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More than Half of Ontario Students Aren’t Showing Up

A former chronic absentee explains why

“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 Horton’s, 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........

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