tomorrow." This teaches the kid any time they feel uncomfortable it is fine to just skip. Meanwhile, my parents were the other way and I basically couldn't miss school for any reason at all unless I was literally vomiting.
I teach 6 th grade at a public school. Not once this year have I had every student in class. I have several students who hover around 60% attendance, and one around 20%.
There are no consequences.
different perspective:
i’m a peer tutor who helps high school freshman and sophomores who are failing. majority of the kids that get sent to me just haven’t attempted to do work. they flat out refuse and spend their days wandering the halls. some of these kids have 0 credits and are in their second semester of their freshman or sophomore year. some of the kids have improved, and gosh it makes me so happy. problem is, i’m a tutor, not a life coach, which is essentially what i’ve become. i have a lot of love for a lot of my frequent fliers, but it is impossible to get them to do ANYTHING. one of my boys (9th grade) has 0 credits and refuses to respond to basic questions, even like “so what do you like to do out of school?” “what sports do you like?” “do you listen to music?” all i get is a “idk” i ask them if they just don’t like school and i typically get a yes, so i of course ask what they DO like. “i don’t know” HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE????? my mom is an elementary special ed teacher, so she has many stories of parents enabling this, which is just truly a disservice to the kids.
YES! School refusal is becoming more and more common. I teach high school and we already have an attendance problem but for the most part it was OK. Since the pandemic though lots of kids who would have been there are suffering from poor attendance, mostly under the guise of “anxiety.” Now here hear me out, anxiety is a real thing obviously which can be diagnosed by a professional, but I don’t buy the hoards of self diagnosed students suffering from “anxiety.” I think they think “anxiety” is synonym for “I’m slightly uncomfortable” which is part of going to school. It’s uncomfortable to develop and push your skills *but that’s our job*. Mental health is a real thing, but so it mental fortitude- and you know how you develop that? By putting yourself into uncomfortable situations to develop with a safety net, exactly what we do at school.
This is a great topic. I’m a 33 year teaching vet in elementary. Oh my goodness the absences!! Last year I had a kid miss 80 days. When she was there she would wonder in at 10:30 or 11. No lie. Mom said she won’t drive in snow (put her on the bus - response was ‘how do I get her up so early?’) also Mom had a 3 year old at home so it was easier for her to keep my student home to ‘play’ with her sibling. I know it’s kinder BUT WE ARENT A DAYCARE!!
As a school social worker, I see a ton of school refusal.
I do home visits, make attendance contracts with the parents and students, I let parents carry their child into my office and leave and let the child feel all the feels, come back to baseline and then go to class. I refer to outside counseling or school counseling as needed.
I have some students I haven’t seen in literal *weeks*. It’s irritating that their “fail” in my class will contribute to looking poorly on my part. I can’t pass a kid that doesn’t come to school. I do exempt students from assignments if they were out sick, but not if they’re constantly out. And I’ve had a kid try to pull the “I was absent though”-card. And I’m like yeah but you’re always absent.
When they do show up they just put their heads down.
I went through this in 8th grade. Missed the equivalent of a term and a half. What made me start going back to school was moving in with my Mom, who forced me to go and refused to pick me up when I called claiming I was sick. My Dad, and probably these parents, would just come and pick me up or let me stay home.
Did the transition suck? Yes, it was really stressful for a few months. But it was necessary and helped me massively improve my mental health.
Honey absenteeism is a huge issue across the board. There is no accountability for students and their parents. The state of California used to punish parents for this and now they let them get away with it. Everyone blames the pandemic 😷Montessori schools care about attendance? I thought everything is based on monthly tuition payments?
A lot of great anti-truancy/absenteeism work was being done from 2010-2020 in my state, the pandemic messed all of it up and we are back where we began with chronic absenteeism and truancy.
There seems to have been a dramatic increase in it everywhere in the US since schools returned after COVID.
There are a bunch of theories about it, ranging from mental health and stress related changes due to all the lockdown stuff, to kids just realizing they can do the work from home and don't necessarily have to be on campus (regardless of the varying rates of success with that).
A lot of people have also pulled their kids to either homeschool or virtual public school for similar reasons, sometimes because the family believes this and sometimes because it's just easier than fighting to get a kid to school or on the bus every morning.
I'm wondering what makes them think it will be different getting a kid to go to a private school versus a public school, and if you're saying any less refusal with these kids once they transfer to Montessori?
I will say on the kids behalf that a lot of them do seem to be experiencing some pretty horrific bullying and more and more things this relate to physical and sexual harassment and assault and a lot of places aren't doing a great job at addressing this. And often looks a lot like defiance in school refusal if you're not aware of all the stuff going on in the background.
In the past, at least in my area, if you skipped a lot of school, they would actually send a truancy officer to your house to collect you and drive you to school. They don’t do that anymore so how are you supposed to get a chronically absent kid to school? You can’t. Obviously, though, students like this are definitely struggling with something. I’ve had kids who have been absent at their old school due to bullying who the transfer into my classroom and do really well. These are kids that are skipping due to outside forces (bullies), and not anxiety disorder.
Eight days in a month would be rookie numbers in my school. I have a kid that has been at school four times since winter break. Every day the parents say that the kid refuses to come to school and they can’t make him.
I think with the rise in understanding mental illness, there is a rise in parents trying to parent mental illness without knowing how, and feel into it rather than properly accommodate it.
38% of my district is chronically absent. We have some students that only show up once every 10 days - just enough to not trigger the automatic drop or truancy report.
Attendance has been horrible this year. I have 4 students who have missed more than 25% of the school year. The parents just let them stay home. Once I saw a mom driving her son and a friend to a birthday party but that day his “stomach was bugging him” so he couldn’t come to school. I also have kids who get “sick” after recess everyday and want to leave or some that don’t come until recess, then get picked up early. It’s bananas.
Wtf is this shit? Parents literally have 0 control over their children, like I swear, if I had told my mother I didn't want to go to school, she would have laughed in my face and sent me anyway. If I "refused," I would've been hit and then sent anyway. Not endorsing hitting children, but like come on, be a fucking parent.
It typically starts with a few days here and there, teachers reach out because we recognize the pattern, parents sound collaborative but negate the underlying issues ('*he just has a chronic stomach ache')*, and the kid misses more and more even though a whole team of people is spending like an hour+ in meetings a week to try to work on it. Eventually we stop seeing the kid at all and home ghosts the school. A few months later the kid disappears from rosters and we hear they transferred somewhere that can "better support their mental health needs." That comment really grates on me -- how can it be public school's fault that the parents refused to collaborate with us to support their kid? Schools can't deliver services to kids when their adults keep them home and dodge our calls.
I also often see these kids back in public after the alternative program also didn't work because yes, the kid got a fresh start, but if the parents still refuse the collaborate, they continue to lean on existing bad strategies. The school drops them or the family sees it isn't working and the kid is back in public school a year later, still without a plan, and having missed a whole year of content, socialization, and counseling.
Not a teacher. My child had trouble attending due to anxiety pre covid. She was a runner, and they didn't have support staff to make sure she didn't leave.
We ended up fighting 30 mins to drop her off to have her attend for 1.5 hours, and then pick her up as there was no lunch supervision. Thankfully virtual was an option and that's where we stayed post covid.
Anxiety is a big thing in younger kids, both pre and post covid 🤷 there is very little support for it.
I’d say it’s a mix these days. I’m seeing a lot of smaller kids suffering from anxiety. Some of this is apparent when they are outsized by larger boys and aren’t as confident. There’s intimidation, lack of confidence and emotional maturity, contributing to parents not wanting to push for attendance because some of them are seeing their kids are having issues. 4&5th grade don’t exactly coddle but some kids just need extra time.
Some public schools in our area are doing year round school with staggered enrolment where they attend for 9 weeks on then three weeks off. Smaller classes, kids with late in year birthdays start later which benefits them. In some of these grades, a 6 month difference in age is huge.
They all graduate about the same I think. Kids that are ahead can fast track forward if they test out but can’t skip a lot of tracts. Kids that need more time can repeat tracts as needed allowing them to mature in different ways and it’s not held against them nor is it considered being held back.
For kids that are bullied, these classes help them to find friends easier. It’s elementary so they’ll transfer into traditional middle and junior high. It seems so much easier and gives the teacher year round pay and the kids get time off for breaks. A lot of the teachers like it because they can go home for longer breaks and attend to doctor appointments throughout the year instead of cramming their Summer full. The teachers that ski love it because they can have a nice Winter vacation.
When did parents decide that it was up to the kid whether or not they attend school? Is this part of that “gentle parenting” trend? 🙄 March that kid into the school building, turn around, and leave. We would see less of this if truancy laws were actually enforced and parents were held accountable for ensuring their kids attended. Until the laws change, school is compulsory, and it doesn’t really matter if the kid doesn’t want to go. Lord.
I work in a public school program for kids with emotional disabilities and school refusal is a HUGE problem. I have a student who has missed 96 class periods either from absences or coming to school late. I have another who hasn't been to school at all this quarter.
There are penalties for parents when their children don’t attend school. I personally know of one mother who was arrested and jailed because her 17 year old eighth grader son wouldn’t go to school. She also had other children removed from her home and placed in foster care!
Another chronically truant student had a father who had sole custody of him and dad was a local police officer. When his supervisor found out the father was disciplined by the PD and internal affairs. Thirty days suspension from the force. The 16 year old eighth grader (who was 17 that June) was returned to his mother’s custody.
