Between paying for substitutes to fill in for absent employees and “incentivizing” teachers and service personnel to show up for work, Ohio County Schools pays out more than $2.7 million a year. That is an improvement over the past.

Absenteeism has been a chronic concern among school officials. During the 2018-19 school year, Ohio County educators and service personnel missed a total of 9,572 days of scheduled work, Board of Education members learned last week. That is an average of about 12 3/4 days for each of the system’s approximately 750 employees.

Even that figure is an improvement. Board members were shown statistics dating back to the 2015-16 school year, when 11,376 days were missed. Since then, improvement has been steady.

School Superintendent Kimberly Miller praised those on the payroll during last week’s board meeting, saying, “We are truly proud of our employees.”

Still, as she pointed out, absenteeism creates problems other than additional expenditures of taxpayers’ money. “We know that our students learn best from their highly-qualified teachers, and continuity is best for our students,” she told board members. Anyone who has ever watched a substitute teacher — unfamiliar with lesson plans, schedules and individual students — understands that.

Indeed, school employees are to be praised for the decrease in absenteeism — though a glance at the statistics indicates much of the improvement last year may be due to Mother Nature. During the 2018-19 school year, 5,267 missed days were due to illness — compared to 6,118 the year before.

Can Ohio County schools do better? One suspects they can. It may be that tightening the incentive program would help. In its current form, the initiative provides $1,350 bonuses to teachers and service personnel if they do not use all the 14 “sick days” they are allotted each year. Perhaps a sliding scale, with the amount of bonuses tied to the actual number of days off, would help.

That — and other ideas for reducing absenteeism — ought to be considered by school board members.