'It's cool to be in school': Studies show absences can have detrimental effect on students

SALT LAKE CITY — With a smile on his face, Robert Alfredo Deanda struts to the front of his school's auditorium to get his perfect attendance certificate.

It's one of the last days of school, but Deanda has been working on this award all year.

"A couple days I was sleepy or tired or felt lazy, but I didn't want to be one of the kids who didn't get perfect attendance," the 12-year-old says just moments after the assembly where 40 other students from Jackson Elementary also got perfect attendance certificates — a kind of record at the school.

Schools across the country have celebrated perfect attendance in recent weeks — giving out certificates, trophies, bikes and even cars. And while some have complained about perfect attendance awards — calling the awards unrealistic goals that push kids to go to school even when they are sick — the awards do encourage students like Deanda to make school a priority. This is his third year of getting perfect attendance.

Research shows that attendance is an important predictor of achievement in school — even for kindergartners. Some parents, like American Fork mom Heidi Alldredge, believe absences are becoming more of a problem in the fast-paced world.

Nationally, about one in 10 kindergartners is chronically absent or misses 18 or more days in a school year, said Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national initiative to advance student achievement by reducing chronic absence. A study in California released last month showed that students chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade only had a 17 percent chance of reaching their targeted reading level at the end of third grade, the point at which researchers say if students aren't on track, they may never be, Chang explained.

And by ninth grade, school attendance is a better predictor of graduation than eighth-grade test scores, according to a study conducted by the University of Chicago in 2007.

"This is a universal issue in our society," Chang said, adding that by middle school, students of all backgrounds are affected equally by chronic absence.

Schools are starting to catch on and have come up with new ways to recognize attendance. In recent years, for example, schools have begun rewarding perfect attendance in smaller doses — like if a student is at school every day for a semester, a month or even a week straight.