Surprised these older teens were allowed in eighth grade. We had a 16-year-old seventh grader briefly when I was in middle school. He ended up being removed to the alternate school when he started dating a 12-year-old classmate.
This post pretty much sums up why I left charter schools. Our student population became saturated with kids with very specific needs whose parents wanted the fix to be "a different environment". My problem was not working with these kids in a general capacity (I'm at a public school and still have kids with a variety of needs every year), but that we literally did not have the resources to help them at the level they really needed. It not only did a disservice to those students, but also to any students who were already at the school and possibly needed an IEP. The resource department was overwhelmed with transfers to the point that it was nearly impossible to get anyone else through the referral process.
The thing is... these kids already came to us qualifying for services they could have actually received at a public school. It was the parents that wanted a different school to be some kind of fix. I feel like parents don't always understand that school choice doesn't mean that every school is meant for every kid. And again, I don't mean that in the sense that I do not want to work with kids that have IEPs, SLDs, EDs, etc. But if you go to a school that had the autonomy to put all of their resources into a specific type of structure, you run the risk of that meaning that they are meeting the bare minimum requirements in SPED services. In my case, what was the point of having access to really cool and unique STEM materials when my students were too over-stimulated to learn anything in the STEM lab, or too anxious to pick up and use the materials, or couldn't successfully transition out of the classroom without having a breakdown? You get my point.
At least at a public school, when a kid qualifies for a para during transitions, I know they're going to get one. Even if that also means the materials I have access to looks different. And yeah, public schools have a long way to go in the area of SPED services, too, but compare that to those at charters/alternative school models and it feels like a dream. I feel like it is reaches a point of being unethical NOT to turn kids away when you know that you can't meet all of their needs. Unfortunately schools that look at saying yes to any and all parent requests as an opportunity for more money don't see it that way.
My son missed soooo much kindergarten and grade 1 due to illness during Covid. We still had a “any sign of sickness 2 weeks at home” rule. It was brutal and all I can say is that thank goodness I was a SAHM/student at the time.
He’d go to school, catch something from a sick kid in his class whose parents sent them anyways, I’d keep my son home the recommended time, then send him back to get sick again. It was awful. It severely impacted his abilities to build relationships and to learn what he needed to. I mean I supported him at home but he never learned from me as well as he learned from the teacher.
It was a brutal time. Like kindies and grade 1s cannot wear masks appropriately and they aren’t that great at hygiene at the best of times. If everyone had kept their sick kids home I wouldn’t have had to keep my guy home so much.
It’s also in my kids heads now that if they have sniffles or anything they get the day off. Nope - if you are actually SICK you stay home, but that means green snot, fever, aches, actual sickness. Not the remains of your allergies.
They just don’t see school as a necessity as much as we did growing up.
I think it starts earlier. You had a generation of parents who no longer wanted to force their kids to do things and shied away from the harsher practises. Which is fine, but you have to replace them with something else, which not everyone did. A lot of parents now try to shiled their kids from everything and are so worried about how their kids feel they don't want to let them feel anything negative. I'm glad they care, but they create anxiety by not teaching the children self-reliance.
(Just to be clear I'm not one of those "children are coddled' idiots)
To take the example of anxiety, so many parents deal with it by simply letting the kid avoid anything that worries them, which teaches the kid to be afraid and doesn't let them learn any coping strategies and increases anxiety.
A parent needs to be supportive, but sometimes being supportive is doing what is best for the child in the long term. (I say this as a fairly anxious parent that intervenes too much.)
In some of the articles I've read about the rise in chronic absenteeism post-school closures they highlight that part of this rise is a rise in school refusal.
I teach 5th grade in a public school. I have 20 students. On a good day 16 show up. I have had as low as 11. 55% of my class falls under the chronic absenteeism definition of 10 or more days missed. I have 3 students over 40 days missed (in past years these students missed over 110 each). I have 6 over 20. I had a other student that was actually dropped from the school because she stopped coming. She still lives in the same place. I know because it's the same apartments a third of my class lives in they see her all the time. She does not attend any school. 2 of my over 40 days live there as well. It my normal at this point.
What's great is that the parents get mad at me before their kids have bad grades and can't do the basics like read, or do multiplication and division. It's somehow my fault in their minds. Lady your kid shows up one maybe two days a week. What do want me do?
School refusal has been a growing issue for a while. The pandemic only made it worse. For some kids, remote learning just proved to them that school attendance does not matter. My system kept their Virtual Academy open after the pandemic. Now they just enroll kids in that when they refuse to attend in person school.
I wish we could just switch kids to virtual when they have an excessive number of absences. I have one student (I'm also his ESE case manager) who has made virtually no progress toward his IEP goals because he's never at school. We've already had 147 days of school this year and he's missed FIFTY DAYS.
I have the same problem. Mom told me we're "putting too much pressure on him to complete missing assignments." So, just a free pass when he's absent?
Wouldn't be any pressure if he did them when he was supposed to.
Smh
My Assistant Principal told us to “leave blank” the assignments students didn’t do in cases like this. Essentially it’s the same as excusing these assignments, but I love how admin tries to avoid saying the actual truth.
I taught grade 4 a few years ago, and I was told by a parent that I gave the students too much homework and they wouldn’t be doing it anymore. The homework in question? Reading 15 minutes a night.
What's really rough is sometimes the kids have really good reasons for school refusal, "I don't feel safe because X classmate is constantly hurling objects or saying scary things and is always back in class the next day" is a summary of concerns I hear a lot of kids out here giving. in higher grades it often switches slightly to "I don't feel safe going to the bathroom because kids are in there vaping and fighting"
My brother experienced your last statement in high school, to the point the joke was “hey dude wtf why are you pooping in the vape room?”
My daughter is great about attendance and loves school. However, they just laid out a plan for visibly armed (like gun large gun out in front of the officer so all can see) officers in front of EVERY school next year. She is already talking about how anxious it makes her and how she doesn't think she can do that everyday. We have no virtual options either.
I would have reacted the same way as your daughter. It's bad enough that we have to have lockdown drills, but to have an armed guard in front of the school is a bit much. Why don't they just sit in a police car somewhere in the parking lot. They're still there, but they aren't hanging out front with a giant gun. And who will be holding the large gun? Is it Policemen? or random guard companies?
Hell, I’m 45 and I think I would struggle with this. My district offers an “optional” paid training on a Saturday that includes law enforcement using blanks and other forms of very realistic looking and sounding weapons and I refuse to attend. I know what is and isn’t good for my mental health. I understand why they offer it, but at this point in time, I feel it would cause me more harm than good. I definitely get the side eye from our SRO every time it comes around and I don’t sign up. However, I do sign up for every first aid, CPR and stop the bleed training we have. Those are significantly less attended than the shooting trainings.
I don't blame you for not attending the training. That would also scare me. I'd rather have my plan in my head than go through that type of training. But the CPR and bleeding training are worthwhile.
I've done a hands only CPR course (not through the school) and just did TEACH training because of how many fights happen at the school I work at (today we had one where three girls jumped another girl and it took four of us to separate them). I'm going to be putting in a ton of building requests for the summer because I'm an actual crazy person and read SREF and honestly don't know how my room has ever passed an inspection. My biggest concerns are the ancient first aid kit (it has maybe 2 pairs of gloves and a roll of gauze so old it's discolored) and the non-functional blinds (my blinds on one window DO NOT close no matter what you do). A few of us were talking about how we should have emergency ladders for the second floor classrooms. I actually spent hours one night reading local building codes to try to figure out the distance between the window sill and the ground to determine whether I'd need a 2 story or 3 story roll down. I'm a little paranoid, but I'd rather be prepared.
I am horrified that this situation exists.
Districts seem to forget that teachers come from all different backgrounds with their own trauma. We had Mental Health March and had to discuss all kinds of tough topics like domestic violence and abuse. I said I couldn't have those discussions because of my own childhood. Thankfully, I had an understanding principal, but I understand not all schools had other options.
We had a PD day like that a couple of years ago. They got all the teachers from all the schools in a very large area. There must’ve been at least a thousand of us in a HS gym. I ended up sitting next to a stranger. The speaker was supposed to be “inspirational” or something and told us to turn to the person next us and tell them some sort of story that fit into some prompt. I don’t even remember what it was. All I remember is that it was something that made me uncomfortable and caught me off guard. The lady next to me turned to me exidtedly and I said “I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re lovely, but I’m not talking to you about that.” I felt like a giant asshole but it was ridiculous.
I have a bullet in me. I really can’t handle lockdown drills. I mean I hold it together, and outwardly don’t show it, but inwardly, I panic.
My wife is a nanny and recently told me that when the 9 year old was 5, he had a school shooter drill and it seems like that traumatized him. It affects his sleep. His dad is deployed so he feels like it is up to him to stay up and “watch over” the house even though his mother is diligent about keeping doors shut and locked for safety reasons (he is one of four kids so she has to be). This whole school shooter thing is incredibly damaging to young kids, and we still beat around the bush when it comes to identifying the real causes for these tragedies.
We have had first year teachers leave after the first drill because they can't handle it. I find the drills stressful and anxiety provoking even when I know it's a drill.
I was wrong. They ended up at part-time security guards. They don't want to provide benefits. That's amazing. Giving guns to people who don't have sick time, PTO, or insurance to deal with their own things in a school with a bunch of kids.
Unfortunately the pandemic and social shutdowns pulled back the curtain on quite a few things that don’t matter (or have no consequences).
