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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Education Report: Chronic Absenteeism Undermines Over 5 Million Students

Education Report: Chronic Absenteeism Undermines Over 5 Million Students:


Education Report: Chronic Absenteeism Undermines Over 5 Million Students

Danet Robaina-Cline, an attendance counselor at Chaparral High, considers her school lucky.

Like other schools in Las Vegas, a city reeling from the worst ravages of the foreclosure crisis, Chaparral serves impoverished children. They live in foster care or homeless shelters. They must watch over their younger siblings or move several times a year. But because Chaparral is in the middle of a well-funded turnaround process, it's one of the very few schools that can afford an attendance counselor.

It's one of the very few schools that could have picked up on the fact that a certain student was the sole breadwinner for his family.

After Chaparral's attendance reporting system found this student had missed many days of school, administrators sent him to talk with Robaina-Cline. "During our second meeting, he was discussing this very