Excerpts By: WRAL. Written By: Cullen Browder.
Federal data show 34 percent of North Carolina’s 96,000 full-time public school teachers missed at least two weeks of classes in a single academic year.
The U.S. Department of Education deems teachers who miss that much time as chronically absent. Statistics from the agency’s Office of Civil Rights show that educator attendance varies from state to state, from district to district and even from school to school.
WRAL Investigates reviewed North Carolina’s data and found that, in the Alamance-Burlington School System, 86 percent of teachers missed 10 or more days of school, according to the most recent data available from 2014, which was released this past summer. The school district says its absenteeism rates are improving. However, more than half the system’s teachers are still chronically absent.
In Wake County, 22 percent of teachers were chronically absent. It was 29 percent in Durham, 25 percent in Cumberland and 70 percent in Robeson County. The data showed charter schools, on average, had lower rates of teacher absenteeism than traditional public schools.
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