Facts about School Attendance
🚨🚨🚨 NEW OHIO LAW – Effective October 1, 2025: Changes made under Ohio House Bill 96 (2025 Budget Bill) 📘 Ohio Dept. of Education Attendance Guidance
📍30 hours of absences (excused OR unexcused) = Warning letter + support services offered
📍60 hours of absences (excused OR unexcused) = Required Intervention Plan meeting (in person, phone, or Google Meet). If attendance doesn't improve, your case may go to Juvenile Court.
📍Habitual truancy (30+ consecutive hours unexcused, 42 hours/month unexcused, OR 72 hours/year unexcused) = Juvenile Court filing
What Families Can Do:
✓ Call the school early when your child is absent
✓ Get your student to school ON TIME and keep them ALL DAY
✓ Schedule appointments outside school hours when possible
✓ Request and complete missed work
✓ Partner with teachers to keep your student on track
Goal: 9 days or less absent per year = academic success!
Questions? Contact your school. We're here to support your student's success!
ATTENDANCE MATTERS EVERY DAY!
- Missing 10% of school (1 or 2 days every few weeks) can make it harder for preschool and kindergarten students to:
- Gain early reading and math skills.
- Build relationships.
- Develop good attendance habits.
- Too many absences in preschool and elementary school can cause children to struggle socially and academically.
- Being late to school may lead to poor attendance.
- Missing 10% of school (2 days each month) can make it harder to learn to read and do basic math.
- Students should miss no more than 9 days of school each year to stay engaged, successful and on track to graduation.
- Frequent absences can be a sign that a student is losing interest in school, struggling with school work, dealing with a bully or facing some other difficulty.
- By 6th grade, absenteeism is one of three signs that a student may drop out of high school.
- By 9th grade, attendance is a better predictor of graduation rates than 8th-grade8th grade test scores.
- Missing 10%, or 2 days a month, over the course of the school year, can affect a student’s academic success.
HEALTHY CULTURE
In Lorain City Schools, we believe that creating a warm and caring environment encourages our students to see our classrooms and buildings as their daily destination.
That's why we have kicked up our Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) approach with a district-wide initiative built around kindness this school year.
Why kindness? Because we believe that as we increase kindness across the district, we will decrease the behaviors that interfere with positive environments.
PBIS | KINDNESS
Here are some approaches we use to incorporate our PBIS approach into our attendance campaign.
Rewarding students for acts of kindness, especially when they are Kind to Self, Kind to Others, and Kind to their Environments. You will see this reward system play out in our buildings in different ways, from celebrations to game days, extra recess, or just a positive note sent to the office; we aim to recognize our students for the kindness they bring to our buildings.
STAY IN THE GAME
Lorain City Schools is partnering with the Cleveland Browns Stay in the Game! Network to help all students TitanUp Attendance this school year.
KNOW THE TERMS
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DAILY ATTENDANCE | The percentage of students present each day |
HABITUAL TRUANCY
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EXCESSIVE ABSENCE
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CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM
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