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Senate committee debates definitions and policy for chronic absenteeism and truancy
Summary
Committee members debated H.955 provisions that define chronic absenteeism (a 10%‑of‑days threshold) and truancy (20+ unexcused absences or 175 consecutive days), discussed whether excused vs. unexcused lists should be statutory, and asked AOE to prepare a model policy for nonpunitive interventions.
The Senate Education Committee spent extensive time on H.955’s attendance provisions, testing where law should draw lines between chronic absenteeism and truancy and how schools should respond.
Legislative counsel summarized the draft definitions: "chronic absenteeism [is] a student who is absent for any reason for 10% or more of a district's...attendance days for one year," and truancy is defined separately as a student who accumulates 20 or more unexcused absences within a school year or within a district's last 175 consecutive student attendance days. Committee members debated whether the bill should treat excused and unexcused absences differently in statute or leave the detailed categorization to agency policy, noting that the treatment carries different consequences.
Several members pushed back on writing a long, statutory laundry list of what counts as an excused absence. One member warned that enumerating many categories risks creating subjective judgments about families' circumstances and suggested instead that the agency develop a model policy and a tracking system. "There is no legal consequence for being chronically absent, but there is a legal consequence for truancy," a committee member noted, underscoring the committee's distinction between population-level measurement (chronic absenteeism) and individual legal proceedings (truancy).
Committee discussion covered numeric thresholds and timing: members observed that schools must hold at least 175 attendance days and questioned whether a 10% threshold (roughly 17–18 days on that calendar) is sufficiently sensitive compared with the 20-day truancy trigger. Some members favored an earlier flag (for example, 10 days) to prompt early intervention instead of waiting for a punitive threshold.
The counsel pointed to language that instructs AOE to develop a model policy addressing chronic absenteeism and truancy, including how to address absences for students with disabilities and as a result of harassment or bullying; committee members said that model-policy approach could be a nonpunitive way to respond while allowing flexibility to address varied causes of absence.
The committee left the definitions under active review, requested witnesses (including AOE and local practitioners) to advise on thresholds and implementation, and agreed to resume detailed markup at a future meeting.
