New Ohio Attendance and Truancy Law

The Ohio General Assembly passed House Bill 410 that goes into effect this new school year. With this new law, all school districts across the State will be required to notify parents of specific accumulated excused and unexcused absences during the school year. The Ohio Department of Education released guidance documents to school districts in the last couple of weeks. With these documents the school district is now able to share with you information about this new State requirement.

With this new law, two new categories of accumulated absences were created: Excessive Absences and Habitual Truant.

 Excessive absences is defined by: 

1. “38 or more hours in one school month with or without a legitimate excuse”, and
2. “65 or more hours in one school year with or without a legitimate excuse”.  

If a student meets the above criteria, the new law requires each school district to notify parents by letter of this information. Thus, if your student goes beyond these requirements, we will send you a letter in the mail. In addition, the school district is required to notify the State of Ohio through our State reporting software that the letter was sent to parent/custodian/guardian.

Habitual truant is defined by:

1. “Absent 30 or more consecutive hours without a legitimate excuse”,
2. “Absent 42 or more hours in one school month without a legitimate excuse”; and
3. “Absent 72 hours or more in one school year without a legitimate excuse”.

If a student meets the above criteria, the new law requires each school district to notify parent/custodian/guardian by letter of this information. In addition to this requirement, the school district is required to develop an Absence Intervention Team to work with the parent/custodian/guardian and student on improving attendance to school. The school district is required to notify the State of Ohio through our State reporting software when the team is developed and letters are sent. If the student does not make progress on the plan within 61 days or continues to be excessively absent, the new law requires the district to file a complaint in juvenile court.

If you would like further information on this new law we encourage you to go to the Ohio Department of Education website (http://education.ohio.gov/) and search HB 410 Attendance and Truancy.

In the Anthony Wayne Local School District, we are very happy that we continue to have, on average, a 95% attendance rate each year. We look forward to continuing this trend into the future and working with parents, custodians, and/or guardians to maximize learning for all students.