Unjustified absences: epidemic or controllable rebellion? Audience: parents, police officers and students. Introduction In recent discussions of juvenile delinquency, a controversial issue has been whether or not students arrested or penalized for truancy have been successful. On the one hand, the police and other authoritative figures argue that this is a great way to become an example for other children so that they do not follow their path. On the other hand, many argue that this will not affect students and that the problem will continue to recur. Explaining what absenteeism is has often been defined as “a student who has excessive unexcused absences.” According to truancyprevention.org, the definition of truancy can vary among different states and school districts, but the general working definition of a student truancy is five or more truancy within a month or ten within a year. For clarity, unexcused absences are defined as a student who misses a majority of the hours or periods of a school day or who may fail to meet their school district's excused absence requirements. Within this working definition, local school districts and individual schools have substantial discretion in determining what is considered an excused absence. It is difficult to distinguish what qualifies as truancy and how to control the issue due to: lack of a clear definition of truancy; lack of control groups; lack of a larger number of students examined; lack of a review of the performance of students absent at sea after interventions. Absent Students and Why They Are Absent In current media, three categories are provided for characteristics related to absenteeism: personal, family, and school. Personal traits. In the case studies that criticized the unjust sailor... half of the paper ......frequency of students among students who chronically truant. Campbell Library. Retrieved April 3, 2014, from http://campbellcollaboration.org/lib/project/118/Nesmith, A. (n.d.). Involving families to prevent chronic school dropout. SOFIA. Retrieved April 3, 2014, from http://sophia.stkate.edu/msw_papers/278/Petzko, V. N. (2011). The relationship between the characteristics of large metropolitan high schools and school attendance rates. Retrieved April 3, 2014, from http:www.worldcat.org/title/relationship-of-characteristics-of-large-metropolitan-high-schools-to-school-attendance-rates/oclc/27959857Truancy. (2013, December 19). Improving Attendance (CA Department of Education). Retrieved April 3, 2014, from http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/ai/tr/Truancy Definition, Facts and Laws. (nd).Unexcused Absence Prevention TruancyPreventionorg RSS. Retrieved April 4, 2014, from http://www.truancyprevention.org/