Giving Compass' Take:

• Elissa Nadworny reports that a study found that living in or traveling through a high-crime area reduces student attendance at school. 

• How can funders work to ensure that students are safe on their way to and from schools? 

• Find out how attendance impacts math skills. 

Getting students to show up is one of the biggest challenges schools face: How can someone learn at school if they're not there in the first place?

A new study suggests living in a high-crime area, or simply passing through one on the way to school, can impact how often students show up to class.

"Some kids have a harder time getting to a school than others, not for any fault of their own, but because of the way the transportation system is set up, because of the way crime clusters in particular places," explains Julia Burdick-Will, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and the lead author of the study. "It might not be huge, or every day, but it adds up."

She and her team looked at how neighborhood crime in Baltimore affects attendance. The vast majority of students there use public transportation (like many urban school systems, Baltimore City Public Schools don't bus students). Researchers mapped the routes high school freshmen took to and from school — what streets they were walking on, when and where they picked up a bus, when they transferred, etc. Then, researchers applied crime data by location and time of day to see how those findings related to student absences for the year.

They discovered "kids who are supposed to be walking along streets with higher rates of violent crime are more likely to miss school," Burdick-Will explains.

Read the full article about how crime impacts student attendance by Elissa Nadworny at NPR.