Walters: California schools face major cash squeeze from chronic truancy

California’s public schools have a numbers problem — and it’s not just that their students don’t score very highly in national tests of mathematics ability.

Their other numbers problem is the financial squeeze posed by declining enrollment, especially in large urban districts, compounded by apparently growing levels of chronic absenteeism, or truancy.

“Thirty percent of California public school students were chronically absent from school in 2021-22 — a near tripling of the percentage...