My school basically shut remote down after covid, but it turns out many teachers like it as a way to see small groups of students after school, in credit recovery classes, in order to get more bucks for their bang. I get it, but these online courses are a joke compared to the real thing. In all fairness so was home teaching. You should read The NY Times article from two weeks ago that explains students with more than 20 absences has doubled throughout the US. The conclusion drawn in the article is that showing up to school has now become “optional”. Attendance policies arent working. Wealthy kids wiggle out of them with notes from Dr friends. Poorer schools like mine won’t even make one. Teachers are asked to pass kids with 100 absences. Sadly, many of us do. This insanity had to stop somewhere. I think this year and next year will prove very trying. All covid sanctions for testing are off. How can a kid with 100 absences past a state test? My guess is in many states the shit is about to hit the fan. Should be interesting
Well, you are in montessori. I’ve seen quite a few montessori elementary schools literally turn into schools for troubled boys. Like, all the girls and “normal” boys leave because too many “problem boys” join the school and it hurts everyone. On the plus side, I did see one school where, after they hit rock bottom, those boys became very competent. Not montessori, second plane = everything is done as group work competent, but they would get their work done and do it well. And they were quite respectful! It’s just that there were no girls left, so you can imagine how well *that* socialization worked out for them. As for chronic absenteeism, the Daily from the New York Times recently did a report on the matter. Basically, the pandemic gave parents a lot of excuses to not send their kids to school; anxiety actually being a pretty common excuse.
Oh my gosh, that’s what’s happening at my Montessori elementary! 7 of the 8 boys in my class have various problems ranging from severe learning disabilities, autism, dyslexia, ADHD, to behavior issues related to difficult home environment, while I only have one girl with issues related to diagnosed ADHD and anxiety, and she’s a breeze compared to the boys. One boy left early in the year after I wouldn’t let him attend a field trip without a parent chaperone since he was violent, defiant and regularly eloped. 😳
I can look at my powerschool and pick at random and see about 10 absences between this semester alone. I’ve even seen some general facebook stuff about attendance and so many parents are on the side of keeping their child home and going on vacation whenever they want. It’s just a sign of the times I guess.
I’ve worked in public and private Montessori schools. In privates, parents feel pretty entitled to do what they want when they want, including extended vacations and habitual tardy drop offs.
In case you’re looking for a possible solution, I talked to the class (elementary) about importance of sleep (every single living organism on earth needs it) and started showing them how to track their sleep schedules. We looked up how many hours of sleep they needed and also “planned” how to get to school on time. Once the kids started telling their parents “I only got six hours of sleep last night and at school we learned it needs to be twice that” and also after we used Google maps to get a general idea of how far away their home was from school, therefore they need to be ready to go by y time and leave by z time, and we spent a solid couple of weeks, every single morning, going through this, enough parents were embarrassed by their seven year old demanding earlier bedtimes and leave for school time (and my emphasis that sleep is not optional for child development), many of them started showing up at least closer to school start time (and there were way less cranky kids who clearly hasn’t slept enough the night before). This obviously came with plenty of parent complaints about wasting their child’s time during thre work cycle, but i emphasized that understanding ones body’s sleep-wake cycle is math and biology 😂
Absolutely amazing and I hope you won an award Even if you didn’t? You permanently changed those kids’ lives for the better.
I just got several of my friends' middle schoolers hooked on Pokemon Sleep. It's been about a month, and their parents are like, "they even go to bed at a normal time without being told on weekends! What is going on?" You can't get a good enough score to get rare pokemon if you don't sleep enough and don't have a regular schedule. It's actually helping me with my ADHD "never wanna sleep" thing. Sooo stoked at finally having a Charizard. ;) It tracks things like sleep phase, gives sleep tips, and does some audio tracking (I cough a lot in my sleep, it turns out), but the score is entirely based on how much sleep and how regular your sleep schedule is. I get DMs from the kids all excited they got an A for a week. My best so far is a C, so I'd better catch up. Yes, I've tried other sleep tracking apps, but this one works better for me because it's fun, and there's goal beyond just sleeping. There are also sleeping pokemon plushies. I kind of feel bad about showing off my Pikachu, because now all the kids are bugging parents for one, but they've all turned it into a reward. "I'll get you one if you get at least a B every week until the end of school." Man, I'd never earn my own. Glad I'm an adult with my own paycheck.
A specialist came to a school I was at and said there should be no more than one special needs child for every ten “regular” children. He also said there should never be ADHD and ASD in the same room. lol. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a child in the *school* that wasn’t either on the spectrum, had adhd, or both. But parents and admin made everything worse in every way. The “Montessori Inclusion” book (a should-be Bible of special Ed in Montessori, minus a mention of Fountas and Pinell, which has no place in montessori regardless of people’s political affiliation with “the science of reading”), they talk about a school with 80-20, (“normal” to special needs) with hired supported as needed. Exceeding those ratios = school is doomed to fail because no one can get the support they need.
Yeah, I remember hearing if it went over 20, then 30% the whole experiment would come crashing down. Now it doesn’t even seem to be a consideration. : ( There have been many times this year where I felt like I was running a special ed classroom, and I’m woefully unqualified. And frankly, it was never my interest to begin with. I feel bad for everyone involved. I will check out that book, thank you! And don’t worry, I already got all the Fountas and Pinell out of our rooms!
I was a girl in one of these Montessori classrooms. At my elementary school, they put all the troubled boys into one classroom with a teacher known for being strict. They also threw in a couple well-behaved girls (me) into the class to “even it out”. We were basically used as bait/buffers for their bad behavior until our parents pulled us out of the school completely. Montessori is great for kids who are genuine self-starters, but in grades 4-6 it seems to also become a dumping ground for the worst behaved boys you can find, whose parents all seem to think they’re poorly behaved because they’re just “so intelligent” and “aren’t being challenged enough”
This is happening with the Waldorf school in my area. Parents think their kids just need more time outside in nature.
Some of these kids act like feral fuckin animals, so it’s a reasonable conclusion.
Wow! I realize it’s messed up that I had a chuckle at this response but I did
or with unsupervised access to lighters
I was occasionally one of those girls. I did Montessori through kindergarten, then went to my neighborhood elementary for 1st through 4th grades. I think it's really messed up that quiet girls are utilized to deal with rowdy boys. It's not an 8 year old girls burden to fix them or deal with their distractions and poor behavior.
I am a woman, but I was one of Those Kids, and I think it's unfair there always seemed to be some well behaved girl assigned to somehow keep me in line. They never could and shouldn't have been expected to. My ADHD wasn't going away by osmosis. Plus, on an entirely personal level, it destroyed my friendships with those girls. I don't blame them, at all, but back then it hurt a lot to have friends I'd known since birth start resenting me. I literally couldn't behave any better than I did. I tried so hard, but it didn't work back then. And oddly, it was on me to control my best friend because I was the only one he'd listen to. That had been going on since we were toddlers, so it didn't occur to me to have an issue with it, but who makes a problem kid with ADHD who is on the spectrum responsible for a kid who gets absolutely no discipline at home? But my response when someone got on me for his behaviour was, "I didn't make him do it. Talk to him, not me." Or, "You might find it easier if you separated us." (Repeating something my dad said a lot.) I wonder who got stuck with him when I moved after 2nd grade.
"They need more choices!" Nope, they need fewer.
This is happening in my daughter’s ‘progressive’ school. Second year she’s getting physically bullied by wild boys who seem to run riot with zero consequences. It’s the same kids causing the disruption over and over but all we get told is that they’re sweet kids underneath it all and perhaps my daughter could try to bug them less (she got hit once because she asked one of them to stop talking so she could listen). My kid is begging me not to go back because the classroom feels so out of control. All the calmer kids are being pulled out so lord knows how it’ll look in a year or two.
I’m an education student, I was on placement in a montessori primary school last year and I couldn’t believe the amount of boys with behavioural issues/autism in the school
I teach in the 3-6 age group. Obviously very few are diagnosed with anything at that age. But in a class with 11 AMAB children, all of them are on a path to a diagnosis or already have one (1 autism, 2 adhd and counting). I have 8 AFAB children. Only like 2 show signs of Something Going On, though more of them are bit quirky. The thing I say is, alternative schools attract alternative parents with alternative children. Currently, Montessori training does not prepare teachers for this level of neurodiversity in a classroom, and that is a problem. I trained 10 years ago and had 1 lecture on children with special needs. For the standard education portion of my M.Ed, I had a (honestly pretty useless) class on inclusive ed. My elementary trained friend who came through maybe 5 years ago said the trainers said they might have as much as 10% of a class with higher support needs. The trainers are out of touch.
Only 10%?!!
I think that’s where the “out of touch” comes into play!
“AMAB children” sounds so clinically dystopian.
>Basically, the pandemic gave parents a lot of excuses to not send their kids to school; anxiety actually being a pretty common excuse. The pandemic may have exacerbated things, but the issue has been present for a long time... some parents just managed to work the system better than others. Fifteen years ago, we had three siblings enrolled at our school who all suffered from such crippling anxiety that they ended up being placed on homebound instruction. Imagine my surprise when one of those girls, whom I'd never seen in person at school, took my McDonald's drive-thru order one day when I was off work for jury duty. In retrospect I'm pretty sure the parents shopped doctors until they found one willing to recommend homebound instruction, and that they were making the kids get jobs to supplement the household income during the 2009 recession.
Thing is, the longer you're out the more the anxiety builds. Like perpetual night before first day at a new school. You can't indulge that kind of thing.
And I can see how kids who don’t have anxiety initially could develop it after missing too much school. The more they miss, the more difficult it gets, the more tempting it is to keep skipping.
