But being awakened in the middle of the night by sharp pains was new for Coreano and their family. Rats had begun to bite them in their sleep. Later that morning, they went to their Kensington school and pretended nothing happened.

Chronicling the life of Corem and two other Puerto Rican students from Philadelphia, author Nikhil Goyal presents harrowing accounts of childhood in his latest book . 

Readers see Corem, Ryan Rivera and Giancarlos Rodriguez grow up overpoliced and underfed. By the time they reached high school, the system threatened to close some 37 schools, and only after , shuttered 24. 

In some cases walking an hour one-way to school without transportation after an eviction left them displaced, Corem, Ryan and Giancarlos give low-income children a human face and serve as a cautionary tale. The Census Bureau has revealed the rate of childhood poverty has doubled, and the country will soon see pandemic-era relief for families, schools and come to an end. 

“If we believe that schools should be equitable and humane and child centered, then we’ve got to be willing to fight for an agenda that will end poverty,” said Goyal, who for the last two years served as the senior policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Budget Committees. 

Their stories illuminate exactly how economic instability and harsh discipline policies impact children’s ability to learn safely, making the case for change, particularly as educators nationwide grapple with how best to support students academically after pandemic disruptions.

Making economic stimuluses like the Child Tax Credit permanent, Goyal added, would mean “the lives of educators and school staff and counselors would be a lot easier.” 

Named one of 2023’s best books by the New Yorker, also illuminates how school policies governing students can disproportionately shape entire futures, particularly for students of color who are more often suspended and expelled than their peers. Zero tolerance discipline policies, for instance, put children like Ryan Rivera in juvenile incarceration and harsh schooling isolated from friends for years, after being pushed to light a trashcan on fire at 12 years old.

In conversation with ���˶���, Goyal reflects on school closures, community schooling, chronic absenteeism, and what policies stand to make a difference for the nearly living in poverty nationwide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You frame childhood poverty as a crisis to be — why release this book now? What’s happening?

The Census Bureau released its — child poverty more than doubled. More than 5 million children are plunged into poverty. It was the single largest increase in poverty in recorded history, just an astonishing development in public policy that I think deserves enormous attention as well as a full-throated response from people in Washington and people in power. 

The increase in child poverty coincides with the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit, economic stimulus payments, expanded unemployment insurance, and a number of other programs that have enormously benefited children and families, whether in terms of food assistance, or housing assistance, or Medicaid access. 

We’re also at this moment where a lot of districts throughout the country are facing dropping enrollments, facing fiscal cliffs with the end of ESSER funds. People are anticipating a lot more consolidations, and possibly something like what happened in Philadelphia where a school system weighed closing dozens of schools. What are some lessons that school leaders might glean from what happened in Philadelphia? 

In 2013, the school district proposed closing some three dozen. The argument was that the district was bleeding in a major fiscal deficit. In the book I cite a major report by Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by the district to evaluate the fiscal state of schools. One of the recommendations was a mass closure of schools. They also recommended a mass firing of teachers and other school staff and a very market-oriented approach to public education. The key recommendation was taken up by the school district, against the wishes of students and parents and educators and unions, who were an incredibly robust coalition. 

Pew Research and others have found that school closures haven’t actually yielded the balance of savings that the architects originally envisioned. They cause a lot of displacement, educational instability. And, and in many instances, students are not actually necessarily attending so-called “higher performing schools” after their schools shut down. 

I read about Fairhill School, this extraordinary school in the poorest neighborhood of Philadelphia, which had been serving generations upon generations of children of the working class. This was a school that had been deeply underfunded. And in spite of that, they were still able to provide children with a nurse, a safe environment. 

Their test scores weren’t as good as suburban districts, sure. But does that mean that we should necessarily be closing a school like that which has been an anchor of the community? I don’t think so. I think if we provide public schools with equitable resources, and the type of respect that they deserve, so many of the issues that folks might point you to in public education, I don’t think would exist. 

