SAN DIEGO, Calif. – Recently released statistics on school absentee rates show that in many districts teachers are chronically absent more than their students.

“According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, nearly one out of every four teachers in San Diego County miss 10 or more school days per year, a threshold that triggers that label. Those absences don’t include professional development time off for training or in-service days,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

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“On the other hand, fewer than one in 10 students were labeled chronically absent in the same data set, which covers the 2013-14 school year.”

The realization comes from data tracked by the federal government for the first time on the national level. It shows that teacher absenteeism varies widely by school district, with some in California showing the majority of teachers are absent more than 10 days per year while others report less than 10 percent of teacher missing 10 days or more.

The Union-Tribune explained the reason for the variability stems from the various ways districts calculate leave time, and different teachers union contracts that dictate the number of days off offered to educators.

District administrators also blame the high number of teacher absences in part on federal laws that require districts to give employees leave time for medical reasons.

“Our goal is always to have our teachers in classrooms as much as possible,” National Elementary School District Assistant Superintendent Cindy Frazee told the Union-Tribune. “But we also have to comply with the Education Code and the laws for the leave time we provide our employees.”

The National Elementary School District was listed as the fourth highest in the state for teacher absences.

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The problem, however, isn’t restricted to California.

Across the country, unionized teachers are taking as much as three weeks off during the school year, despite also receiving leave for Christmas Break, Spring Break, and Summer Break.

WKYC recently highlighted a National Council on Teacher Quality report that shows Cleveland teachers miss an average of 15.6 days each school year, and a third of Cleveland teachers miss 18 days or more.

“If teachers don’t come to school, how do we expect the students to come?” Cleveland parent Twyonia Cooper asked the news site. “They see that you’re not there so why should I be coming to school.”

Cleveland schools’ chief academic officer Michelle Pierre-Farid told the news site the district is embarrassed by the distinction of leading the nation in teacher absences.

“We don’t want to be number one in that area,” she said. “We want to be number one in student achievement.”

Pierre-Farid said the district has looked for ways to incentivize teachers to show up for work because “you’re not going to be a great teacher if you don’t come to work.”

Regardless, union officials in both California and Cleveland did their best to discredit the teacher absentee data and downplay the problem, which costs some students a full year of quality instruction by the time they graduate from high school.

David Quolke, Cleveland Teachers Union president and vice president of the national American Federation of Teachers, called the NCTQ study “a pretty poor and blatant attempt to continue the anti-teacher rhetoric,” WKYC reports.

San Diego Education Association President Lindsay Burningham also alleged the federal data on teacher leave is misleading because it doesn’t “delineate” between different types of leave, despite the fact that teachers are absent from the classroom either way.

“I don’t think it’s fair to paint it as teachers taking a ton of vacation on top of school vacations,” she told the Union-Tribune. “There are more types of leave than there are categories to define them. You don’t always delineate the difference between them all.”