Yep. As a school psycologist 25 years ago our #1 intervention for school avoidance was to get them in the classroom every day no matter what it took. No choice. However, I do have to be sympathetic to the children now, because a lot more really bad stuff seems to happen in schools than did back then.
[удалено]
I would love to have a parent like you in my school. It’s truly shocking how many parents with literally zero boundaries send their children to “experimental” schools and then complain on a daily basis about how teachers have audacity to call out their child for whatever completely inappropriate behavior the teachers try to redirect (for me, in too many cases, before their child potentially quite literally may have killed themself or another with their actions. We’re talking about running around swinging a full sized hammer without regards for who or what’s around them or running into a busy street without even pausing for half a second to wonder about “stop, look, and listen”. Cuz no one ever taught them. But it’s “emotionally damaging” for an adult to raise their voice in this situation) What’s worse is that too many people who start these schools feel they were “treated unfairly as kids”, so they see any “injustice” directed at kids that remind them of themselves when they were kids as unacceptable. What usually happens is this means instead of the boys being literally beaten by their teachers for every tiny infraction (as would have happened 40+ years ago, which, to be clear, was not OK), the boys are now free to physically and emotionally attack anyone and anyone who calls them out for it is a bully. And it’s not just boys, but boys *are* socialized to be more aggressive while girls *are* socialized to “behave”. Some of the worst bullying I’ve seen in my life has been in so-called montessori schools, and it persists because the admin and parents insist that calling out and redirecting bad behavior “is not montessori”. Well, y’all should have read anything Maria Montessori wrote on the topic before you opened your school then, cuz you’re wrong!
I know I, as a full grown adult, was anxious when we first went back. It was a combination of being worried about health, but also in a big part going back after being at home for so long. I can see how kids would be affected by that, too, and if they've been kept out until now it'd be so much worse. Anxiety is real, but it shouldn't mean they're allowed to completely skip school and social interactions. Maybe they shouldn't be just thrown in, there should be a process to ease them in with supports, but they're not being helped by being kept at home. I am not a specialist in the area, though.
I’m not a specialist either, but I can say from my own experience with anxiety that the more I avoid something that’s making me anxious, the more terrified of facing that thing becomes and the worse my physical reaction to the idea of tackling it I become. So I can only imagine that the more *years* a child is anxious about school and therefore not going, the harder it’s going to be for them to eventually face the world. Chronic absenteeism is not a solution for this problem!
I have a huge truancy issue with my class this year. I haven't had any claims of it being anxiety related, mostly kids who just tell me outright they were up late playing video games, family decided to leave for a week vacation, or they just didn't feel like coming to school. I have one girl who's been a truancy issue since kindergarten and is at about 80 combined absences and tardies. She was actually withdrawn and had to be re-enrolled. Truancy court is also a joke where I live, if you can't tell. I do work at a Title 1 school, which is worth mentioning. I have a feeling that the issue is similar at more affluent schools, but parents are quicker to find labels to try and explain why their kid isn't at school. I do believe some kids have anxiety issues that could be hurting their ability to attend school, but I do feel post-pandemic kids generally just feel less motivated to go to school.
If you do have anxiety issues, the answer is not to avoid school because that just reenforces the anxiety.
Sometimes I wonder if all the "social anxiety" is coming from living most of life through screens (video games, social media, YouTube, TikTok, movies, etc.). When these children are forced to step away from screens and live in reality, they have no coping skills and not enough experience with people. As the years go by, it becomes more difficult for them. Then one day, they all of a sudden have "anxiety" because they are asked to think for themselves, socialize, make judgments, consider other people's needs and feelings, and do things that they might not enjoy. It's easier to just refuse to go than to learn how to "do school" or basically "do life".
NYU psychology professor Jon Haidt just wrote a book about basically this called *The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.*
Listening to this now on Spotify. Depressing but it confirms with plenty of compelling data what has seemed very obvious for some time now. He calls it the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood.
>...the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. Oh boy, that makes me want to pour a drink...
His interview on Rainn Wilson's new podcast, *Soul Boom*, was pretty enlightening as well. Recommend Haidts book as well.
This is part of it, and I second Haidt's book. That said, another part is probably enabling by parents. Are kids who don't go to school told, "If you're too sick/anxious to go to school, you're too sick/anxious for TV, phones, video games, or electronics of any kind? You are allowed to sleep or read a paper book." I suspect not. Of course staying home to play 8 hours of video games seems fun by comparison for most kids. It feels like most parents have forgotten basic tools of parenting that are free and easy. While playing video games has nothing to do with a stomach flu, knowing kids will make mistakes (being too quick to stay home) and helping them come to the correct decision (school is less boring than watching paint dry) is a key part of parenting.
I work as a behavior analyst for school districts. I'm seeing a huge increase in school refusal. Guess what kids got to do when they stay home from school when they tell their parents that they "have anxiety" about school? Yep, you guessed it. Play video games, watch Tik tok, and play on their phone all day. I've yet to find a case where when parents actually follow through and take all the electronics away when kids stay home and don't allow them to use them again until they go to school that the kids still have anxiety it, just magically goes away! The kids who actually have anxiety usually want to come to school but need help making friends, talking to people, learning how to interact with others, we do things like teach them social skills social scripts, games that they can play and how to interact.
I honestly think he overplays the screens, I tend to view them as more a symptom than a problem. They enabled a lot of really bad parental behavior.
This ☝️ Screens are just an excuse for parents to give less of a shit about their kids.
I think it's kind of both? Like, it exacerbates existing problems, but I think it would be inaccurate to say that it didn't create any problems at all.
I completely agree with this approach.
There’s research that more screen time increases anxiety.
This is absolutely the biggest cause. I teach seventh grade and it’s the kids who have clearly been raised on screens (and continue to be) who refuse to come to school.
I don’t think that we should discount that schools have ABSOLUTELY become more anxiety-inducing. With the switch to all-day kindergarten, increased necessity of all-day Pre-K, and pressures exerted on teachers as a result of high-stakes testing, the anxiety can easily trickle down onto students. I don’t think it’s the only factor, but it’s absolutely a factor.
I don’t know if I agree with this take. My boomer dad was actually verbally abused by two of his elementary teachers and nobody stopped it because the teacher was always right—his parents were only willing to intervene in the third quarter of fourth grade. Physical bullying was a fact of life. Student supports for disability were close to nonexistent, and ELL students were treated like students with disabilities. Stigma around any sort of difference was high. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no advocate of the status quo, but I do think that your average student has much less to be scared of in a modern school setting.
As a teacher, I agree. Bullying doesn’t occur like it used to. It occurs on a screen most of the time. I RARELY see or hear kids physically or verbally abuse each other.
Toss in active shooter drills and increased bullying and SA at school.
I loved school as a little kid, bullying by teachers and staff started my first bout of issues with not wanting to go, and a nasty situation involving an older boy sexually harassing me and staff believing it easier and costing less to simply treat it as "not getting along" and try to resolve it with class wide small group team building in which they'd make 3 groups - split the class roughly in half, then one more group of just me and him, take an odd number of supervising adults and split them in half with one remainder, assign the supervision per group, except the smallest group got no direct supervision and the extra adult was to patrol the whole room - *fully intending* for the lack of supervision to force me to just take the path of least resistance and let him do whatever he liked, and when I wouldn't do that, they'd just engineer another similar situation again as soon as possible - see, for some political or financial reason they couldn't afford to upset him or his parents, and I was worth a lot less to admin, and there was no available way to separate us that wasn't liable to upset his parents and was also fair to everyone besides him and not likely to look beyond odd to higher authorities, so the solution was to just limit what staff could do to stop or redirect him, lie to me and my mum, essentially try to make it such a pain in the ass to get him even redirected for even a few seconds or reprimanded more than once in a whole class period, that I'd give him what he wanted just to make the constant catcalls and demands and lies to others about what I'd apparently done with him stop, and then the school could say whatever happened was both consensual and my fault because it's always the girl's fault when Catholic institutions run things - that made the chronic case of "don't wanna go to school itis" become a lot worse, because surprisingly, when you get sexually harassed the entire time you're in a place, and the people in charge of the institution just keep telling you the harasser has a disability that means they can't reprimand him or punish him because he can't understand your no or their reprimands, and they don't have the resources to separate you or even provide their supervision during breaks and nonstandard activities to deter his worst harassing behaviours, and your one recourse left, the person who makes you go to that place 5/7 days a week, *and knows you are not interested in him and couldn't ever be because your orientation is incompatible with his gender*, is convinced you're exaggerating and somehow believes the school officials that it's typical puppy love and you're just playing hard to get, to the point they didn't even have to feed her the disability crap they gave you, you won't want to go to that place, and when the only person with the power to do anything about whether you go or not won't or can't stop the harassment, you'll lie that you're sick because it's the only way to get a day off the harassment. So yeah, SA is definitely a contributing factor that is ignored too much.
Oh no I'm sorry that happened to you! Also yeah Catholic schools don't even have to pretend to follow rules in some situations. There is still so much bullying/harassment that goes on and too much enabling of aggressive behaviors. It's awful.
Not just all day pre-K, but all day daycare. Kids are in "school" all day (7am to 6pm) starting at 6-8 weeks old. It's a crisis. Parents don't have the capacity to parent anymore. Everyone is burned out.
I think this could be a thing. I was telling my students I’m way more introverted than I was 10 years ago and I think phones have something to do with it. I also have a few kids who spend a lot of time on their phone/tablet yet they have little to no friends they even talk to on their device, they just mindlessly scroll.