The charter movement has capitalized on this. But if you go back to the history of charter schools, and you go back to Minnesota and some of the earliest charter schools, these were laboratories of progressivism. We’re gonna bring innovation, bring the best, experiment with interesting ideas in pedagogy and curriculum and instruction and the teaching force. See what works and then bring the best ideas into the public system. That is the model that I would prefer, where charter schools work in tandem with public schools, not as competition.

Something I appreciated while reading is that you give these trends and the political events around them a human face, from the war on drugs and no tolerance policies for violence that led to thousands of incarcerated youth. What’s currently underway that you think might be on track to cause more devastation? Particularly for Black and brown children?

I think there’s a dramatic rise in the privatization movement. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in the voucher schemes as well as charter expansion. In Philadelphia alone, nearly 40% of children attend either charter schools or cyber charter schools. There’s cities all over this country where traditional public schools have become dismantled, and we’re seeing a rise of the private sector intervening in public education. There’s obviously some really amazing organizing and efforts by teachers unions and advocacy groups like Journey for Justice fighting back against those policies all over the country.

What’s at stake, if these models are to continue at the scale that they have? What would be the impact for students, based on your research and experience with Philadelphia?

If we continue down this path, where more and more charters replace traditional public schools, where voucher programs siphon even more dollars away from the public system into the private system, particularly the religious sector, then I think that’s one of the most grave and profound threats to American democracy. I think the foundations of American democracy are found in public education. I think it’s one of the areas of our society that has not been fully transformed and taken over by the market.

Look at health care, look at energy, look at housing. By and large, public education has withstood a number of those assaults over generations, but I think public schools are facing their most serious threats. The pandemic didn’t help. We can debate about school closures, the efficacy of that or not, but I think the reality is that they breed a distrust among parents who were rightfully frustrated about making sure that there was a place for their children to be during the day and be educated. 

One exception to this threat you’ve identified to the traditional public system is the expansion of 3K and pre-K programs in many cities. 

The early childhood education space is very fascinating to me. Public dollars might go to both public providers as well as private providers, and you’re seeing that there’s not a sustained level of federal dollars. A lot of those private providers cannot remain open because their margins are so low. 

There is a growing interest from states all over this country as well as cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they have poured an enormous amount of money into public pre-K. We’re talking about an area of great optimism. I am deeply encouraged by efforts by states and cities to expand early childhood education, because it is not only the right thing to do, it is good for our economy and society.

At one point in the book, you say their story is one of survival, where 18th birthdays are not rites of passage, but miracles. That it’s a story of social contract in tatters. In this reality, where so many children grow up in poverty, what are some best practices for school systems?

I think every school should be turned into a community school, where they have wraparound services, social and health supports. Universal free school meals, extended hours, restorative justice, well paid teachers and staff and modernized infrastructure. 

There are incredible examples of community schools all over this country. I will point to Cincinnati as the gold standard for community schooling, because they’ve converted virtually all of their public schools into Community Learning Centers. I am always struck by the fact that they have dentists and mental health professionals and other medical staff and doctors who are literally based in the school itself to provide care to students. 

We have to recognize that the issues and challenges that young people experience in their homes and in their communities don’t get left behind when they go to school every day. It affects their ability to learn. It affects their relationships with their teachers and counselors, and their relationships with their peers. 

We’ve got to really recognize that poverty and economic insecurity is the root cause of many of these educational inequalities. That schools can be places where children can get access to healthcare and all their social support. I’m very encouraged by that trend across the country. And the research shows that community schools have a positive impact on absenteeism, on truancy, on graduation rates, and student engagement. 

It’s the idea of, meet people where they’re at, provide them with the basic, basic building blocks for dignified life and you will see many of the social problems that once existed, either be reduced or eliminated.

were chronically absent by the end of the last school year, and we’re hearing more and more about school avoidance. What does Corem’s story reveal about this trend and its links with mental health, which is what some believe to be a root cause right now? 

