“Do you have any interest in graduating?”

It was the spring of 2013, the last semester of high school, and I was sitting in my guidance counsellor’s office. A usually kindly older woman, she gripped a sheaf of papers like a pissed-off lawyer. My attendance record, printed. The usual twinkle in her eye had been replaced with something harder.

The question sent a familiar heat to my face. It was not my first time in her office. By then, four years into my disastrous tenure at Victoria Park Collegiate Institute, a standard brick-built North American high school on the border of North York and Scarborough, I had become something of a frequent flier. I sat in my own mortification, staring at a poster about missing a hundred percent of the shots you neglect to take.

The definition for “chronic absenteeism” in Ontario is missing more than 10 percent of a school year—roughly eighteen days or two days per month. The previous year, in the eleventh grade, at the height of my disobedience, I had long overshot this threshold. I’m still not sure exactly how many days I missed. Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. I just knew I had opted out of every class I could.

Most days, I woke up, got dressed, and began the 200-foot trek to school, only to take a sharp turn toward the nearest Tim Hortons, or the public library, or the small clearing in the woods where a group of other burnouts met to pass around a joint and commiserate over the pains of being sixteen and hounded by adults. Sometimes, I took a bus downtown for hours of wandering among the tall buildings or rode the green line on the TTC all the way to Kipling and back again, reading until it was time to go home. On lazier days, I slipped into my own school’s library and signed in under a litany of fake names, including “David Copperfield” and “Oedipa Maas.” Otherwise, I simply drifted alongside the neighbouring ravine until lunchtime, when I would sneak back to school to see my friends and pretend I had been there all along.

My parents, saddled with the immigrant responsibility of sustaining our lives in a still-befuddling country, paid little attention. Soon, they would refer to the daily automated phone calls from school with a wry little joke, turning to me and saying, “Your girlfriend’s calling again.”

It wouldn’t be long before the hammer came down. I failed four classes that year and only grazed by in the others. I was enrolled in summer school and promptly flunked out of that too. Now, in my final year of high school, I was being credibly accused of squandering my last opportunity to shape up. I faced the very real possibility of taking a remedial year or failing out altogether. This would mean no diploma—the minimum prerequisite, I had been told, to engage in adult life.

In the absence of any discernible progress on my part, these meetings with my guidance counsellor had begun to feel like an expected humiliation ritual. Sitting there that day, confronted with the issue of my interest in graduating, I scrambled for a suitable answer. Finding nothing, I settled for the truth.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” I said.

I don’t remember what she said then. I only remember her posture slumping in defeat, the recognition that the message she had been trying to get to me all these months had once again bounced back and returned to sender. I did not feel the adolescent thrill of defying authority or even the relief of getting her off my back. Instead, a colder sensation, the dawning on the sinner of having sinned too much. I began to realize I might be beyond saving.

It’s a feeling that must be familiar to many students in Ontario today. According to data obtained by the CBC from the Ministry of Education, 60 percent of all high school students meet the standard for chronic absenteeism—as well as 45 percent of students in grades one to eight. Both of these figures are markedly higher than pre-pandemic levels. One analysis by researchers at York University found that, between 2012 (the year I flunked out of all those classes) and 2024, rates of absenteeism in the province essentially doubled.

My home province is not alone in this. In British Columbia, unexcused absences for high schoolers are up nearly 90 percent from pre-pandemic levels, according to CBC data. In Alberta, absenteeism in public schools has nearly tripled in the same time. In every corner of the country, more students are missing school than ever, leaving parents, teachers, and school administrators scrambling for a solution.

In Ontario, the Doug Ford government has announced a top-down policy tying attendance to final grades. Starting this fall, 10 to 15 percent of a student’s grades in high school will be tied to attendance. Under these rules, missing more than two classes would mean jeopardizing this percentage of their final marks. This approach has already been widely panned by students, educators, and other advocacy organizations, who say it’s unlikely to draw kids back into the classroom and risks punishing the most disadvantaged among them.

Part of the challenge of addressing absenteeism is understanding why it’s happening in the first place. While the numbers are enough to diagnose the existence of a problem, there is no scholarly consensus on why students are really missing school or what should be done about it.

Robert Brown, co-author of the York University analysis, has been researching absenteeism in Ontario since the early 1990s, driven by his own experiences of avoiding school as a student. I ask him why more students than ever are missing class. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you narrow that down too much,” he tells me. “I haven’t a clue myself.”

Still, there are some broad trends that have remained relatively consistent over the past few decades: boys are slightly more prone to missing school than girls, as are students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and those in certain special education programs.

Beyond that, the reasons students miss class vary, he says, “almost down to the individual level.”

Jess Whitley, research chair in inclusion, mental health, and school attendance at the University of Ottawa, says there is a “long list” of reasons why absenteeism is spiking in Ontario. But one likely factor is the disruption caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns, online school, and the bumpy return to in-person learning.

“There were a lot of assumptions after COVID that absenteeism would bounce back and things would get back to ‘normal’” she says. “But you know, we work differently, we live differently, we communicate differently. Schools have in some ways stayed a bit static in that midst, which doesn’t fit for many families.”

This was echoed by Christine Richer, an Ottawa mother whose daughter struggled with school avoidance even before the pandemic. She was still in middle school when things went online. After that, she says, “it’s like we lost two years.”

