Gunderson, Jessica. The Vera Institute of Justice, New York, NY, October 2010. This policy brief looks at one response to the statewide problem of chronic school absence in New York State: reporting parents to the child protective system, which handles allegations of child abuse and neglect. It determines that the system is ill equipped to deal with school attendance and that punitive approaches fly in the face of research on adolescent development. The report concludes that the first step toward more effectively addressing chronic absence among teens may be to remove them from the jurisdiction of the child protective system, while simultaneously creating a less adversarial set of interventions to keep youth connected to schools. This would allow the child welfare system to focus on the most vulnerable abused and neglected children in the state.