It’s a great crisis. I would say that Corem has a harrowing, fascinating story with a lot of lessons. Today Corem uses they/them pronouns. When they were growing up, they lived with their mother who was disabled. They endured consistent housing and food insecurity. They would run out of food. They had to endure evictions. They moved in some years, twice or three times, which meant that they had to constantly switch schools and never really settle into one school. That meant Corem’s academic performance faltered. 

I know they’ve suffered from absenteeism at times, not due to their own failings, but simply because they were deprived of the basic necessities of a decent life. They didn’t have the tools and resources that would allow him to get to school on time every day. There’s one moment in the book where the landlord tells their mother that sorry, we just sold the house and you have to leave immediately. 

That means, in the middle of the school year, they have to walk more than an hour from the new home to the old school. Their mother was able to get them a public transit pass, but it just goes to show homelessness and housing insecurity are huge obstacles to consistent and regular school attendance. 

There’s a lot of research to show that homeless students in particular make up a significant part of the population that is going to be absent. As emergency rental assistance winds down and now we’re more than two years since the end of the national eviction moratorium, our families are really suffering through the housing affordability crisis. And I think we see that play out with children.

Pint-sized hall monitors in yellow neon vests greet their fellow students first thing in the morning at the Tornillo PreK-8 School as part of a program meant to encourage them to come to class every day.

As children shuffle into their classrooms, teachers begin taking counts of who’s absent the moment the school day starts at 7:30 a.m., even though attendance isn’t due until 10 a.m.

From there, it’s a sprint for staff to reach parents and find those missing students.

“Staff start making calls to parents to find out if a kid is going to be making it to school,” said Tornillo Independent School District Superintendent Rosy Vega-Barrio. “If we don’t get an answer right then and there, we send an officer to the house to find out what’s going on.”

Once a student starts accumulating absences, school leaders like Tornillo PreK-8 Principal Myrna Lopez-Patty set up meetings with parents to talk to them about Texas attendance laws, which require school districts to begin court proceedings if a student has three unexcused absences.

“You’re meeting with me as a preventive measure because we don’t want to file for court,” Lopez-Patty told parent Brenda Guillen and her son Nathan during one of those meetings in March.

Guillen said that she did not know her son could be in danger of losing credit if he missed more than 10% of his classes for the year. In the end, she said she was glad she went to the meeting before Nathan’s attendance became a bigger problem.

“I was confident with his grades. I thought he was doing great, but I completely disregarded the fact that he needed to be on time more and in school more,” Guillen told El Paso Matters.

Vega-Barrio said that these efforts helped it become the only district in El Paso County to lower its chronic absenteeism rate since students returned to school from the pandemic, although it still remained higher than pre-pandemic levels.

The 2018-19 school year was the last before the pandemic disruption. Schools across the country shut down in March 2020 and most remained closed the rest of the 2019-20 school year. In El Paso, most classes remained closed in the fall of 2020 and reopened in early 2021.

Throughout Texas, the number of chronically absent students — characterized as students who miss at least 10% of class, or about 18 days a year — rose from 11% during the 2018-19 school year to 15% in 2019-20. That increased to 26% during the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent Federal Report Cards data released by the Texas Education Agency.

Nationally, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 15% in 2018-19 to 28% in 2021-22, according to a compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with the Associated Press.

El Paso County saw a similar trend, as chronic absenteeism rates in school districts countywide grew between 11% to 26% on average over those three years.

Tornillo ISD, a rural school district on the eastern outskirts of the county with less than 900 students, was an outlier. The district saw its chronic absenteeism rate drop from 10% in 2018-19 to 2% during the 2019-20 school year but then shot up to 22% in the 2020-21 school year. The rate dropped to 14% during the 2021-22 school year – the lowest in the county that year but still above the pre-pandemic rates

That year, the El Paso Independent School District had a 36% chronic absenteeism rate — the highest in the county. The Socorro Independent School District had a 28% rate and the Ysleta Independent School District reported a 25% rate.

