School avoidance liaisons: what New York's new policy means for Europe

33.5 percent. That is the share of New York City kids who were chronically absent in the 2025-26 school year, meaning they missed at least 10 percent of school days (Chalkbeat, 17 September 2026). The same term, the city began requiring a named school avoidance liaison in every one of its 1,500-plus schools. No European school system has tried that at scale. For anyone working on school avoidance in Denmark, the Nordics or the UK the two things together are a useful mirror: the number shows how hard the problem is, and the policy shows one way of finally naming it.

One in three kids missed a month of school

The figure comes from Chalkbeat's report on the 2025-26 attendance data (17 September 2026): 33.5 percent of New York City kids chronically absent last school year, unchanged from the year before. Before the pandemic it was roughly one in four. At the 2021-22 peak it hit 40 percent, the highest in decades.

So one in three kids in the largest school district in the United States misses at least a month of school every year, and the line has flattened rather than recovered.

It is not bleak everywhere. A SchoolStatus report published on 11 September 2026, covering 1.1 million kids in 142 districts, found chronic absenteeism falling for the third year running: down 6.2 percent year on year to 20.29 percent, and down 10.3 percent over two years. The biggest gains were among the youngest, with kindergarten absenteeism improving by 18.7 percent over two years. The report's own conclusion is blunt: districts do not have to wait for national trends to move.

Why New York chose "liaison" and not "truancy officer"

The interesting part of New York's policy is the vocabulary. The city is not hiring attendance enforcers. The liaison role exists for kids who miss long stretches because of social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression. It came out of a 2024 lawsuit brought by four students with emotional and social disabilities, and it sits next to a June 2026 overhaul that requires every school to draw up "attendance success plans" with parents and kids, naming the barriers and setting goals.

That is a structural admission that a large share of absence is not defiance. We talk about it as if it were a discipline problem, a parenting problem, a phone problem. It is something else. It is what Danish practitioners call school avoidance, what English local authorities call emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA), and what parents in every country recognise as a kid who is physically unable to walk through the school gate.

When I taught in a special needs class in Denmark I met the kids behind that word. A kid who does the maths at home in twenty minutes but cannot get past the school gate. A kid whose stomach ache is real every Monday and gone every Saturday. A kid who has been at home so long that the class has stopped keeping a chair.

Education Week's reporting from 3 September 2026 quotes Jayne Demsky, founder of the School Avoidance Alliance, on the misconception under most failed interventions: "The biggest misconception is that kids can control it." Not will not. Cannot. What looks manipulative from the outside is usually anxiety, depression or trauma from the inside.

The same article gives the counter-example of Old Bridge Township in New Jersey, which cut chronic absenteeism from a 2022 peak of 20 percent to 12 percent in the most recent school year. It did not do that with one liaison. It did it with cross-departmental teams of nurses, social workers, psychologists and administrators, early identification, staff training and continuous contact with families.

The Danish parallel: a cost the labour market is now counting

Denmark has no liaison mandate, but the problem has just been named in an unusual place. On 4 September 2026 the employers' organisation Dansk Erhverv published a piece titled, simply, "School avoidance is a societal problem".

The argument is economic. Dansk Erhverv points to a 38 percent rise over ten years in the number of people receiving compensation for lost earnings, and puts part of it down to parents cutting hours or leaving work to care for kids who cannot attend school while they wait for child and adolescent psychiatry. The government and the regions have set aside one billion kroner for an emergency plan to shorten those waiting times and strengthen early intervention.

When a business lobby starts writing about school avoidance, the framing has moved. It is no longer a niche special-education topic. It is a workforce problem, a psychiatry-capacity problem and a municipal-budget problem, and the kid in the middle of it is still at home at 10:00 on a Tuesday.

What the two stories have in common

Put the New York data and the Danish debate side by side and three things stand out.

• Naming the problem is the first intervention. New York's liaison policy and Dansk Erhverv's headline do the same job: they separate school avoidance from truancy and give it an owner. Until someone at the school is responsible for the kid who is not there, nobody is.
• The window is early. The largest improvements in the SchoolStatus data are in kindergarten and transitional kindergarten. The Mount Sinai paediatrician quoted by Chalkbeat, Dr Kenya Parks, says the same from the clinical side: kids who stop attending early have a poor prognosis for work and health throughout life.
• A liaison without a team is a name on a door. The districts that actually moved their numbers built cross-functional teams and kept families close. One person with a title and a spreadsheet does not reverse a 33 percent rate.

What a school can do while it waits for the system

Most Danish schools cannot wait for psychiatry waiting lists to shorten or for a national liaison policy to arrive. I think waiting is the wrong plan anyway. Three practices from the districts that improved are within reach of any school this term, and the time cost is small.

1. Track the pattern, not the total

Chronic absence is a threshold, 10 percent of days. School avoidance shows up earlier as a pattern: Mondays, the day after a weekend at the other parent's, the lesson before one particular subject. A weekly look at who is missing which days catches the pattern before it becomes a month. About 20 minutes a week for the person who owns the list.

2. Keep the thread to the kid unbroken

Every intervention that worked kept contact with the kid during the absence. That contact does not have to be a phone call from the head teacher. It can be a piece of work the kid can actually do at home, pitched at their level, on something they care about, that gives them a reason to be part of the class on the day they come back. About 10 minutes a week per kid, sent on the same day each week.

3. Make the return low-stakes

The first day back should not be a test. A reduced timetable, a known adult at the door and material the kid has already seen at home all lower the height of the gate. One 30-minute meeting with the parents before the first day back.

Where GradeAid fits

GradeAid started as a platform for kids with school avoidance and neurodivergence, built with the teachers and parents who were living exactly this problem. GradeAid is a Danish platform for teachers. The teacher types in the topic and the level and gets a lesson plan, a worksheet, a quiz, a presentation and screen-free activities in seconds, which you can also differentiate. The material can be printed. For the kid at home, the parents, a special school or a municipality the point is different: a kid who will not open a textbook will sometimes open a maths task about their football team, and that is the thread a teacher can hold while the rest of the system catches up.

One in three kids absent for a month a year is not an attendance problem. It is a design problem, and the design starts with who owns the kid who is not there.

If you work with pupils who struggle to attend, we would like to hear what is working in your school. Write to us at founders@gradeaid.ai.