Online Learning as a Panacea for Dealing with School Truancy

Abstract

School truancy has been identified as one of the causes of students’ low school achievement, leading to school dropout. Although the problem of school truancy is not new, yet, many school authorities or Governments have no rules on how to deal with this problem. In some arears, there is apparently no database or information, and educators are at a loss as to whether school truancy exists, and at what level if it does. There is no coordinated action against school truancy in many school districts. Consequently, each school district takes decision on how it approaches the problem. This study is designed to have a conversation directly with the student clientele and to determine what they know about school truancy, and from their perspective offer suggestion(s) or strategies that would help to reduce or prevent school truancy. Results suggest for a distinction between “school truancy” and “class truancy” in order to help school managers to adequately focus on each group rather than treating “skipping school” and “skipping classes” with the same amount of resources. The study suggests giving incentives to good students, providing adequate school bus services, insisting on “no 12^th grade, no drivers license”, and putting several classes online would be good prevention strategies. The above excerpt forms the basis of the research results presented in this paper.