Few would disagree, yet most school districts don’t actually monitor the number of days that each child is absent. Schools track truancy (unexcused absences), and they count the number of children who show up each day. But they don’t report chronic absenteeism, or the percentage of children who miss at least 10 percent of the school year, excused or unexcused.

“You can have a kid in kindergarten rack up a ton of excused absences, but they’re missing a lot of school,” said Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to promote awareness of the issue.

Chang presented her research Friday at an education forum in Sacramento hosted by Tom Torlakson, state superintendent of public instruction.

The Oakland school district became one of the first in the state to actively monitor chronic absenteeism, and the results have been sobering. Chang’s analysis showed that 14 percent of all district students and more than 20 percent of African-American students missed at least 18 days of school last year. The report found the highest percentages of chronically absent children to be concentrated in West Oakland, an economically distressed area with high rates of violence, asthma and housing instability.

“We know that if students aren’t attending, they’re losing ground,” Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith said at a special school board meeting this week.

The Oakland school district has developed an early warning system to change these patterns. District staff analyze the absentee data by school, race, poverty and other groupings. Principals receive weekly lists of students who have been absent for at least 10 percent of the school year.

Brookfield Elementary School in East Oakland has reduced its chronic absenteeism to a third of what it was two years ago — to about 6 percent. Principal Adam Taylor said the results are encouraging.

“First, you see a difference in their attitude,” he said, adding that students who miss a lot of school tend to withdraw academically.

Taylor said Brookfield has an outreach coordinator who works with families to figure out what’s causing the absences and how the school can help. The solution for one boy who was wandering the halls each morning after being dropped off? “He gets his own personal welcome,” he said.

Taylor said he has borrowed ideas from other principals, such as popcorn parties for the class with the best attendance and bicycle raffles for children with perfect attendance. But such initiatives must happen throughout the city, he said, and it would help if a big company sponsored the cause.

“How do we get a Target or a Walmart to make it a districtwide attendance effort?” Taylor said.

You know, like the one that includes community outreach, parent involvement and the push for neighborhood schools.

Just a few days ago, residents in The City’s Inner Sunset neighborhood became alerted to a “proposal” by the school district to relocate a program for troubled youth — students who have gone through the courts for drugs, alcohol and other disciplinary problems — into an abandoned school site on Seventh Avenue near Irving Street, smack in the heart of the community.

A hurried meeting was arranged by officials of the school district, program directors and members of the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors, a gathering that went from bad to worse when residents were informed that the proposal, in fact, was a done deal, and that the district planned to expand the school from 30 to 150 students over time.

“The passions are really high in this room because people feel we’re not getting answers, we’re not getting the feedback we want,” said Andrea Jadwin, head of the neighborhood association. “The families here feel that they are being squeezed and the district hasn’t thought out how this might work.”

It didn’t help that district officials acknowledged that they hadn’t involved the neighborhood groups prior to making their decision last month, or that such issues as security, staffing levels or general oversight of the school were still being “worked out.”

For community residents, who include a large number of young parents, it was a matter of getting worked up — following the recent news that a majority of families in the district did not get their preferred schools in the annual lottery process. The Inner Sunset is home to two of the more coveted elementary schools in The City, Clarendon and Alice Fong Yu, yet to hear the parents tell it, they’ve all been shut out of getting their own neighborhood selections.

The backlash against the “at risk” youth school, currently called the Principals Center Collaborative and located in aging bungalows on 43rd Avenue and Judah Street, is not your typical NIMBY fight in San Francisco. The Inner Sunset neighborhood is generally considered a left-leaning extension of the Haight, which is why it was gerrymandered into the liberal boundaries of District 5.

The community is also an education mecca of sorts, being home to UC San Francisco Medical Center, one of the top medical institutions in the United States, and where thousands of students, nurses and researchers parachute into (well, actually many drive, much to the neighbors dismay) each day.

So, if any district might welcome a school using innovative programs to help troubled youths find their footing away from courts, incarceration and truancy, it would probably be the Inner Sunset, a thought voiced by more than one parent.

But that would still require their knowledge and input, two things missing from the school district’s machinations up to this point. The school site already has been a sore spot for the neighborhood, being home in recent years to Gateway and Newcomer high schools, one that moved and one that went away entirely.

Yet the “at risk” part of the new planned school has the community questioning just who is at risk.

“We’ve been a dumping ground for rotating high schools,” one parent said. “We had no say in Gateway, no say in Newcomer and now we have no say here.”

Close to 80 percent of Lazear Elementary School’s 300 students didn’t show up for school Thursday – a loss of almost $9,000 in state funding for the day – and apparently a wake-up call for district and teachers union officials who met with the parents Thursday afternoon to try to resolve the issue.

The boycott was a last resort for the parents, who were tired of the time-consuming and egregious process of getting rid of someone they say is a bad teacher.

In nearly two years of teaching at Lazear, the veteran third-grade teacher has repeatedly left his pupils unattended in the classroom and on the schoolyard, physically manhandled students, told children to “shut up,” and at one point locked a girl in the classroom because she wasn’t moving fast enough, said Olga Galavíz González, a parent organizer at the school.

Students fear him, she said.

About a year ago, parents began writing letters to district officials to complain. They held meetings with the principal and district board members. They signed and turned in petitions. They called the district. At first, they wanted administrators to admonish the teacher, and when things got worse, remove him. They got nowhere, González said.

Thursday morning, about 100 parents and children, carrying signs, marched in front of the school and then moved downtown to picket district headquarters. They demanded the teacher be gone by the fall and that the principal, who they say failed to respond appropriately, be replaced.

District officials said they have been following personnel protocols to address the parents’ concerns.

“This is taking longer than anyone likes, but we’re definitely trying,” said district spokesman Troy Flint.

The parents declined to identify the teacher, saying the action was aimed at getting administrators to do something, not at exposing the teacher. District and union officials also refused to identify the teacher, saying the issue is a personnel matter.

Thursday’s strike exemplified one of the more common complaints in public education. Too often, the solution to bad teachers is to shuffle them to another school to avoid the costly two-year process to fire them – what is known as a dance of the lemons.

Lazear parents said they don’t want the lemons landing in their yard. At the same time, many stressed that they love most of the children’s teachers.

“Our kids deserve better teachers,” González said. “Just because we’re here and not up in the hills, they deserve the same teachers.”

By “here” she meant Lazear, a predominantly low-income elementary school with a large Hispanic population on the other side of a chain-link fence from Interstate 880.

Schools like Lazear can feel like dumping grounds for tenured teachers the district can’t or won’t fire, said Oakland school board member Noel Gallo. The third-grade teacher at the center of Thursday’s controversy had moved around the district before he arrived at Lazear in fall 2008, he said.

“If the families don’t speak English, so what?” said Gallo, who stood with parents on the picket line. “They deserve the same fairness, equity, treatment and quality.”

Lazear Principal Pia Jara said she has been talking to and meeting with parents over the issue, and didn’t think pulling students out of school – a week before standardized testing starts – was the answer.

“Kids need to be here to learn,” Jara said.

During the afternoon’s meeting, district officials reiterated to parents that they are working on the problem, giving parents the impression the teacher would not be back next fall, González said. For some parents, that was not soon enough and they vowed to keep their children out of school again today.