Province says number of chronic school absences are on the decline in P.E.I.

The Department of Education says student absences have been decreasing in Prince Edward Island's schools.

The province classifies a student as chronically or severely absent when they’ve missed 20 or more days. Department officials said they starting seeing a spike in those cases when classes resumed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maribeth Rogers-Neale, director of English education, programs and services with the department, said work to bring the absentee numbers down is finally paying off.

"We have significantly less students who are chronically absent than we did in previous years," she said. "We're sitting at about 19 per cent this year where this time last year we were at 24 per cent and in the post-pandemic peak we would have been at 28 per cent."

The department said more students are now falling into the category of satisfactory absenteeism, meaning they're missing fewer than 10 days of school.

Anne Ives, who retired as a school principal last year, said she noticed a difference in kids who were at home during COVID when they came back to school.

"They had more difficulty problem solving, self-regulating, getting along with others, just social interactions that they had missed out on from being at school," Ives said.

"[There's] a lot of opportunities at school to have face-to-face interactions and learning to line up one behind the other and take turns and solve conflicts that you really can't do over the computer."

Rogers-Neale said some of the initiatives the province has introduced include efforts to make sure school is a place students want to be emotionally.

The department created student engagement groups to understand why kids are missing class and present them with solutions. Those could include rewarding attendance and increased communication with parents.

There's also a focus on social-emotional learning goals — a form of learning that helps students feel more welcome in a school setting.

"The easiest way to explain it is if you kind of closed your eyes and thought about that teacher you loved and how they made you feel when you were at school," Rogers-Neale said.

"You walk in the door and somebody says hello to you, it can be very simple things, somebody who's passionate about teaching or makes connections to characters in books."

While there will be times when students get sick and need to take time off, Rogers-Neale said it's when the number of absences starts to grow that can affect their academic and social success.