Outside the city limits, 35% of students in the San Elizario Independent School District were chronically absent, with 32% in the Fabens Independent School District, 28% in the Clint Independent School District and 20% in the Canutillo Independent School District. The Anthony Independent School District kept its chronic absenteeism rate the same — at 25% — between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.

Texas schools are required to keep track of which students are chronically absent, but most do not monitor the data at the district level and rely on the TEA’s annual reports.

While most El Paso schools don’t track their overall chronic absenteeism rates, some school leaders said average daily attendance has improved since the 2021-22 school year but has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Now some experts are concerned that this rise in absenteeism could have negative effects on students who missed out on some of the benefits of attending school every day, like getting counseling, socializing, and participating in extracurricular activities.

“The earlier students attend school consistently, in terms of their age, the more likely they’re going to graduate and go on to whatever postsecondary success looks for them,” University of Texas at Austin education professor Joshua Childs told El Paso Matters. “It can provide some structure and some organization. … It’s a place where they can get a couple of meals a day, and be around adults that care about them and engage with them. For many kids, it’s a critical component of their daily life.”

Research shows chronically absent students tend to perform worse academically and are more likely to drop out of school.

One Chicago found that students who are chronically absent in pre-kinder, kindergarten and first grade are less likely to read at grade level by the end of the second grade. 

Chronic absenteeism during the sixth grade is an indicator that a student will drop out of high school, and students who were chronically absent between eighth and 12th grade were seven times more likely to drop out, according to a 2017

What is chronic absenteeism and what causes it?

In Texas, students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% — or 18 days — of a school year, even if an absence is excused. 

States have been required to report and track chronic absenteeism to receive Title I funding since 2015 when the Every Student Succeeds Act — or ESSA — was signed into law to replace the No Child Left Behind Act. Before 2015, Texas only tracked average daily attendance, which made it hard to tell if absences were concentrated among specific students.

“What ESSA has allowed us to do is get at the frequency of students missing school and how much they’re missing,” Childs said.

Experts and educators say that in many cases, students who are absent for long periods often face obstacles that make it hard for them to get to class every day. This can include a lack of transportation, illness and personal issues that disrupt a family’s normal day-to-day lives.

San Elizario ISD Superintendent Jeannie Meza-Chavez said she has seen cases where students have lost a parent or family member and missed several days of school afterward. In another case, a family’s home burned down, leaving their children at risk of becoming chronically absent as they face potential homelessness.

The data suggests students living in poverty and those with disabilities face even more of these obstacles than their peers, keeping them from attending school regularly. In Texas, a third of economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year.

“There’s just so many different factors,” Meza-Chavez said when asked about the causes of chronic absenteeism.”Sometimes our families just will not send kids to school.”

Because the reasons students miss school vary, Childs said educators and researchers need to dig into why students are missing school and find ways to support them.

School leaders say most districts already make efforts to address the obstacles that keep students from getting to school. Most have social workers who connect parents with outside resources. Some take matters into their own hands finding ways to help families.

At Tornillo ISD school administrators have helped students get transportation to and from school when they are unable to take the bus.

In San Elizario, counselors worked with the family that lost its home to make sure they had a place to go and the children had clothes and shoes to wear to school, Meza-Chavez said.

Why did chronic absenteeism increase?

While changes in chronic absenteeism rates varied by school district, most followed a similar pattern. Chronic absenteeism dropped slightly when the school first closed during the 2019-20 school year, likely because districts did not need to report attendance for the last few weeks of the year, said Ysleta ISD Director of Student Services Diana Mooy.

Chronic absenteeism began to rise slightly during the 2020-21 school year. At this time Texas schools worked under a hybrid model where some students could attend class online while others went in person. Mooy said chronic absenteeism didn’t rise too much in Ysleta ISD because the state gave school districts more flexibility when taking attendance to accommodate for virtual classes.

