One major issue that schools are currently facing and seeing little or no improvement is about truancy

One major issue that schools are currently facing and seeing little or no improvement is about truancy. Our school, Saint Thomas Aquinas College, is not even exempted from this problem. Truancy according to a certain dictionary is the practice of staying away from school without permission. Teachers have been trying to motivate their students to come to school every day to study especially the truants. In addition, truant cases has been for many years but recently it has become more serious as the number of cases rises continuously.
Sharma T.R (1981) made a survey of the problem of truancy among high school students. He observed that truants are mostly boys and they are generally quite healthy. Main contributing factors are uneducated father, illiterate mother, overcrowded houses, bad economic conditions, low intelligence, and bad company.
Eastwold (1989) stated that some researchers believe that truancy problems can be blamed on ineffective school attendance policies. In some cases the costs in time and energy to enforce compulsory education statutes seem to outweigh the benefits. As a result schools will develop policies that devote the most energy to those students expected to have the best chance of success. He also indicate that the burden of reducing truancy rates rests primarily with schools, and a message that can be drawn from the research is that schools can affect truancy rate whenever they give high priority to effective attendance policies. Eastwold identified the most effective policies as those that have the following elements: 20 Expectations and outcomes are clear and well publicized, policies are followed consistently by everyone, students are held responsible for their actions and their parents are involved.
According to Woog (1992), three theoretical categories identify the causes or predictors of student attendance specifically are: those which identify the cause of the absenteeism with the student or his/her family characteristics, those which identify the student’s social or economic environment as the causal factor, and those which examine the effect of various school characteristics as influential in the absentee rate of students. The 1977 Educational Research Service report identifies age, IQ, achievement, religion, and co-curricular activities as associated with various rates of absenteeism. Older students, students living with one parent, students with lower IQ scores, students with lower grades, students who did not participate in school activities, and non-Jewish students all were noted to have higher absentee rates than did their counterparts. Galloway (1985) reports that frequently absent students have a fear of teachers or specific subjects. He also reports that the families of absent students were noted as scoring much higher on measurements of familial stress. Both of Gallaway’s reports identified an unfavorable parental attitude toward school as a significant influence on the absence rate of their children. Galloway’s (1985) research showed excessive absentees 29 as students whose families had experienced financial problems or whose parents experienced poor health. Galloway suggests that the poor economic condition of the family may generate a negative attitude toward school either because the family needs the student to work and contribute to the family income or because education is not perceived to be an avenue to increased economic status.