Regardless of children’s economic status or commute time, if they take the school bus, they are more likely to attend class.
Those are the results of a Brookings Institute study that has just been released. It compared the absenteeism rates of kindergarteners in the 2010-2011 school year who took the bus or got to school in any other way, such as being driven to campus by a parent. The study found that children who took the bus to school were three percentage points less likely to be chronically absent.
The study is timely in that some districts are now trying to relieve their budget shortfalls by cutting bus services.
Campus Safety magazine has previously reported on our nation’s school absenteeism issue. Each year in California, for example, about one million elementary school students are truant, and 250,000 miss 18 or more school days at a cost of $1.4 billion in lost funds to school districts in the state.
Nationally, as many of 5 million to 7.5 million K-12 students are missing one month or more each school year, according to Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. The consequences of missing school are lower academic achievement and poor social development, among other things.
