Comments on Table VII. The average membership of the schools shows a gain of 12,130; the average attendance, a gain of 11,160. Were the gains in these two items numerically the same, the relative gain of the smaller item (the average attendance) would nevertheless be greater than that of the larger (the average membership). It is possible, therefore, for the average attendance to show a little less gain in number (11,160) than the average membership (12,130), and yet to show, as in the present case, a slight gain in percentage (from .9205 to .9217+).

VIII. Table showing by Counties the Numbers of Towns whose Percentages of Average Attendance for the Year 1898-99 fall into the Several Percentage Groups specified.

Comments on Table VIII. — The percentage of attendance is based in every case on the average membership. If based on total membership, it would be lower.

The following towns report an attendance percentage of

The only town reporting a percentage under 80 is Alford, which reports 77. Alford was the only town last year that reported a percentage below 80, and then it reported 77. The percentages run very high for most of the towns in the State. This is due in part to a high esprit de corps in matters of attendance, and in part to the indulgent attendance rules of the old State register. The new register, which was distributed to the schools in September, 1899, will not be closed until July, 1900. Its facts will be reported to the State in the school returns of 1901, and consequently will not appear in the annual report of the Board until January, 1902; that is, they will first appear in the sixty-fifth report. When returns come in from the new register, it is expected that they will

show lower percentages of attendance; but, as explained elsewhere (see page 83), these lower percentages may be perfectly consistent with improved attendance conditions.

In connection with attendance percentages, the following points merit attention : —

1. It is only when the alleged excellent attendance is genuine and not the product of fictions and indulgences that it can be trusted as an indicator of school efficiency.

2. The irregular attendance of the few, even when the percentage of general attendance runs high, merits the close attention of the school authorities. It is a move in the right direction that the names of such cases cannot be so promptly dropped from the membership roll and therefore from thought under the rules of the new register as under those of the old.

3. It is a pertinent inquiry whether the pressure in some schools for perfect attendance is not excessive. That esprit de corps which prompts the pupil to be present, and punctually present, without a break throughout the weeks of the year and the years of the course, is in most ways admirable; and yet it may impel attendance in extreme cases to the great imperilling either of one's own health or of the health of others, or of both. To retain so fine a spirit and at the same time to guard the school against a possible tyranny of it is a problem to be solved for individual cases and merits tactful handling.

Necessary Absence. - To deal stringently with such irregularity as is due to the greed or the negligence of the home or to the perversity of the child, to discourage tactfully that sort of parental coddling that keeps well children at home when the weather gets rough for fear they will become sick, or that sort of parental indulgence that lets the circus or the county fair take precedence of the school, to see to it that the over-conscientious or the over-ambitious pupil shall not sacrifice himself or harm others for the sake of 100 per cent. attendance,all this puts upon the teacher duties so difficult, delicate, and at times seemingly contradictory, that he may be pardoned if he is not altogether and uniformly successful in discharging them.

Until recently it was left by law wholly to the local school authorities to determine what excuses for absence should be

accepted as valid and what should not be so accepted. In 1898 the Legislature provided that the local school authorities might excuse cases of " necessary absence." The local authorities are now called upon, therefore, to determine what constitutes necessary absence. The statutes wisely refrain from defining the word "necessary." necessary." No definition of it can cover all the cases that may possibly arise under it. There is an extreme definition that would forbid the detention of a sick child at home, when he might, at some personal risk or by dint of special effort, report at school, or that would interfere with a well child's staying at home to attend a wedding or a funeral in the family, or to discharge some grave duty in an emergency. The possibility of attendance in a physical sense might clearly exist in any of these cases, and yet in the presence of a conflicting duty that of attending school might clearly be the inferior one, and so, in a moral sense, impossible to discharge. Obviously, that view of necessary absence which makes it apply to those cases only in which physical attendance upon school is literally impossible does not commend itself as a reasonable one. On the other hand, as a matter of fact, there are scores of reasons assigned for the non-attendance of children at school that cannot, in any fairness, make the absence necessary. They are reasons that parents or pupils may readily overcome by a little extra pains, a little greater sturdiness, a little more self-denial, a little greater forethought, a little higher conception of duty. Just where between these two classes of necessary and unnecessary absence the line of division should be drawn no one can say. Fortunately, it is not necessary to establish the line in any formulated statement. Concrete cases largely take care of themselves. No parent is ever prosecuted for not sending his child to school, no child ever prosecuted for truancy, until it becomes absolutely clear, beyond a chance for doubt, that the absence is unnecessary, and has continued so beyond the margin allowed by law. It is neither the parents nor the children, but the school authorities that finally determine whether absence is necessary or not. Therefore, the school authorities are legally entitled to know the reasons that exist for absence. Persons who ask that children be excused for absence are doubly bound by common courtesy and by im

plication of law, to say nothing of a certain consideration for the rights and welfare of others, to state the reasons for so asking. It devolves, indeed, upon persons having the control of children to decide in the first instance whether the reasons for their absence are sufficiently weighty to justify it; but such reasons are finally subject to the judgment of the school authorities, or, on appeal therefrom, to that of the courts. It is true that the simple request of a parent to excuse his child's absence is not unfrequently accepted by the school when no hint of the reason for such absence has been given; but the practice is not to be interpreted as a recognition of any right to withhold the reason. Should such a right be admitted, it would nullify the compulsory attendance law. It is so simple and obvious a thing for a parent to do, it so helps the teacher to discriminate between that necessary absence with which he should deal considerately and that unnecessary absence which he should discourage, it so strengthens the school authorities in their efforts to secure regular attendance and its resulting benefits, that it ought not to be necessary to remind a fair-minded person of his legal obligation to do what considerations of courtesy, co-operation, example and the like should naturally prompt him to do. While simple requests, without assignment of reasons, that children be excused for absence might be presumed to cover excellent reasons in the cases of most parents, it would be preposterous to extend such presumption to the similar requests of other parents. The more cheerfully the former assign reasons, in compliance with the rule of the school authorities and the intent of the law, the easier it will be for these authorities to enforce the rule and the law in the case of the latter. It should not be overlooked that, while the school committee is the final judge, outside of the courts, of the validity of reasons assigned for absence, it invariably accepts the presentation of those reasons by parents and guardians as prima facie true and correct ones. It is only in rare and suspicious cases that it is called upon to show the contrary.

It becomes the school authorities, however, in view of the inclination of the American citizen when he does a thing to do it from an inner sense of its fitness rather than from outward