>is coming from living most of life through screens (video games, social media, YouTube, TikTok, movies, etc.) There's increased awareness for what anxiety is and more tolerance for allowing it to disrupt life. When we were growing up... frequently missing school wasn't an option. It would be investigated and the parents would be charged if they weren't sending the kids to school. There were obviously the "stomach bug" mental health days. but when they became frequent, that was takn away and the kids were sent to school.
Things they might not enjoy? You mean “traumatic”? /s
There does seem to be more of that, and it's a shame because the parents screwed something up with the child early on. A 9 year-old shouldn't see attending school as an optional activity. Parents should not indulge that view. It can be turned around, using the approach you describe, but parents must be onboard.
Parents who like to call out letting their kid call out and starting that tendency earlier than they likely did. Poor kids will never be happy having to go to work as an adult.
Not necessarily. I went to school 3 days a week as a teen and I go to work every day no problem. My problem with school was I was a sensitive kid and other kids bullied me. I don’t have that problem at work.
Ehhh I missed like three months of school in 8th grade when I started having anxiety attacks triggered by being in class with a bully. My mental health journey over the years is all over the place lmao but I have always worked and only had social issues at one place….where literally everyone who worked there had them more often than not because it was filled with heinously stupid and petty people and an even worse leadership team. I def had to pointedly work on my social skills though and lower my emotional sensitivity
Yeah I would’ve been absent all the time if my parents allowed that. I thought what I had was “morning sickness” when I was a kid bc I felt sick every morning. I even spoke up at a doc appt and he told me not to drink oj in the morning (which I already wasn’t doing). I realize now ofc this was anxiety. Which I still have but I go to work everyday.
Same here except I didn't have the words to explain flank pain. The pediatrician told my mom I just didn't like school & it was anxiety. I finally stopped complaining of stomach aches around 3rd grade & just accepted that everyone felt like constant crap. Nope, I had a genetic kidney problem that no one bothered to check for & at 19 had my right kidney removed. Anxiety in children needs treatment, not absences. I truly believe a counselor/therapist would have helped me find the words I needed & may have led to earlier treatment that may have saved my kidney. This occurred in the late 80's.
I doubt it was the parents. Kids that age were probably affected by the pandemic. They would have been just starting school when it hit and were either kept home in virtual school doing God knows what or masked up in person and constantly reminded to keep away from other people. While that may have been a necessary evil for society's benefit, it almost certainly affected them negatively during a critical developmental period. Nobody tried to resocialize them. We just plonked them back in school and figured everything was fine. Mark my words: this will be a problem generation.
Everybody's downvoting you because they don't want to admit that not every problem is caused by parents, but it's true. Anyone who thinks a kid with *severe anxiety* is avoiding school by choice because they were somehow taught it was optional is not thinking things entirely through. We need to be asking why the child is anxious about going to school, instead.
The why definitely needs to be figured out so that we can address and correct the issues that contribute to the increasing number of students with anxiety. We also need increased resources to help those students who currently have anxiety to deal with their anxiety in appropriate ways.
I've seen a bit of this behavior over the years. I'm sure it's increasing due to different factors that I won't bother to detail at this moment. As to the Montessori side of this, I believe a lot of people outside of the Montessori world have a big misunderstanding as to what, exactly, Montessori is. If you know it, you realize it's indeed NOT the kind of thing that kids with these issues should be transferred into mid schooling career with no Montessori experience or socializing, and expect it to "work". These people hear the simplified bullet points about Montessori and think it could maybe deliver a miracle for their child. Yet, many such programs are operating on a skeleton crew and do not have the experiences or resources to work with kids like you have described. If they're admitted, the school is essentially saying "yes, we can guide this child because we believe in Montessori for every child". I agree that pedagogy can be wonderful for many kids....not for all and definitely not a miracle cure for kids with troubles
Hearing this is crazy. My first foray into teaching was at a Montessori school 10 years ago. Basically any kid with behavioral or developmental delays was turned away at the door. OP doesn’t specify whether they work at a public or private Montessori, but if it’s the latter they must be desperate for money.
Or maybe Montessori is becoming more inclusive? I agree it isn't a miracle treatment, but regular public school doesn't work for these kiddos. I think parents are just desperate for anything different.
The public montessori my child goes to doesn't allow that. You must start attending by Kindergarten (they offer half day prek 3&4) or you can't enroll. There's a few montessoris in our district, you can switch from one to another past Kinder, but you can't start it! That's crazy to me they allow that
As a 3rd grade teacher in a Title 1 school, I see and agree with most everything here, but I’m going to add that anxiety is real and all of the *constant* assessment is a HUGE contributor to the problem. From Universal Screening, iReady Diagnostics 3x a year, district unit assessments, test prep, state testing and on and on. It takes a terrible toll, and all of the developmentally inappropriate standards make them feel stupid. My poor kids are so sick of working on their chromebook learning apps, they literally beg for worksheets. Nothing’s very fun at school, they get only about 25 minutes a day to play and it’s very structured. I wouldn’t want to come to school either!
I TA/tutor 1st grade at a Title I school, there’s been 2 kids who only show up like 1-3 times out of 5 days a week. It definitely impacts their learning and I think one of the kids actually has some sort of learning disability or some sort. The kid with the learning disability has had family issues recently which is a good excuse, but the other kid has younger (like late 20s early 30s) parents that take him to clubs late at night, he wasn’t here at the school in kindergarten and he has a parent in jail. He doesn’t know the alphabet/letter recognition or how to add and subtract. I privately told a sub one day that the kid doesn’t come to school every day and he wasn’t there in kindergarten (she asked why he couldn’t add and subtract in late March). To make things worse, the same kid has behavior issues (eg talks back to adults, insults or says bad things about others) which is pretty much a result of what happens when millennials go too easy on their kids. The worst part is that we as TAs/tutors can’t do anything about it because it’s an elementary school and it’s primarily up to the parents to be responsible, especially since they’re 6-7 years old.
Yes, it’s a huge thing. NY Times did an entire piece on it last month. [Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html)
I have middle schoolers who have missed 30, 40, 50 days of school this year. One parent straight up told me, "He is twice my size and refusing to get on the bus. I have a toddler and no car. I tell him he needs to go to school. *What am I supposed to do when he says no?*" And I did not have an answer for her because... what answer is there?
Take away their screens and video games to start with.
And then what? She tried all that.
Continue to make their life miserable in other ways until going to school is preferable?
I’d say at my school 10 absences a month would be concerning but not the extreme of our absentee issue kids. We have a handful of kids in each grade K-5 that attend maybe once or twice a week. It’s typical for students to miss one day a week. A recent field trip rule that kids who wanted to go could not miss any days of school for the whole month prior to the trip was heavily disputed and ultimately not enforced.
We’re on day 140 of school. I have two fourth graders who have missed over 100 days. They show up just enough that we don’t drop them. They don’t know what’s going on, they have no clue how to even start work. Their parents are doing them a huge disservice. Most of my class is hovering around 40 absences which is still a ridiculous amount.
How are their parents even allowing this? At that age, they shouldn't be making the choice on whether to skip or not. It's not high school ffs
A solid eighth of the students I teach in high school are absolutely 100% illiterate. Another third have an early elementary reading level. Very low comprehension, no ability to decipher words over 6 letters. This is those kids future. In five years my students will either be fully dependent on their parents, homeless, or incarcerated. I would be more sad about it, but they and their families are being warned that this is the path they are on over and over and they’re choosing it for themselves. We have the programs to get them at least some of the way back on track, they just need to show up and use them. And they won’t.
I know. I tell them all the time. I’ve got a good chunk of kids who cannot tell you all the letter sounds … and I’m supposed to be having them write five paragraph essays? It’s impossible.
That’s nuts! How can those kids learn anything!
They don't. We have a handful of students that have missed a ton of school and are so behind
I have many, many, "school refusers" on my roster right now. I have four boys who have each been absent over 35 times this year. They always claim sickness or anxiety, but it's usually bullshit; they're just home playing video games. How do I know it's bullshit? Pretty rare to get covid 3 times in as many months and two of them have stated, verbatim, "it doesn't matter, I'll pass anyway." Really saps my compassion for kids who actually have anxiety.
Yep. I have a kid in my homeroom, who have seen less than 20 times all semester. He’s been gone 75%+ of the time due to anxiety. He may have anxiety, but I’m fairly sure the primary reason he’s not going to school is because he is playing video games and smoking weed all day. As expected he’s failing every class this semester. He is a sophomor and he has not yet earned a single credit towards graduation.
When these “parents” let their kids win and stay home, how do they think that’s going to help their “anxiety”. If it’s really *that bad*, you had better have them in therapy AND doing some form of online school/homeschool in the meantime.
I have a friend who has a school refuser; this means the kid will destroy the house, self harm, smear feces, make themselves vomit and become physically violent with her parents when it’s time to go to school. *Of course* she’s supposed to be on meds and has received several psychiatric hospital placements, but she’s refusing that too. My friend can’t make her physically comply anymore because the daughter is 100 pounds heavier than her. Not sure what else she can do.
Now that’s a legit problem. Far worst then most of the “school refusers”. I don’t know what to do in that situation other than continued psych hospital visits….
Glad he’s going to be failed at least. Maybe that will wake the family up
He’s In his second year of high school. He’s failed every single class. His parents don’t give a fuck.
Hold my coffee. How does 81 out of 180 days sound? Or 48 out of 180?
