Absences happen every day. It’s normal in a way, but all you have to do to take note of chronically truant students is take a look around the classroom and see who is never there.
According to LAUSD, excused absences include things such as being ill, having an injury, a medical appointment or a family emergency. Unexcused absences include everything else, including something as simple as saying that they don’t want to go to school.
A series of three unexcused absences will label you as truant, which isn’t something to brag about, like some might believe.
It can essentially wreck your education.
Being chronically truant leads to days worth of designated class time gone to waste and missing those valuable lessons can lead to declining grades and losing credits needed to graduate.
It’s easy to grasp that missing classes will result in low grades in the short-term, but in the long run, chronic truancy can get so much worse than just sabotaging your education.
It’s found that mental health conditions are also at risk when you avoid school.
Truant students are more vulnerable to loneliness and increased mental health issues. Your constant absence can risk increasing or creating problems like social isolation, depression and anxiety.
Along with your mental health, choices made to skip school can also affect loved ones.
Guardians are also responsible for their dependent’s actions and are susceptible to legal consequences and fines, or in the more extreme cases, can be brought to court, resulting in potential criminal or civil charges.
But if that’s not enough to deter someone from skipping, those who continuously skip school can be sent to the district attorney’s office or even juvenile court.
However, despite these net negatives, there has been a normalization of skipping in high school environments that has fostered a culture of skipping.
For many chronic truants, sometimes the goal of skipping class is to miss heavy assignments, exhausting projects and stressful tests.
Instead of being viewed as an educational detriment, it’s instead seen as the norm to blow off class.
Chronic absence isn’t helped when ditching students aren’t being called out by their peers in fear of being labeled a snitch or rat.
This normalization of skipping class has also been accompanied by new cultures of substance abuse in students.
The presence of drugs, alcohol and other substances are in practically every high school but it poses an even greater threat when students aren’t in a supervised environment.
There’s truly no good outcome of constantly avoiding school. Even if consequences appear to go unenforced, a truant student will still feel the weight of missing school.
The actions of truant students are already dangerous but what makes it all the more hazardous is that they certainly can’t and won’t be responsible for their own actions – their actions don’t just affect them.
And to think they’d rather all that than just going to class.
