It’s hard to believe, but students will be heading back to school in less than three weeks! The 2024 school year will mark the start of a new state pilot program to tackle absenteeism. Twelve school districts were given funding by the legislature to create new strategies to combat a big problem in the state.

Absenteeism is defined as missing more than 10 percent of the school year. And in Minnesota in 2023, the Department of Education found there were more than 300,000 students statewide, or about 30 percent who are considered chronically absent from school.

Those numbers are even higher in Minneapolis Public Schools where more than half of students were frequently absent in 2023.

To learn more about this problem and the solutions districts are implementing, MPR News host Cathy Wurzer was joined by a retired researcher and former head of the Hennepin County “Be At School” program Tim Zuel and Colleen Kaibel, the director of student retention and recovery at Minneapolis Public Schools.