As we close out calendar year 2023 and embark on a new year, school officials need to be aware of their obligations in the area of school attendance and truancy. Student attendance is critical for positive outcomes, and the law is clear that school officials cannot remain passive when a student is excessively absent from school. Ohio’s school attendance laws, most recently updated with 2016’s House Bill (HB) 410, outline very specific steps that school officials are required to follow when students meet certain thresholds of absences.
Fortunately, there are many resources available for district officials to understand their procedural obligations under Ohio law and to help them formulate specific strategies to intervene when attendance becomes an issue. Last month, an Attendance Task Force put together by the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) released a new publication entitled Ohio’s Attendance Guide: District and School Practices in Early Intervention. The resource is available on DEW’s website and is a helpful guide for administrators and teachers to formulate strategies to improve attendance.
The guide includes information about why attendance is important, the district’s legal obligations, and information about multi-tiered and creative solutions for improving attendance. It discusses strategies that can be implemented district-wide as well as more individualized and intensive interventions that district staff can use to help individual students and families by identifying possible barriers to attendance and implementing strategies targeted to those barriers.
This guide to districts is one of many that have been made available since HB 410’s passage. OSBA offers a Student Attendance and Tuition guide, which is available for purchase in our store here. We also offer an Attendance, Tuition and Custody workshop for members every August. OSBA members are welcome to contact our Legal Hotline with questions about the law at 855-OSBA-LAW.
We hope all our members have a great holiday season. Please be on the lookout for more posts on the Legal Ledger as we enter 2024!