Create multiple checkboxes php

I am trying to create a student attendance table that contains a checkbox for each students attendance, that is to be stored in a database.

This is my table that I have so far, that is executed from an ajax function call. Most of the data is from a database, that contains student names.

For the sake of this example $numStudent = 5;

echo '<form method="post" action="checkAttend.php"> 
    <table border="1">';
$count = 1;

while(($count < $numStudent) && ($students = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result))) {
    echo '<tr>
        <th>' . $count. '</th>
        <th>' . $students['student_name'] . '</th>
        <th> <input type="checkbox" name="students[]" /> </th>
    </tr>';
    $count++;
}

echo '<th colspan = "3">
    <input type="submit" name="button" id="button" value="Submit" /> </th>';
echo '</table>';
echo '</form>';

In checkAttend.php The form prints exactly the way I need it to, but when I try to print out the values in the checkbox array (to check what values are contained within before saving it to the database) each value in the array prints out :

$student_attend[0]       A
$student_attend[1]       r
$student_attend[2]       r
$student_attend[3]       a
$student_attend[4]       y

Typically I want to store some kind of value in the corresponding field in the database to indicate if the student is absent or not.

I cant tell if I am doing the checkbox loop correctly or not or if I need to add in more stuff.