One-third of students in the Jamestown Public Schools District missed at least one of every 10 days of school last year.

That means there are 1,700 children who meet the definition of chronically absent from school — and that there are likely 1,700 different reasons why each of those children were absent.

For some families, unstable living situations or poor transportation make it difficult to get a child to school. Sometimes there is a chronic illness in the home that keeps children from attending. Some children don’t want to go to school because they are bullied or have bad experiences with a teacher or staff member at school. Older students sometimes struggle to realize why their education is important.

Like a weed, the roots of absenteeism run deep; no single action or plan will remove them. It’s important that we try. According to the U.S. Department of Education, children who are chronically absent in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade are much less likely to read at grade level by the third grade. Students who cannot read at grade level by the end of third grade are four times more likely than proficient readers to drop out of high school. A study of Utah public school students, meanwhile, showed that chronic absenteeism in a single year from eighth through 12th grade increases the likelihood of a student dropping out of school by 70 percent. And, high school dropouts, which tend to include a higher percentage of students who were chronically absent, has been linked to poverty, diminished health and crime.

We didn’t really need the studies to make our point. We see it every day. Jamestown High School’s graduation rate is typically between 72 and 78 percent — which means there are roughly 80 people each year entering the workforce without the skills they need to land a job and provide a living for their family. Chautauqua County has hundreds of jobs waiting to be filled but too few workers to fill them. Jamestown is an area of high poverty, opioid addiction and crime. A strong case can be made that the root of all these problems is an inability to get children to school consistently when they’re as young as 4 years of age.

Tina Sandstrom, Jamestown Public Schools director of schools, told The Post-Journal recently the district is taking a proactive approach this year to make sure students are in school every day by increasing the support staff within the Jamestown Community Learning Council with a primary focus on absenteeism, increasing incentives for students who attend school more regularly, and doing what they can with individual students to encourage attendance before absenteeism becomes a problem.

Schools must do their part to reduce absenteeism, but so must parents. Parents are doing their child no favors by letting them miss school on a regular basis. Sadly, allowing their children to miss school too often is actually a life sentence for the child to a life of poverty and struggle.

It doesn’t have to be that way.