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You might want to encourage the kids to take a few extra minutes to scrub the teeth very carefully, 

According to a study be researchers from the Ostrow School of Dentistry at UCS, poor oral health, dental disease, and tooth pain can put kids at a serious disadvantage in school, causing more absences from school for kids and more missed work for parents.

The study will be published in the September 2012 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. 

Researchers examined nearly 1,500 socioeconomically disadvantaged elementary and high school children in the Los Angeles Unified School District. They matched their oral health status to their academic achievement and attendance records.

Children who reported having recent tooth pain were four times more likely to have a low grade point average-below the median GPA of 2.8-when compared to children without oral pain, according to study results.

According to the researchers, on average, elementary children missed a total of 6 days per year, and high school children missed 2.6 days. 

For elementary students, 2.1 days of missed school were due to dental problems, and high school students missed 2.3 days due to dental issues," she said. 

Parents missed an average of 2.5 days of work per year to care for children with dental problems.

Eleven percent of children who had limited access to dental care-whether due to lack of insurance, lack of transportation, or other barriers-missed school due to their poor oral health, as opposed to only four percent of children who had easier access to dental care.

Roseann Mulligan, chair of the school's Division of Dental Public Health and Pediatric Dentistry and corresponding author of the study, said the data indicates that for disadvantaged children, there is an impact on students' academic performance due to dental problems. 

"We recommend that oral health programs must be more integrated into other health, educational and social programs, especially those that are school-based," Mulligan said. "Furthermore, widespread population studies are needed to demonstrate the enormous personal, societal and financial burdens that this epidemic of oral disease is causing on a national level. "

In a  previous study, researchers found that 73 percent of disadvantaged kids in Los Angeles have dental caries, the disease responsible for cavities in teeth.  

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 16 percent of children ages 6-19 years have untreated dental caries and 79 percent of children ages 2-17 visited the dentist in 2010.