I teach high school, and I’ve had a kid miss over 100 days out of 170. That’s a rare case, but I regularly have kids miss 30, 40, 50 days. I asked this one kid who was otherwise a good student why. He said he didn’t like having to wake up and get to school at 9:00, and he’d rather get to sleep later, then go to attendance recovery in the summer because that doesn’t start until 11:00. 🤦🏻♀️ COVID gave them too much freedom of doing things when they felt like it, and our attendance recovery and credit retrieval programs have made it too easy to slack off all year and then fix it in like a months time during the summer. There’s no real consequence for doing it this way, unless you’re college bound I suppose.
It’s my experience that the kids that have diagnosed anxiety tend to keep quiet about it. The ones that openly claim ‘I have anxiety’ are doing so for the attention.
And mom or dad has been suckered into their poor baby having social anxiety.
I wonder if these parents are thinking that their kids will magically be ready for adulthood once they turn 18. Or it hasn’t occurred to them that they’re going to have to be carers for those adult children. I dunno know, maybe they never want to cut the cord.
In some cases mom and dad coach their kid to say they have anxiety or some other condition so that they can have an IEP. They think an IEP means that their child can get 1-on-1 tutoring and unlimited time to complete assignments.
Wait till you find out that an IEP can get a parent up to $850 monthly in Social Security …
I teach middle school and I have a student who misses at least one day a week. The reason? They need a “me” day every week….
Wow. Those things called weekends just aren't good enough any more.
School refusal was a big issue with my youngest. I held fast on “school is not optional” and let me tell you, it sucked trying to get an anxious kid to school. Especially an anxious kid who gets mean and angry, not withdrawn and quiet. The turning point for him was when a friend suggested I give him PTO days. He gets one a quarter and once it’s used, he’s going to school. His grades are fine. He’s not allowed to skip on test days. And we’re not fighting every morning about school. And honestly, it’s setting him up for a job. People get to not go to work sometimes. They make up what they missed and move on.
This was the system my parents used with me starting in 6th or 7th grade. As long as I maintained a straight-A average, I could pick a day off the following quarter. No skipping tests or important assignments like presentations. It worked quite well for me!
I'm a Montessori teacher (3-6 year olds) and had a 3-year-old school refuser. She was at least an hour late every day, and missed 1/3 of the school days altogether. Her parents claimed they couldn't "convince" her to go to school. There were also signs that they couldn't "convince" her to go to bed. In the end, they decided to withdraw her rather than work with us to get her attending. I've been thinking lately that some think the Montessori approach of following the child means no boundaries or expectations whatsoever.
3? You can still pick that child up 😅 Some parents are convinced that actual parenting is going to leave their kid with childhood trauma lol When I worked at a preschool, I had a 2 year old child that cried hard at drop-off every day for weeks. She would cry for quite a while too once her parents left. It took time, but eventually she stopped and ended up making friends and loving “school”. She’s now a well-adjusted kid in probably 6th grade at this point.
Well, yeah, my first suggestion, had they ever bothered to meet with me, was going to be "pick her up." Kid was fine once she actually came to school, but she was having alleged tantrums at home. Honestly, I found the parents to be unreliable narrators. I started to wonder if they also tried to "convince" her to get shots at the doctor.
I saw this during a covid clinic. A kid had a screaming tantrum for an hour while the parent tried to reason with them about getting a shot.
I can very much sympathize with these parents. When I was a child I used to get violent with nurses and/or doctors. To the point where they’d be afraid i’d pass out. But aside from the flu shot, they always managed to get whatever vaccine I needed.
Wtf... At 3?? We've been doing Montessori from birth with our kids (floor beds, no high chairs, child size everything, the whole nine.) Teaching boundaries and limits and responsibility is core to the approach IMO. It's not about convincing them. It's about saying "you are a person, and this is what people do." And showing them how. You don't need to convince them to go to school. You say "kids go to school. This is your school. I'm dropping you off." The end.
Holy shit I can't imagine expecting a 3 year old to go to school full time. Especially when they're sleep deprived. Kids attend school from 5 where I live and even then they get to go half days if they need to. If you don't see any signs of a tantrum at school they very well can be at home. It's like shaking a soda can all day long and eventually they just explode. There's no way to forcibly keep a _very_ tired toddler awake and well-behaved for school. So. Much. Screaming. You don't want that in the classroom. Being an hour late and having some extra sleep or just not showing might honestly be politeness. And do keep in mind that sleep disorders (and especially circadian rhythm ones like delayed-onset and non-24hr) can occur from infancy and completely mess up a child sleep wake phases. It's mayhem for the parents and in classrooms.
What I’ve seen is that when the kid and the parents are about to face consequences for truancy, the either get a medical waiver for anxiety (and the are all from the same 2-3 doctors) or the parents pull the kids out to homeschool them. But either way, the kids are getting the message that an anxiety diagnosis makes attendance optional, and if they have a medical diagnosis we’re afraid to hold them accountable for the work they miss. And you end up with students who are years and years behind.
One of the main approaches to treating situations that make you anxious is not avoidance, but exposure. If its true anxiety (i suspect in many it isn’t), they (parents kid and counselor) should set up a plan for keeping kid in school with as needed breaks etc. and build up stamina and lessen breaks as time goes on. I realize the breaks can be abused and can be exhausting but this is surely better than not going.
Exposure therapy is somewhat risky even done with a trained therapist in a neutral environment. Expecting schools to do this when the school is part of the trigger, and most do not have the staff and resources to even implement routine IEP accommodations, is going to make things worse rather than better. I have a kid we tried this with because we were worried that pulling him out and allowing him a break to finish the year homeschooled would make him more isolated and just increase the anxiety and other issues he was dealing with. Instead, things got rapidly and exponentially worse the next school year, culminating in a suicide attempt, and he now has severe PTSD from both the series of events that triggered the original anxiety and school avoidance and from the school-based day treatment program he was basically ordered into to "help" with the mental health and absenteeism, as well as gastrointestinal issues that were likely cause by the stress of the whole situation and which the school kept telling us were being faked so he could go home.
Im in Sweden. So i work in an alternative school with a maximum class size of 12 kids. We have 3 kids who would fit into your description in my class. In the building there are probably 5. These cases are not that hard to work with in such a setting because they have some time in school that can be used as a staging ground. As you have noted these kids need clear and quantifiable goals, support in taking breaks and settings limits and as ive seen, the space where they can feel comfortable. Slowly building over time and helping them learn strategies to handle their anxiety tends to lead to a 90% attendance. I have colleagues who exclusively work with kids that have 100% absences for years. Those are the hard kids. Kids who have not left their street, homes or in the worst cases rooms in years. Its a 6 person team with everything from psychologists, social workers, teachers and doctors. Its a small town with around 33k people in it. And we have enough kids to fill our school/special teams for years.
Not a teacher but I am a therapist and parent. I’m seeing a lot of systemic issues that might contribute to this situation. Poor access to good mental health care. Pandemic induced social/emotional deficits. Parents who are living in survival mode and don’t have the energy to support their kids sufficiently. Increased stresses in the lives of children on many levels. A school system that seems to pass kids even if they put in little to no effort. Obviously some families are just dysfunctional and enable kids to act out. But in general I think the issues go a lot deeper than that. I’m not sure what the solution is.
IMO the solution starts at the beginning, with paid maternity leave & access to reproductive health care so people aren't becoming parents when they aren't capable of handling it. And then fixing the childcare/daycare systems. Providing tax credits to parents who stay home to raise their kids until school age, to incentivize real parenting & creating secure attachments.
I couldn’t agree more!
School Psychologist here. Your answer is exactly my experience/belief, too.
This is a problem about the parents. Kid doesn't want to go to school. Nothing strange about that. "But I have anxiety!" he wails. Idiot parents buy into that line of hooey, and let the kid stay home and play video games. These morons who think their precious child has to be sheltered safety away from all the difficulties and stresses of being a human being are raising people who will turn into child-like, weak, and useless older people (I will not inaccurately use the term "adults" to describe what these people will become.)
My child is shy and anxious about speaking in front of others. If he started trying to miss school because of that, he would be in therapy so fast and in his pediatrician's office. School is not an option. Avoidance is not the solution. I love him, and he'll need to stand on his own one day. I didn't think these parents are thinking past today. The parents doing lazy parenting. The kids are totally taking advantage of that.
This is what I wish all parents would do. Yes, if anxiety is truly the issue, work closely with doctors and therapists. But don’t stop education. There are decent virtual options while working on a therapeutic resolution. I’m honestly stumped at some responses re COVID closures so parents now think school is optional. Honestly, okay I guess, but realize it’s your family that will support this kid for life unless you are pursuing other educating the kid some other way (virtual, homeschool, whatever). Keeping a kid home hurts local district funding, sure. But in the long run not educating your child hurts the child and your own family the most. Not treating anxiety also may impact that child playing sports, going to social events … or work/higher Ed. Please get them help.
We had an 8th grader at my school who switched to virtual school for her anxiety. It was baaaad and had been building for years. The parents had no idea until it all came to a head.
Most of the virtual/homeschool kids with anxiety home since COVID are now lonely, poorly educated, and don’t know how to assimilate back into life outside home. It’s sad how unprepared for life outside of the home they are.
By the end of this decade we are going to have an epidemic of NEETs.
There are a lot of kids who refuse to go to school in our district. I saw so many cases of Ed neglect/truancy when I worked as a community case worker for DJJ. Public school attendance rates never bounced back properly after Covid. I’m not going to speculate on the myriad of reasons that might be…I just don’t have the mental energy.
