The absenteeism data published by NBOE barely scratches the surface of the situation. The high school kids get marked present for the day but don't go to their classes. With the excessive understaffing, including security guards, even with cameras there is no way to enforce going to class. Many children cut loads of their classes every day and still get marked "present" for the entire day based on the official attendance data that NBOE uses for their state and public reporting. NBOE has access to class by class attendance data and they don't make it accessible to teachers and don't publish it on purpose. I manually calculate 60-65% attendance daily in my classes and I call home constantly to inform parents. Even when parents know kids are not in their classes, what can they do? Plus, many teachers at the high school level have up to 220 total kids that they see every single day this year. This is especially true in hard to staff subjects like bilingual Ed. Teachers are teaching 7 periods per day, each period far exceeding the legal max number of students allowed in a class per state law. That means these teachers barely have 30 seconds per student for grading each week... and the NTU "president" wants them to call home for the 60+ chronically absent students on their rosters? The NTU should focus on getting more pay for dual certified staff to stem the staff shortages, not giving PSAs saying to call home more when that doesn't help.