A classroom at Wazoson Public School of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) in Ottawa, in December, 2025.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Some mornings, Scott Montgomery’s daughter Renee will wake up, put on her school uniform, and make it to the front door, but can’t go a step farther.
Other days, she makes it halfway to her high school in Toronto before the anxiety disorder she was diagnosed with a year ago makes it too hard to do anything but return home.
When the Grade 9 student makes it to school, she does well on assignments, gets good grades and is liked by teachers.
Last week, Ontario introduced new legislation that would make attendance a significant part of final marks for high school students. The government said the new policy would take into account that some students are not attending because of mental health issues, disabilities or other reasons. But none of this will help Mr. Montgomery’s daughter get to class, he said.
Scott Montgomery in his home in Toronto on a day his daughter attended her classes, on April 22.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
“To an outsider, and the new legislation, she would appear to be a slacker and a truant,” he said. “I give them kudos for recognizing there’s a problem, but I think the solution they’ve come up with really doesn’t address it.”
Attendance rates in Ontario have plummeted since the onset of the pandemic, and everyone – from researchers and teachers to administrators and parents – agrees something must be done about it. But experts say punitive measures alone won’t be enough to help some students overcome the hurdles that are keeping them away from school.
The provincial standard is attendance on 90 per cent of school days during the year. Students who attend less than that are considered chronically absent.
Data from the province shows only 40 per cent of high school students are meeting that standard, a figure that has dropped 20 percentage points since before the pandemic.
Among students in Grade 9, only 45 per cent met the standard in the 2024-2025 school year, down from almost 70 per cent before the pandemic.
Students in Grade 12 are showing up the least, with only 33.3 per cent meeting the standard, compared to 48.7 per cent in 2017-2018.
The drop in attendance rates is troubling because of the clear link between attendance and academic success.
Research has shown that students who are chronically absent are more likely to get lower grades, are less likely to meet the standards for reading, writing and math, and are less likely to graduate from high school.
Showing up matters.
Some parents say the new legislation is a needed corrective to a cultural shift brought about by the pandemic in which many students and their parents consider regular school attendance to be optional when school work can be done online.
“This concept that the required, mandatory nature, that you need to be there every day no matter what, sort of went away somehow,” said Stephanie McCaig, a mother of three in Toronto.
Often, her two kids in high school will say they don’t need to be in school that day because they have a substitute teacher, or it’s only a review day, or it’s the day before winter break and no one is going to be there.
One reason for the cultural shift Ms. McCaig has noticed is because so much learning was moved online during the pandemic, she said.
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Most, if not all, class assignments and the material needed to complete them is available on Google Classroom or some other digital platform, and so the need to actually be at school doesn’t seem as urgent as it did for her generation.
“It blurs the line of, well, do I need to go to find out what I need to do for homework because it’s already posted here,” she said.
“But my worry is it doesn’t set them up for the future,” Ms. McCaig added. “You can’t just not show up for work, and you can’t just be late for stuff and decide not to go.”
However, more needs to be done for students who struggle to attend school for more complex reasons, Ms. McCaig said.
“This is sort of like punishing kids, in a way, for a system that adults have created since COVID without doing anything else to support them,” she said.
Grades earned or lost through attendance will not solve the problem of chronic absenteeism for most students who struggle with it, say researchers who study the problem and counsellors whose job it is to get students back in the classroom.
“For most students who are having significant attendance problems, it’s not a motivation problem,” said David Smith, a professor of counselling psychology at the University of Ottawa and co-founder of the Canadian School Attendance Partnership, a group of researchers and community organizations trying to address attendance problems.
There is some research that shows that incentivizing attendance through measures similar to the new legislation has potential to help, Dr. Smith said.
“But only when there are other policies that address the structural problems that are getting in the way of kids attending,” he said.
These include mental health supports, making school safe for students who are being bullied or have experienced violence in the classroom, addressing the needs of students who have caregiving responsibilities in their families, and transportation issues, almost all of which have gotten worse since the pandemic, Dr. Smith said.
Tammy Peplinski works on a daily basis with students who are faced with many of these types of issues.
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As an attendance counsellor, it is her job to work with students who are chronically absent, and their families, to help get them back in to the classroom.
Ms. Peplinski usually has a caseload of 150 students split between two high schools in Renfrew County, near Ottawa.
Some of her colleagues throughout the province have caseloads of upward of nearly 1,000 students, said Ms. Peplinski, who is also president of the Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services, a non-profit organization.
It used to be that Ms. Peplinski would work with students when they missed 10 per cent of school days.
Now, that threshold is up to 20 or 30 per cent because there are so many students who are missing so frequently.
“We have to triage,” Ms. Peplinski said.
On one end of the spectrum are families taking extended vacations over exam periods and expecting exams to be rescheduled.
On the other end are families who don’t have enough food to send their kids to school with and keep them home because they don’t want to risk triggering a Children’s Aid Society investigation, Ms. Peplinski said.
The new legislation will work for students who have no issue with going to school other than a preference for staying home, she said.
But for the majority of students Ms. Peplinski and her colleagues work with, it will only be one more barrier for them, she said.
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Most of those students tend to get grades between 50 and 60 per cent in the classes they manage to pass. The new legislation won’t get those kids into class.
“You’re just going to make them fail, unfortunately.”
A better approach would be to invest in early intervention and learning supports for students who have missed significant amounts of instructional time, Ms. Peplinski said.
“We need to be focused on those elementary kids, because that’s where it starts,” she said.
“They’re pushed through the system, and then there are huge learning gaps. Now we have these kids in Grade 9 and 10, and they’re avoiding because the work is hard and they can’t meet the expectations.”
Data from the province showed 55.5 per cent of students in Grades 1 to 8 are meeting the attendance standard, down from nearly 70 per cent before the pandemic.
We need to solve the problem of widespread absenteeism, and the conversation of how is long overdue, but believing the solution is through changing the grading system is simply misguided, Ms. Peplinski said.
“Attendance is always a symptom of something bigger.”