Too bad these DC students' flirt with truancy shot their schools in the foot. Federal funding is based on daily average school attendance. This little stunt may have cost the DC school district thousands of Federal education dollars for today absentees. This policy has been in place since the Carter administration.
Ironically if they really wanted to do something about their schools education funding, they could have stayed in school and not blamed the President. But that doesn't send a political message.
I would suspect that they were marked present for the whole day so that the school would get the money. Someone needs to demand an audit to verify that the school officials were not committing fraud.