“We usually take attendance in second period, and if you’re in your seat, you’re counted present and if you’re not you’re absent. In (2021-22) we were able to take attendance later in the day so we were given more time and more opportunities to count kids present,” Mooy said. 

Then chronic absenteeism skyrocketed during the 2021-22 school year when all students were required to return to school in person.

Some school leaders El Paso Matters spoke to said they saw parents keep their kids from school more often because of illness and concerns over masking and vaccination policies.

EPISD’s former truancy prevention director Mark Mendoza said he noticed a shift in families’ attitudes around school attendance.

“Before the quarantine, we had students that were chronically absent for a variety of reasons, but the general culture was that it’s important to go to school every single day,” Medoza told El Paso Matters. “Then when the pandemic happened, and the entirety of in-person schools shut down, both students and their families lost that.”

Mendoza suggested that one of the reasons EPISD has the highest chronic absenteeism rate in the county is because as a District of Innovation, it is exempt from the state law that requires students to attend 90% of their classes to get credit.

The District of Innovation concept, adopted under House Bill 1842 during the 2015 legislative session, allows school districts to excuse themselves from certain state requirements. The initiative was intended to give school districts some of the same flexibility as charter schools as long as they adopt an innovation plan.

Mendoza said that since students were allowed to miss more than 10% of their classes and still get credit as long as they got passing grades, attendance suffered.

“Many people began to have the idea that I can learn and get good grades without going to school every single day,” Mendoza said.

EPISD did not respond to a request for comment.

What did Tornillo ISD do differently?

Tornillo ISD is encompassed by expansive desert and farmland along the Rio Grande, with some families living miles from their closest neighbor.

While most schools in Texas saw their chronic absenteeism rates go up when students returned to in-person learning, the rural district saw an increase when students were learning from home. With limited broadband service in the area, district leaders said many students who could not connect to their virtual classes were counted absent.

“The majority of our kids didn’t have access to Wi-Fi,” Vega-Barrio said. “Even though we provided hotspots to every single household, you had multiple kids online at the same time and it just created a lot of issues. I think that’s what hurt us in (2020-2021).”

Additionally, the district has several students who live in Mexico and cross the Tornillo-Guadalupe International Bridge every day to get to school. 

After schools closed and international travel was restricted during the pandemic, “it was really hard to get those students to partake in online learning,” Vega-Barrio said.

In many cases parents and guardians also struggled to help their kids with school work or troubleshoot technology issues, leaving them feeling like their children needed to be back in school, Vega-Barrio said.

Tornillo ISD also implemented several programs and measures in 2021 to try to reduce absenteeism including hiring an attendance officer and educating parents on the importance of not missing school.

Texas truancy courts may require parents to participate in counseling, take special classes or do community service. Parents could also face fines and up to three days in jail if they do not comply. They can also face misdemeanor charges if they are found criminally negligent for not forcing their children to go to school, according to the Texas Education Code.

Students with five or more unexcused absences in a semester can also have their enrollment revoked, which could prevent a student from graduating or progressing to the next grade.

Tornillo PreK-8 also started a morning hall patrol program to encourage students to show up to school on time every day.

“The goal was for us to get students on time but also to build leadership skills and make them feel like they had a role here in the district,” the school’s secretary, Cassandra Soto, told El Paso Matters. 

Soto, who came up with the idea for the program, said she focused on students who were missing class or showing up late excessively, and those with behavioral issues. Now many of those students have improved their attendance and are eager to go to school every day.

“We’ve seen a difference in attendance and in their behavior. They actually even told me, ‘It’s our job,’ so they get here very early,” Soto said.

Tornillo ISD school leaders say these efforts have allowed them to get students back in the classroom and rebound its attendance rates. 

Soto said she thinks that success can be replicated by other schools.