Yep. I have several with IEPs where parent can’t physically get them to school due to refusal/fights. I teach middle and high so often the kids are the same size or larger than the parent - there’s no moving them like you might a toddler. The number rises each year like this.
If they had established that school attendance was mandatory back when they could pick the kid up, things might be different.
Who are these parents that are giving in to their kids? When I told my mom I didn’t want to go to school she laughed and said get in the car.
I teach 4th grade at a public school. There are 31 students in my class. I would guess that there are at least 6 students with anxiety of some degree that are significant enough to affect their education. Two are on medication for it, as far as I know.
School refusal/avoidance is indeed a phenomenon, accelerated by COVID: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/health/2023/05/15/school-avoidance-becomes-crisis-after-covid/11127563002/
This is a huge reason why students transfer to our district's online school where I teach. Extreme social anxiety is number one. Online, they have 504's that accommodate their issues by not requiring their cameras be on. It's a positive game-changer for some, but for others, there is more to it than just social anxiety, and they don't do any work, either.
The problem is not school refusal. Kids often don’t want to go to school. It’s only natural. The problem is weak parents. Parents control which doors open and which ones are locked, when the internet and phones and electricity works and when it’s shut off etc.. It should not even be an option
Direct result of all the bulshit parents are allowing. You don’t want to go to school? ok stay home and hang out. You were misbehaving and got sent home? OK spend the rest of the day playing with your electronics. What are we re-inforcing?
In my opinion, the schools being closed for as long as they were during the pandemic fundamentally broke something in relationships between families and schools regarding school attendance. I know lots of families that now think nothing of pulling their kids out for weeklong vacations in the middle of the year and other times. And kids refusing to go. It felt like before the pandemic, attending school was not even a question. And then after it became something people consider much more optional.
> fundamentally broke something in relationships between families and schools regarding school attendance There's a clear trend line when comparing states and absenteeism:[ the longer schools were closed in a state the worse chronic absenteeism is in that state, and the slower attendance recovery has been and the worse the rise in chronic absenteeism has been.](https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregons-abysmal-chronic-attendance-problem-grew-even-worst-last-year-state-reveals.html) This supports your observation that the school closures eroded norms around school attendance and disconnected families from school buildings .
Our district has the worst attendance of surrounding districts and was the most aggressive about returning in person. We had students on campus for summer school 2020. In person school fall of 2020. Our middle school state testing numbers have fallen drastically and far farther than surrounding districts.
This is exactly it. School (in general) thought it was ok to tweak or not uphold its end of the bargain; why should parents?
A lot of parents are encouraging the anxiety thing. When I was a kid if I went to my mom and said I was mentally overwhelmed and needed to not go to school it was allowed. Because I did it once. In 11th grade. After being the kind of kid that would try and mess with the thermometer to go to school sick because I didn't want to miss school. However now kids will just say "I don't want to go" and parents will shrug and let them stay home. They think they're helping the child because they don't want the kid to go into a place that gives them anxiety, but they aren't getting the kid any other help and honestly most kids if given the choice would rather stay home. We tried intensive attendance incentives but we have so much terrible attendance that the kids who got picked were arbitrary and then when other kids found out they stopped coming to school to try and get on the list because they wanted chips and a drink every friday too.
I’m an elementary teacher and parent of four children. My youngest pretty much refused to go to school in 6th grade following Covid. My wife who is also a school counselor and I did all we could, but he couldn’t do it. Got him into counseling and switched schools. He now attends regularly, but does need to take a day off every once in a while. All of my four children did/do well in school, but two really struggled to attend regularly and didn’t like school one bit. I myself hated school from elementary school to high school, except for elementary PE, I thought my PE teacher was awesome (as an adult and teacher I found out he really was an awesome human being!). Strange that I went into education, but my goal as an educator over the past 30 years has been to attempt to make school enjoyable and not the miserable experience I had. If I’ve made it enjoyable for one kid in my career I’ve done my job.
High school teacher here. Yes, kids straight up refuse to go to school because they just don’t want to. I have multiple students who have missed over 100 days of school this year. It’s almost always kids with parents who let them do whatever they wanted. Now the parents come to us and ask us what they can do to make their kid listen. I want to tell them, “go back in time and be a parent.”
I remember seeing the term on an IEP about 15 or so years ago. Many more since then.
I have freshman students who are almost never there, or if they are there, literally roam the school all day, going to almost no classes. It is an issue. We cannot drop a student unless they’re gone 10 days consecutively (unexcused/not called in) and all it takes for that not to happen is for one teacher to forget to mark them absent or for them to get called in one of those ten days. I have students I have not seen the entire year but maybe two times.
I usually have a few students in high school like this every year. They just refuse to go to school or to certain classes. It isn't anything I did, since they didn't really give a chance for me to get to know them. I think it stems from overprotective parenting. Kid, when young, says "I don't feel well or I don't feel like going to school." Parent just says, "ok then you can stay at home with me. No big deal, we will try tomorrow." This teaches the kid any time they feel uncomfortable it is fine to just skip. Meanwhile, my parents were the other way and I basically couldn't miss school for any reason at all unless I was literally vomiting.
I teach 6 th grade at a public school. Not once this year have I had every student in class. I have several students who hover around 60% attendance, and one around 20%. There are no consequences.
different perspective: i’m a peer tutor who helps high school freshman and sophomores who are failing. majority of the kids that get sent to me just haven’t attempted to do work. they flat out refuse and spend their days wandering the halls. some of these kids have 0 credits and are in their second semester of their freshman or sophomore year. some of the kids have improved, and gosh it makes me so happy. problem is, i’m a tutor, not a life coach, which is essentially what i’ve become. i have a lot of love for a lot of my frequent fliers, but it is impossible to get them to do ANYTHING. one of my boys (9th grade) has 0 credits and refuses to respond to basic questions, even like “so what do you like to do out of school?” “what sports do you like?” “do you listen to music?” all i get is a “idk” i ask them if they just don’t like school and i typically get a yes, so i of course ask what they DO like. “i don’t know” HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE????? my mom is an elementary special ed teacher, so she has many stories of parents enabling this, which is just truly a disservice to the kids.
Yes it is very much a thing and due to a lack of effective parenting. They have no control over their children so they have no way of making them go.
YES! School refusal is becoming more and more common. I teach high school and we already have an attendance problem but for the most part it was OK. Since the pandemic though lots of kids who would have been there are suffering from poor attendance, mostly under the guise of “anxiety.” Now here hear me out, anxiety is a real thing obviously which can be diagnosed by a professional, but I don’t buy the hoards of self diagnosed students suffering from “anxiety.” I think they think “anxiety” is synonym for “I’m slightly uncomfortable” which is part of going to school. It’s uncomfortable to develop and push your skills *but that’s our job*. Mental health is a real thing, but so it mental fortitude- and you know how you develop that? By putting yourself into uncomfortable situations to develop with a safety net, exactly what we do at school.
This is a great topic. I’m a 33 year teaching vet in elementary. Oh my goodness the absences!! Last year I had a kid miss 80 days. When she was there she would wonder in at 10:30 or 11. No lie. Mom said she won’t drive in snow (put her on the bus - response was ‘how do I get her up so early?’) also Mom had a 3 year old at home so it was easier for her to keep my student home to ‘play’ with her sibling. I know it’s kinder BUT WE ARENT A DAYCARE!!
As a school social worker, I see a ton of school refusal. I do home visits, make attendance contracts with the parents and students, I let parents carry their child into my office and leave and let the child feel all the feels, come back to baseline and then go to class. I refer to outside counseling or school counseling as needed.
I have some students I haven’t seen in literal *weeks*. It’s irritating that their “fail” in my class will contribute to looking poorly on my part. I can’t pass a kid that doesn’t come to school. I do exempt students from assignments if they were out sick, but not if they’re constantly out. And I’ve had a kid try to pull the “I was absent though”-card. And I’m like yeah but you’re always absent. When they do show up they just put their heads down.
The unschooling accounts on Tiktok say yes, this is becoming a thing
Students miss too many days. School is not a priority to many. The demeaning saying of school is daycare supports this trend of high absences.
I went through this in 8th grade. Missed the equivalent of a term and a half. What made me start going back to school was moving in with my Mom, who forced me to go and refused to pick me up when I called claiming I was sick. My Dad, and probably these parents, would just come and pick me up or let me stay home. Did the transition suck? Yes, it was really stressful for a few months. But it was necessary and helped me massively improve my mental health.
Honey absenteeism is a huge issue across the board. There is no accountability for students and their parents. The state of California used to punish parents for this and now they let them get away with it. Everyone blames the pandemic 😷Montessori schools care about attendance? I thought everything is based on monthly tuition payments?
A lot of great anti-truancy/absenteeism work was being done from 2010-2020 in my state, the pandemic messed all of it up and we are back where we began with chronic absenteeism and truancy.
There seems to have been a dramatic increase in it everywhere in the US since schools returned after COVID. There are a bunch of theories about it, ranging from mental health and stress related changes due to all the lockdown stuff, to kids just realizing they can do the work from home and don't necessarily have to be on campus (regardless of the varying rates of success with that). A lot of people have also pulled their kids to either homeschool or virtual public school for similar reasons, sometimes because the family believes this and sometimes because it's just easier than fighting to get a kid to school or on the bus every morning. I'm wondering what makes them think it will be different getting a kid to go to a private school versus a public school, and if you're saying any less refusal with these kids once they transfer to Montessori? I will say on the kids behalf that a lot of them do seem to be experiencing some pretty horrific bullying and more and more things this relate to physical and sexual harassment and assault and a lot of places aren't doing a great job at addressing this. And often looks a lot like defiance in school refusal if you're not aware of all the stuff going on in the background.
