By Maggie Macintosh, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Winnipeg Free Press More than 15,000 students — including six in 10 children and youth in one Manitoba school division — were chronically absent from class in 2023-24. Leaked government documents expose the troubling state of truancy in elementary and high schools across the province. “Unbelievable” and “mind-blowing” were among the descriptors that came to mind for Kent Dueck when he saw the data, which an ex-NDP MLA obtained and made public on Wednesday. Dueck, the executive director of Inner City Youth Alive, has spent more than a decade advocating for interventions to address absenteeism in Winnipeg. “This should force us into action on the issue,” he said. “Now that it’s out in the open and everybody knows, I think we’re in a…
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