Today marks the beginning of Attendance Awareness Month.
Each year, as many as 7,500,000 students across the country miss nearly a month of school in both excused and non-excused absences. These absences is frequently a prediction of future scholastic failure and a warning sign of students not graduating from high school. The problem of chronic absences is that they disproportionately affects children from low-income families and communities of color, creating graduation gaps.