I was born and raised in Cannon Falls. I was birthed here, I have grown up here, and this is where I have experienced some of the best and worst moments of my life. I was enrolled in Cannon Falls Elementary school when I was 5 years old. Since then I've grown up with the same people for over 10 years, a whole decade! Lately, I have been noticing a difference in all my peers; furthermore, it seems that they aren't trying in school as much as they once did. I hear about it more and more with people each year talking about how they didn't study for a test or how they didn't do the assignment. Some people will then skip days solely because they have a test that day or don't even want to show up. After this point of avoiding tests and assignments, many people, mostly adults, would call this laziness or indolence. But research shows a more evolving problem called School Avoidance, and skipping school once or twice a week every week is a huge warning sign of this avoidance.
First of all, what is school avoidance? According to Eli Lebowitz, a Child Study Center psychologist with a Ph.D. and Postdoctoral, “the school-avoidant category includes children who simply don’t attend school at all, some who rarely attend, and many who are under-attenders”. This indicates that kids are skipping about one to two days of class each week, which is about ten percent to twenty percent of the whole school year. School avoidance also has factors other than just not attending school, according to Avoiding and Refusing to Go to School by YaleMedicine this includes coming from a disadvantaged background, having low socioeconomic status, and being part of an ethnic minority. If a teenager does not fall into the socially, academically, or athletically gifted area of the school, what is the point of them attending school if they´re not happy with this repeat of a Monday through Friday week? This unhappiness at school can lead to anxiety and depression at the thought of showing up to school.

Lebowitz says. “Nobody wants to feel frustrated daily¨. Anxiety can start forming in the sixth or seventh-grade year for this reason. Anxiety and depression can very well be involved with school absences. It can be about being away from parents for too long or being amongst other teens at school. Whether it is anxiety or not, sometimes school would not be a good fit for this type of student and it's easy to understand why a teenager has no motivation to show up to school. Other forms of illnesses teens can have is social anxiety, phobia of germs, and OCD. When students do decide to show up to school there is so much work for them to complete. That exact reason is also why I think School Avoidance is a big problem in public schools. If someone were to even miss 3 days of school, they´d have multiple assignments to do, tests to makeup, and projects to start and finish. The thought of doing so much homework will result in kids overthinking and not being able to complete that homework, which is exactly what I have experienced.

Personally, the reason why I do not want to show up to school is that I do not want to socialize with people I do not even like for 7 hours of my day for 5 days a week. Then after school every day I have to show up to a sport that I don't even enjoy playing for 2 hours with coaches yelling at me for making a silly mistake. After that I know I'm going to have to get up at 6 am to go through everything the same day and the next and so forth. Teenagers all around are just tired. Tired of everything always being the same, I can understand why teens don't want to show up every day. Adults always say ¨high school is some of the best years of your life, don't waste it,¨ but here I am thinking that if these are the best years of my life, what are my years going to be when we actually graduate high school. Go onto harder education with college, then what? Work a job that I also don't want to get up at 6 am for. Teenagers know this is going to have to be their entire life if they want to be successful and that is so much pressure on us. Parents sometimes don't understand this. They might think that we don't want to go through this because we are lazy. They think this way because high school was easier when they went in the 80s and/or 90s.

Most parents don’t realize the differences between high school then and now. In an article on NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress, titled, ¨America's High School Graduates: Results from the 2009 NAEP High School Transcript Study¨ by Christine Nord explains that high school students from a study in 2009 have taken 3 more credits and about 400 hours of supplementary work outside of school compared to students who got their education in the 1990s. Think about these statistics from 2009 to now in 2023. To put this in perspective of the difference of education differences between the 90s and now, I asked a high school graduate in 1990 what high school was like back then. “The high school system was not as fast-paced as it is now.'' My mom says “Nowadays there are more sports and extracurricular activities to join that are more competitive than ever before. Adding on to that college acceptance and the job market is more competitive than it was back in my days. Back then we also didn't have to compare ourselves to anyone else because we didn't have a social media network to know what other teenagers are feeling, doing, and accomplishing in their lives.” My mother goes on to say that she understands why teenagers would end up in the school avoidance category and she also sees the effect of school avoidance with teenagers all around her.

I am very thankful that my mom does not see this as laziness, but other adults do. Parents and teachers do not know the different issues teenagers have, compared to when they attended their schools. Coming from a disfavored background, not excelling in school already, and belonging to a different ethnic minority are some things adults maybe didn't experience in their teenage years. As I have said, being diagnosed with different mental health disorders like depression and anxiety is way more common in teens now than it was in the 1980s. The Nuffield Foundation explains in an article called “Increased level of teenage anxiety and depression as teenage experience changes over time” in 2012 that teens' depression and anxiety have doubled in the past decades. These mental health issues have a high chance to turn into school avoidance. About 2-5% of children and teens have experienced school avoidance. This is a more serious problem than adults come to think of. This cannot just be called “laziness” or “indolence”. Sure I've seen unproductivity and carelessness around my school, but the more I see it belonging to certain people who seem like they just don't care anymore. I have grown up with these people all my life, they didn't use to act like this. We need to overcome these challenges and motivate students once again to become invested in their schoolwork and future life once again.