“It was basically a person in front of a computer not learning for that period of time,” she said. “It was very difficult to get her motivated to go back in person. School continued as though kids were not affected when they were, and it was never really fully addressed.”

Her daughter, who is on the autism spectrum and suffers from anxiety and depression, eventually fell behind by almost two years. In that time, Richer says, she was advocating relentlessly with her school to get her some support.

She ended up reaching out to the Parents’ Lifeline of Eastern Ontario, an organization that helps families whose children are struggling with mental health issues and school avoidance. They tell me that in the last few years, they’ve received a surge in calls about school-avoidant children. They paired Richer with a peer support worker who helped her navigate conversations with her daughter and the school board. Today, Richer works as a manager with PLEO herself.

Richer ultimately found an alternative high school in Ottawa that took her daughter’s needs into account. This past semester, she graduated with her high school diploma and is attending college this fall.

Looking back on the process to get her there, Richer says, “it was extremely difficult. Even though I’m a parent that is in this sector and knows my rights, I still came out exhausted in the end.” Things can only be harder for families who struggle to access such resources, she says. “I can imagine that [my daughter] was one of many, many children in that situation.”

It would be impossible to provide a complete accounting of how school—and adolescence itself—has changed in the last few years. It is easy to point to their digital lives, which have become stimulating on a level that a classroom could never replicate. Online, they’re often sold the idea that success comes from non-traditional career paths, like influencing or investing in cryptocurrency.

But things are different in the tangible world too. Students in Ontario are facing down a failing job market, record youth unemployment, and now have to take on greater debt to pursue higher education due to the province’s cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program, or OSAP. Meanwhile, the province has been involved in a contentious restructuring of school boards that has seen a reduction in the role of school trustees (making it more difficult for families to advocate for their children at the local level), the shuttering of alternative education programs, drastic reductions in staffing, and cuts to special education.

Of all these, the last might be the most galling. A report by the province’s auditor general from earlier this year found that only 21 percent of teachers in three school boards reported being able to meet the needs of special education students. The understaffing is acute enough that even support staff report high rates of absenteeism. According to the report, roughly one in five educational assistants across three boards were absent on an average school day, “driven by elevated stress and frequent student-related physical injuries.” As a result, students in special education programs are frequently sent home, because schools simply don’t have the capacity to support them safely.

The obvious solution here would be for Ontario to reinvest in public education: furnish teachers, school psychologists, social workers, educational assistants, and support staff with the resources they require to address the epidemic of distress that is driving absenteeism.

“I think that’s always true,” says Whitley, the University of Ottawa professor. “We can always use more qualified people, and things would probably go better if we did.”

But, she says, this should happen in tandem with a bolder reimagining of education as a whole.

“I do think some of these [solutions] are not ones that necessarily require ten times more staff. There are different ways of doing things that are really hard for us to get out of the box to imagine.”

She gives the example of alternative education models, such as the one that helped Richer’s daughter cross the finish line to graduation. These can include approaches that emphasize self-directed learning, allowing students to determine the flow of their day; or that minimize traditional tests and grading for students (such as myself) repelled by such strictures; or employ an environmental or active citizenship framework, taking learning outside the classroom into the real world. Investing in such solutions, Whitley says, requires thinking about our changing social structures and relationship to our communities.

“That level of analysis, which I’m not seeing a ton of, would be helpful,” she says. She notes that Canada’s surge in absenteeism mirrors trends across the world. “There’s something happening in all of these countries, and the stories are so similar when we sit with international partners that it’s kind of staggering. There’s got to be something more going on than our realities here with underfunding school boards.”

Thirteen years on, I still do not know what it would have taken to get me to attend high school. Perhaps an alternative education program might have helped or even a single encounter with a psychologist or social worker.

I did manage to graduate. Thanks to a handful of self-guided online courses, I managed to make up for the credits I had missed in my prolific absence. I did this just in time to receive my diploma a month after school ended, from the main office, with chairs piled in the hallway. I remember knocking on the door and a lone administrator opening it just a crack to hand me a manila envelope. She told me that sweet old guidance counsellor, in whom I had inspired such hopelessness, had left it for me.

In a stroke of good fortune, I had been allowed to attend my graduation ceremony and even walk the stage. Not because I had graduated (I hadn’t, at that point), but because I had won an award for writing. The truth is, in all those days of missed classes, I had only spent so many of them involved in shenanigans like hotboxing my friend’s car or wandering all the way onto the shoulder of a highway (because I thought it was a sidewalk). The rest of the time I’d spent reading or doing what I do now for a living: putting one sentence in front of the other, watching narrative and meaning emerge.

Catherine Shea, a family peer support worker with PLEO, who helps families with children who struggle with school avoidance, tells me that support doesn’t begin with finding the perfect response to all of a child’s stressors. Instead, she recommends starting with a simple conversation.

“Listen, empathize, validate your child,” she says. “Ask them open-ended questions. Validate their feelings because they own their feelings.” She says her approach often starts with looking at fundamentals, such as building a routine, emotional support, communication strategies, and engaging with a young person around their likes and dislikes. She also says it’s important to celebrate small wins.

“Even if they step into school for five minutes, celebrate that because that’s a success,” she says. “And then if it’s an hour, celebrate that because it’s a huge achievement.”