“We are a small district and we don’t have a lot of resources or the amount of staff other districts have. So I think that if we’re able to do it, they’re able to do it as well,” Soto said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This article originally appeared in the  

On March 1, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials announced new guidelines for people with COVID-19, recommending those with the virus treat it the same as the flu and RSV — staying home while they have symptoms and fever.

The guidelines eliminate earlier recommendations for five days of isolation and testing for COVID, marking a new approach for the federal health agency. They said the new guidelines are intended to make it easier for people to know how to protect others and take into account that people may not know which virus they have.

“We are in a different situation with the level of protection we have against the virus and the prevention steps we know work to protect ourselves and others,” said CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen in announcing the changes at a press conference.

People with COVID can return to work or regular activities if their symptoms are mild and improving and it’s been at least 24 hours since they’ve had a fever, without fever-reducing medicines — the same standard used for the flu and respiratory syncytial virus or RSV.

After resuming normal activities, the CDC recommends people consider additional strategies for the next five days to prevent the spread of the virus, including wearing a well-fitted mask and keeping a distance from others. Those who are at high risk of severe illness, such as the elderly or those with weakened immune systems, should seek out treatment right away to help reduce their chances of getting seriously sick.

The changes reflect the diminishing threat of the coronavirus and come on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the first two confirmed COVID cases in Georgia.

Four years into the pandemic, most people have had COVID at least once. At least 98% of the U.S. population has some immunity, whether from infection, vaccination or both.

The changes in recommendations should be easier to understand and follow, CDC officials said.

Many people have not been following the five-day isolation guidance anyway, health officials say. A recent survey by the CDC found less than half the people questioned said they would use an at-home COVID test if they had COVID symptoms.

CDC officials also emphasized we have more tools to treat COVID, including the antiviral Paxlovid.

But immunity can wane as new variants emerge. CDC officials repeatedly stressed the importance of getting updated COVID vaccines to help protect against severe illness. CDC officials said about 95% of people who were hospitalized during this winter season with COVID did not get one of the updated vaccines released last fall.

Nationally, 41% of people 65 and older took the updated vaccine since it was released last year, the highest vaccination rate of any age group. That rate is much lower in Georgia, where about 22% of people 65 and older took the shot, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.

Cohen said even with high levels of the coronavirus spreading this winter season, COVID hospital admissions have decreased by about 75% and deaths by more than 90% compared to January 2022.

While the number of COVID illnesses are down dramatically from earlier points in the pandemic, they remain higher than influenza and can be more serious. COVID continues to hospitalize and kill more people than the flu and can trigger lasting complications such as long COVID which doctors and scientists are still trying to understand.

The new isolation guidelines will not apply to nursing homes and hospitals with more vulnerable populations, CDC officials said.

“Let’s be clear,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis director of the CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory. “COVID-19 is not the flu and it is different from other respiratory illnesses, and leads to more lasting effects.”

But COVID does have key things in common with these other viruses, which lead to a streamlined guidance for these respiratory illnesses. Daskalakis said the symptoms are similar, they are spread in similar ways, and share many of the same prevention strategies.

Dr. Jayne Morgan, executive director of health and community education for Piedmont Healthcare, said COVID can be managed differently now that there’s more immunity to the virus that causes it. “To be clear, COVID-19 remains a public health concern, and a new variant can change the trajectory at any moment, however currently, that threat is no longer critical,” Morgan said in an e-mail.

Jodie Guest, a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and vice chair of the Department of Epidemiology, said one positive outcome from the new guidelines might be that more people will test for COVID if a positive test no longer requires a five-day isolation period.

The CDC originally advised 10 days of isolation for COVID cases, but in late 2021 cut it to five days for those with no symptoms or only mild illnesses. That change in guidelines led many companies to pull back on paying employees to stay home with COVID, including Walmart and Amazon.

Over more recent years, many employers and employees have not been adhering to the isolation guidelines. Questions about the impact remain, as well as questions about whether workers with no paid sick days will go to work while still sick.

Guest expressed concern about this.

