Truancy and Meaningful Student Involvement

For more than 100 years, schools have wrestled with truancy. Anytime students are intentionally late for class, late for school, or skipping class, they are deemed truant by schools. There are a lot of rules and regulations in schools governing truancy. Most schools and school districts use punishments to enforce those rules and regulations. Meaningful Student Involvement can play an important role in overcoming the challenges truancy presents in learning, teaching and leadership in K-12 schools.

Opportunities for Meaningful Student Involvement

Students can become partners in addressing truancy in a lot of ways. With adults as allies, they can learn a great deal about why truancy happens, what it does and means, how it affects them and their schools, and why it matters so much. In schools and district offices across the nation, students and adults are working together to transform truancy through research, evaluation, planning and decision-making.

• BOSTON: Working with district administration and their superintendent, the Boston Student Advisory Council (BSAC) investigated why students do not stay in school and became disengaged. BSAC created a survey, interviewed students, collected data and presented their findings to the School Committee. BSAC has combined their solutions with those of the dropout rate research and created a document that is still alive.

Related Content

• Understanding Student Disengagement
• Engaging the Disengaged
• School to Prison Pipeline
• Zero Tolerance and Meaningful Student Involvement
• Convenient or Inconvenient Student Voice?
• Bullying and Student Voice
• Zero Tolerance and Meaningful Student Involvement
• Student Behavior and Meaningful Student Involvement
• Safety, Violence and Meaningful Student Involvement
• Dropouts and Meaningful Student Involvement
• Restorative justice and Meaningful Student Involvement
• Discipline and Meaningful Student Involvement
• School-to-Prison Pipeline and Meaningful Student Involvement

Elsewhere Online

• Slee, R. (1994) “Finding a Student Voice in School Reform: student disaffection, pathologies of disruption and educational control,” International Studies in Sociology of Education, 4:2, 147-172.