Approximately 12-minute read · Systems · K–12

Can every student actually get to school, and who is responsible when the route itself fails? Statutes, district policy and a map often decide whether a child can reach school. Attendance data records the absence; it rarely records why the ride failed.

When a student is chronically absent, the first questions schools usually ask are about the student: motivation, health, family engagement. A growing body of law and research argues for asking an earlier question. Can this child physically get to school, on time, every day, and get home again? In much of the country, the answer depends less on the family than on a statute, a district policy and a map. As Jess Anderson has put it, chronic absence “doesn’t tell you what’s wrong, it just tells you that there’s a problem.”

The full post inventories what state transportation law requires and what it leaves to chance, follows a Maine question into a national pattern, shows what a school did when it stopped treating the ride as the family’s problem, and sets out where Attendance Science™ fits. Read it in full, and download the PDF, at the DOI below.