By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

NASHUA, N.H. – Teacher absences are a problem around the nation, from an academic and financial perspective.

Most teachers work somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 days per year. That’s a pretty short work year, even considering the amount of work many take home and do on their own time many nights.

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Yet in many districts, the teacher absentee rate is disturbingly high. An average of 36 percent of teachers across the nation miss at least 10 days per year, according to media reports. The problem extends to the Nashua, New Hampshire district, where the local newspaper highlighted the issue with a recent series of articles.

The Nashua Telegraph found that one quarter of district teachers only missed 1-3 days per year, while another quarter missed 10 or more days. As the newspaper put it, “If these teachers were students, they’d be considered chronically truant and they and their families would be sent to court.”

The Telegraph also discovered that many of the teachers with the worst attendance records frequently call in sick on Mondays or Fridays, obviously to arrange convenient three-day weekends.

One middle school teacher in the district was absent 11 times in a recent school year, and every absence was on a Monday or Friday, according to a Telegraph editorial that followed the series of stories. One high school teacher took 19 sick or personal days, and 11 were on Fridays.

“With 900 teachers in the Nashua school district, the city has hundreds of hard-working, dedicated professionals,” the editorial said. “But the pattern of teachers taking more Fridays and Mondays off than the other three days of the week, and more of those days at the end of the school year, when the weather tends to be warmer, looks bad.”

The problem involves more than appearance.

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The superintendent of the Nashua district told the Telegraph that the absences “were not a big concern,” and the newspaper said “there’s plenty of data to back him up.”

We’re not sure what data the newspaper is referring to, but many researchers have concluded that students suffer a significant decline in academic performance when their teachers miss a lot of class time. Studies also show that school districts spend a great deal of money on substitute teachers every year. Nationally the figure is around $4 billion, according to media reports.

The absentee problem stems from union collective bargaining agreements, which often give teachers as many as 10 paid sick days and three or four paid personal days every year. Those types of policies make chronic teacher truancy perfectly acceptable.

It’s time for school boards to demand new contract policies that extend fewer sick and personal days, so more regular teachers will be with their students every day.

The absentee problem wouldn’t be an issue if schools stopped inviting teachers to miss so much time.