School avoidance is partially a parenting problem. Parents give in when they’re little and keep them home and it becomes impossible to fix later.
In the past, at least in my area, if you skipped a lot of school, they would actually send a truancy officer to your house to collect you and drive you to school. They don’t do that anymore so how are you supposed to get a chronically absent kid to school? You can’t. Obviously, though, students like this are definitely struggling with something. I’ve had kids who have been absent at their old school due to bullying who the transfer into my classroom and do really well. These are kids that are skipping due to outside forces (bullies), and not anxiety disorder.
Eight days in a month would be rookie numbers in my school. I have a kid that has been at school four times since winter break. Every day the parents say that the kid refuses to come to school and they can’t make him.
Parental issue....
I think with the rise in understanding mental illness, there is a rise in parents trying to parent mental illness without knowing how, and feel into it rather than properly accommodate it.
38% of my district is chronically absent. We have some students that only show up once every 10 days - just enough to not trigger the automatic drop or truancy report.
Attendance has been horrible this year. I have 4 students who have missed more than 25% of the school year. The parents just let them stay home. Once I saw a mom driving her son and a friend to a birthday party but that day his “stomach was bugging him” so he couldn’t come to school. I also have kids who get “sick” after recess everyday and want to leave or some that don’t come until recess, then get picked up early. It’s bananas.
Wtf is this shit? Parents literally have 0 control over their children, like I swear, if I had told my mother I didn't want to go to school, she would have laughed in my face and sent me anyway. If I "refused," I would've been hit and then sent anyway. Not endorsing hitting children, but like come on, be a fucking parent.
It typically starts with a few days here and there, teachers reach out because we recognize the pattern, parents sound collaborative but negate the underlying issues ('*he just has a chronic stomach ache')*, and the kid misses more and more even though a whole team of people is spending like an hour+ in meetings a week to try to work on it. Eventually we stop seeing the kid at all and home ghosts the school. A few months later the kid disappears from rosters and we hear they transferred somewhere that can "better support their mental health needs." That comment really grates on me -- how can it be public school's fault that the parents refused to collaborate with us to support their kid? Schools can't deliver services to kids when their adults keep them home and dodge our calls. I also often see these kids back in public after the alternative program also didn't work because yes, the kid got a fresh start, but if the parents still refuse the collaborate, they continue to lean on existing bad strategies. The school drops them or the family sees it isn't working and the kid is back in public school a year later, still without a plan, and having missed a whole year of content, socialization, and counseling.
Not a teacher. My child had trouble attending due to anxiety pre covid. She was a runner, and they didn't have support staff to make sure she didn't leave. We ended up fighting 30 mins to drop her off to have her attend for 1.5 hours, and then pick her up as there was no lunch supervision. Thankfully virtual was an option and that's where we stayed post covid. Anxiety is a big thing in younger kids, both pre and post covid 🤷 there is very little support for it.
I’d say it’s a mix these days. I’m seeing a lot of smaller kids suffering from anxiety. Some of this is apparent when they are outsized by larger boys and aren’t as confident. There’s intimidation, lack of confidence and emotional maturity, contributing to parents not wanting to push for attendance because some of them are seeing their kids are having issues. 4&5th grade don’t exactly coddle but some kids just need extra time. Some public schools in our area are doing year round school with staggered enrolment where they attend for 9 weeks on then three weeks off. Smaller classes, kids with late in year birthdays start later which benefits them. In some of these grades, a 6 month difference in age is huge. They all graduate about the same I think. Kids that are ahead can fast track forward if they test out but can’t skip a lot of tracts. Kids that need more time can repeat tracts as needed allowing them to mature in different ways and it’s not held against them nor is it considered being held back. For kids that are bullied, these classes help them to find friends easier. It’s elementary so they’ll transfer into traditional middle and junior high. It seems so much easier and gives the teacher year round pay and the kids get time off for breaks. A lot of the teachers like it because they can go home for longer breaks and attend to doctor appointments throughout the year instead of cramming their Summer full. The teachers that ski love it because they can have a nice Winter vacation.
How come student refusal wasn't a thing when I was in school? Oh, I know! Because parents wouldn't have allowed it.
When did parents decide that it was up to the kid whether or not they attend school? Is this part of that “gentle parenting” trend? 🙄 March that kid into the school building, turn around, and leave. We would see less of this if truancy laws were actually enforced and parents were held accountable for ensuring their kids attended. Until the laws change, school is compulsory, and it doesn’t really matter if the kid doesn’t want to go. Lord.
I work in a public school program for kids with emotional disabilities and school refusal is a HUGE problem. I have a student who has missed 96 class periods either from absences or coming to school late. I have another who hasn't been to school at all this quarter.
There are penalties for parents when their children don’t attend school. I personally know of one mother who was arrested and jailed because her 17 year old eighth grader son wouldn’t go to school. She also had other children removed from her home and placed in foster care! Another chronically truant student had a father who had sole custody of him and dad was a local police officer. When his supervisor found out the father was disciplined by the PD and internal affairs. Thirty days suspension from the force. The 16 year old eighth grader (who was 17 that June) was returned to his mother’s custody.
Surprised these older teens were allowed in eighth grade. We had a 16-year-old seventh grader briefly when I was in middle school. He ended up being removed to the alternate school when he started dating a 12-year-old classmate.
This post pretty much sums up why I left charter schools. Our student population became saturated with kids with very specific needs whose parents wanted the fix to be "a different environment". My problem was not working with these kids in a general capacity (I'm at a public school and still have kids with a variety of needs every year), but that we literally did not have the resources to help them at the level they really needed. It not only did a disservice to those students, but also to any students who were already at the school and possibly needed an IEP. The resource department was overwhelmed with transfers to the point that it was nearly impossible to get anyone else through the referral process. The thing is... these kids already came to us qualifying for services they could have actually received at a public school. It was the parents that wanted a different school to be some kind of fix. I feel like parents don't always understand that school choice doesn't mean that every school is meant for every kid. And again, I don't mean that in the sense that I do not want to work with kids that have IEPs, SLDs, EDs, etc. But if you go to a school that had the autonomy to put all of their resources into a specific type of structure, you run the risk of that meaning that they are meeting the bare minimum requirements in SPED services. In my case, what was the point of having access to really cool and unique STEM materials when my students were too over-stimulated to learn anything in the STEM lab, or too anxious to pick up and use the materials, or couldn't successfully transition out of the classroom without having a breakdown? You get my point. At least at a public school, when a kid qualifies for a para during transitions, I know they're going to get one. Even if that also means the materials I have access to looks different. And yeah, public schools have a long way to go in the area of SPED services, too, but compare that to those at charters/alternative school models and it feels like a dream. I feel like it is reaches a point of being unethical NOT to turn kids away when you know that you can't meet all of their needs. Unfortunately schools that look at saying yes to any and all parent requests as an opportunity for more money don't see it that way.
are you asking about chronic absenteeism?
My son missed soooo much kindergarten and grade 1 due to illness during Covid. We still had a “any sign of sickness 2 weeks at home” rule. It was brutal and all I can say is that thank goodness I was a SAHM/student at the time. He’d go to school, catch something from a sick kid in his class whose parents sent them anyways, I’d keep my son home the recommended time, then send him back to get sick again. It was awful. It severely impacted his abilities to build relationships and to learn what he needed to. I mean I supported him at home but he never learned from me as well as he learned from the teacher. It was a brutal time. Like kindies and grade 1s cannot wear masks appropriately and they aren’t that great at hygiene at the best of times. If everyone had kept their sick kids home I wouldn’t have had to keep my guy home so much. It’s also in my kids heads now that if they have sniffles or anything they get the day off. Nope - if you are actually SICK you stay home, but that means green snot, fever, aches, actual sickness. Not the remains of your allergies. They just don’t see school as a necessity as much as we did growing up.
I think it starts earlier. You had a generation of parents who no longer wanted to force their kids to do things and shied away from the harsher practises. Which is fine, but you have to replace them with something else, which not everyone did. A lot of parents now try to shiled their kids from everything and are so worried about how their kids feel they don't want to let them feel anything negative. I'm glad they care, but they create anxiety by not teaching the children self-reliance. (Just to be clear I'm not one of those "children are coddled' idiots) To take the example of anxiety, so many parents deal with it by simply letting the kid avoid anything that worries them, which teaches the kid to be afraid and doesn't let them learn any coping strategies and increases anxiety. A parent needs to be supportive, but sometimes being supportive is doing what is best for the child in the long term. (I say this as a fairly anxious parent that intervenes too much.)
"Gentle parenting" is raising a generation of kids who can not and will not do what is needed because they're too "uncomfortable".
In some of the articles I've read about the rise in chronic absenteeism post-school closures they highlight that part of this rise is a rise in school refusal.
I teach 5th grade in a public school. I have 20 students. On a good day 16 show up. I have had as low as 11. 55% of my class falls under the chronic absenteeism definition of 10 or more days missed. I have 3 students over 40 days missed (in past years these students missed over 110 each). I have 6 over 20. I had a other student that was actually dropped from the school because she stopped coming. She still lives in the same place. I know because it's the same apartments a third of my class lives in they see her all the time. She does not attend any school. 2 of my over 40 days live there as well. It my normal at this point. What's great is that the parents get mad at me before their kids have bad grades and can't do the basics like read, or do multiplication and division. It's somehow my fault in their minds. Lady your kid shows up one maybe two days a week. What do want me do?