Giving Compass' Take:

· Absenteeism doesn't just affect students, it costs schools money. Here, Governing Magazine identifies a simple solution to reduce the negative impact of absent students—mail-based intervention.

· How does chronic absenteeism affect students? How does it affect the school? What are some other ways schools are working to reduce the number of chronically absent students?

· Here's more on this topic and how one group is addressing chronic absenteeism. 

When kids miss school, it's not just their grades that suffer.

For nearly a quarter of school districts in the country, truancy has a fiscal impact on education. Schools in California, Kentucky and Texas, for example, operate on an average daily attendance formula that deducts state funding from a school for each day a student misses class. In the 2016-2017 school year, truancy cost the Los Angeles Unified School District $20 million.

When presidential hopeful Kamala Harris took the reigns as attorney general in California, she took a tough-on-parent approach to truancy. The now U.S. senator backed a 2011 law that allowed parents to be fined up to $2,000 or face a year in jail if their child was absent more than 10 percent of the school year. (Harris eventually softened her stance amid pushback.)

The issue of truancy is one that plagues schools across the country. About 14 percent of all students were chronically absent in the 2013-14 school year, according to Education Department data released last year.

But a simple change can increase attendance for chronically truant students.

Read the full article about reducing absenteeism by J. Brian Charles at Governing Magazine.