“We need to remember that our workforce is negatively impacted when people who are contagious feel they have to come to work,” Guest said in an e-mail.

Focused on schools in Washington, D.C., the preliminary results show middle school students attended an additional three days and those in the elementary grades improved their attendance by two days when they received tutoring during regular school hours.  

But high-impact tutoring —defined as at least 90 minutes a week with the same tutor, spread over multiple sessions — had the greatest impact on students who missed 30% or more of the prior school year. Their attendance improved by at least five days, according to the study from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University-based center that conducts tutoring research. 

Susanna Loeb, who leads the center, called the data “the first evidence of a strong causal link between tutoring specifically and attendance.” 

Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said it makes sense that students come to school more often when they’re keeping up in class and getting good grades. 

“Part of why kids don’t show up is because they don’t feel successful in school,” she said. Forming a connection with a tutor over several weeks or months can also make students more motivated to attend, she added. “I do think it’s an impact of high-dosage tutoring, not necessarily just tutoring.”

The early findings, which will be expanded in a future paper, reinforce the benefits of offering high-impact tutoring during the school day. The extra instructional time helps schools address two of their biggest post-pandemic problems — learning loss and chronic absenteeism, the researchers said. The White House has urged districts to not only target remaining federal relief funds toward those areas, but explore ways to sustain those efforts when they dry up. 

Districts that continue tutoring programs will likely keep “student achievement top of mind,” Loeb said, “with greater engagement — including increased attendance — as another outcome they hope to see.”

also demonstrated how to successfully integrate tutoring sessions into the school day. The state education agency, which has spent $35 million on the program, funds staff members in charge of rearranging the schedule to accommodate the sessions and track data on student participation. 

“They took that off the plate of the principal,” Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent, said at a January conference hosted by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. She added that working with researchers like those from Stanford can help districts communicate the impact of federal relief funds. Without those partnerships, she said, “we would look back three years later and not be able to tell the authentic story around what happened to $35 million.”

The district, which had a chronic absenteeism rate of last school year, began its tutoring program in 2021. Officials awarded grants to a variety of providers, including , which focuses on high school math and teacher preparation program.

Sousa Middle School, in southeast D.C., works with George Washington University’s , which pays college students interested in STEM or education to work as tutors.

“My challenge, when this program first began, was getting students to come and not look at it as a form of punishment,” said Sharon Fitzgerald, Sousa’s tutoring manager. Now students who have “graduated” out of the program ask why they can’t come back. 

Students responded well, she said, because it’s a “break away from seeing their regular teachers every day” and because they look up to the college students. The tutors, she added, also have a clever way of giving students a taste of how much more they’ll learn during their next meeting and if they attend class everyday.

“It was what the tutors left them with in the last session that encouraged them to come to school,” Fitzgerald said.

The results are likely to spark more interest in how tutoring and attendance initiatives can work in tandem.

“We have not intentionally used tutors as a way to address attendance. I can imagine that it could help if part of their work focused on that,” said A.J. Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education. “I see potential.”

Chang, with Attendance Works, said the results are “on the right track,” but don’t go far enough. During the , several states still had chronic absenteeism rates over 30%, including Alaska, New Mexico and Oregon.

Tutoring doesn’t address all of the barriers that keep students from attending school, like health conditions or bullying, she said. But tutors could refer students to school attendance teams when those concerns surface.

“What more could we get,” she asked “if tutoring was tied to a bigger strategy, a more comprehensive approach?’ ”

But even that prediction rests on optimistic assumptions about continued improvement in the coming years. For some states, it could take longer. In Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina, for example, the percentage of students chronically absent for at least 10% of the school year went up in 2022-23, from the American Enterprise Institute. 

The report, based on available data from 39 states, calls chronic absenteeism “schools’ greatest post-pandemic challenge.” 

“We need to make a hard pivot moving forward,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank. Minor decreases in chronic absenteeism rates are not enough to stave off “a disaster for the long term” he said, especially in low-performing and high-poverty districts that had serious absenteeism problems before the pandemic.

