Functional impairment guidelines for school attendance problems in youth: Recommendations for caseness in the modern era.

Abstract

School attendance and its problems (absenteeism) are critical benchmarks of functioning in children and adolescents but also represent highly vexing case presentations for practicing psychologists and other health and school-based professionals. This is especially the case in the modern era marked by multiple teaching and learning platforms. A key challenge in this regard has been determining the point at which a specific case of absenteeism may be considered problematic (i.e., caseness). This article outlines proposed functional impairment guidelines for this population as a common language to define caseness that can apply to various types of school absenteeism, educational formats, jurisdictions and geographical areas, and developmental levels and grades. The guidelines focus on three primary domains: school (timing of school absences; interference with academic competence; administrative/legal action that impedes future school attendance), social (interference with social competence; interference in interpersonal relationships; enhanced risk of harm to others), and family (interference with daily family functioning; significant, maladaptive changes in family dynamics; substantial cost to family members). Recommendations are provided with respect to defining caseness and developing functional impairment assessments for this population. Public Significance StatementThe present article summarizes proposed guidelines for determining whether school attendance problems rise to the level of need for intervention by psychologists, other health care practitioners, and school-based professionals. The guidelines focus on potential problems with respect to school, social, and family functioning that may also help guide solutions for individual cases of school absenteeism.

The Unlearning of School Attendance: Ideas for Change

“…The revised definitions also allow for growth metrics such as school achievement that focus on on-track instead of off-track status for students . The revised definitions further allow for greater understanding of whether engagement, or lack thereof, could be informed by impairment in school (e.g., academic achievement), social (e.g., interpersonal skills, relationships), and family (e.g., financial cost) domains (Kearney, 2022). Both examples eschew traditional emphases on timeline and physical location and synthesize systemic and analytic perspectives by adopting a mutual language to define school attendance/ absenteeism, incorporating multiple instructional formats (e.g., in-person, hybrid, and online), and allowing for categorical distinctions better informed by dimensional aspects .…”

Translating sophisticated data analytic strategies regarding school attendance and absenteeism into targeted educational policy

“…For example, school absences in kindergarten or early in the academic year may be more negatively impactful than school absences later in high school or at the end of an academic year (Koopmans, 2016; Olson, 2014). Other researchers have also examined interference in social and academic competencies that could serve as functional impairment criteria to help define problematic absenteeism for specific students or student groups (Egger et al, 2003; Gonzálvez et al, 2019; Havik et al, 2015; Kearney, 2022).…”

School attendance problems and absenteeism as early warning signals: review and implications for health-based protocols and school-based practices

“…Considerable debate exists as to the direction of school attendance/ absenteeism and its concomitant benefits/impairments; either can be a cause and/or a consequence of the other. This debate is set aside for now in favor of a parallel approach (i.e., concurrent school attendance/ absenteeism with benefits/impairments) for practical purposes and until future empirical work specifically addresses this question for this population (Kearney, 2022). Instead, the assumption adopted for the following sections is that SAPs/absenteeism are proximal and integral features across many key domains of functioning and thus a potentially salient warning signal of an unhealthy state.…”