NEW YORK — An unprecedented 350,000 public school students in New York City repeatedly missed school last year, a harrowing sign of learning loss that is hitting the city’s most vulnerable children especially hard.
The lost classroom time, revealed in new data obtained by the Daily News, disproportionately affected children without a stable place to call home, who are not native English speakers or who have a disability. Children living in poverty were also hit hard, with a 45% rate of chronic absenteeism — tens of thousands more kids since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before the pandemic, the figure of chronically absent students hovered around 25% and was generally on the decline.