Malkus, a former middle school teacher, called for districts to make attendance a high priority, especially among elementary educators. Parents, he said, are more likely to respond to messages from children’s teachers than from “a stranger from the school district.” 

The report, one of two separate studies of chronic absenteeism released Wednesday, further underscores the enormity of a national crisis that is hindering students’ ability to recover academically from the pandemic. The second analysis shows a substantial increase in the share of districts where at least 30% of students missed 18 or more days of school. 

The review of federal data breaks down the rates into five levels of chronic absenteeism, with extreme being the highest. 

“We came up with these categories before the pandemic,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. At that point, nearly 11% of districts nationally had extreme levels. “Then the pandemic hit, and it was like ‘Oh my God.’ ”

By 2021-22, the rate had more than tripled to almost 39%, , the final installment in a three-part from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. The data “compels action from state education agencies and policymakers,” researchers wrote. 

‘It’s alarming’

Some state lawmakers share that sense of urgency. So far, eight bills in seven states aim to reestablish good attendance habits among the nation’s students. 

Earlier this month, a Maryland called interim state chief Carey Wright to testify about whether news reports of shockingly high rates — with over half of students repeatedly missing school — were true.  

“It’s alarming,” she told the members, after sharing district and state-level data. “We have a lot of children who are chronically absent at very young grades, and that’s a real concern, particularly when you’re thinking that they’re starting their educational career.”

In Maryland, 274 schools out of 1,388 had an extreme chronic absenteeism rate in 2017-18. By 2021-22, that number had reached 700.

Lori Phelps, principal of Woodbridge Elementary in Catonsville, joined Wright to explain how her staff reduced its rate from 28% in 2021-22 to just over 9% in 2022-23.

Identifying patterns that increase absences is part of the answer, she added. For example, students were more likely to miss school on early-release days, so the staff worked with parent leaders to offer an afternoon program on those days. The PTA charged $10, but waived the fee for students with the most absences.

“We all want to prioritize those very important state scores,” Phelps said, “but we made a decision two years ago to prioritize attendance.”

No buses

But even parents determined to get their children to school face significant obstacles if they don’t have transportation. In Colorado, every district has to save money or because of driver shortages, said Michelle Exstrom, education director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. She serves on a expected to propose transportation solutions by the end of the year.  

“In rural areas all over the country, where kids don’t have a ride to school, it’s like, duh, they’re not going to be at school,” she said. A lot of parents can’t leave work at 2:30 to pick up their children, she said, and even high school students with cars often can’t drive to school because there’s not enough parking, she said.

In Ohio, two lawmakers think some might reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten and ninth grade, two grade levels with rates around 30%. 

The bill, from Democrat Rep. Dani Isaacsohn and Republican Rep. Bill Seitz, would offer $500 annually to families in low-income districts to boost attendance rates in those grades and ideally save money on dropout recovery services in the long run. If passes, it would start as a pilot this fall .

Seitz told ���˶��� he expects “significant supportive testimony,” based on the success of a similar program led by a .

Another proposal in , which had a 30% chronic absenteeism rate last year, would provide for home visits and tutoring to keep frequently absent high school students on track for graduation. And a would update the definition of “educational neglect” to include a parent’s failure to comply with attendance requirements.

‘Studied in real time’

But both Malkus and Chang expressed skepticism of state solutions that fail to factor in the highly localized nature of the problem. , for example, one reason chronic absenteeism levels haven’t dropped is because “there are whole communities still feeling the effects of wildfires,” said Marc Siegel, spokesman for the state education department. In general, Malkus said it’s unlikely state legislation would be “a rapid-enough response.” And Chang worried that legislators could be “too prescriptive.”

“I think folks have to have local flexibility to unpack the issues,” she said. 

But she does think states are helping in at least one critical area: producing more accurate and timely data. 

In the past, it was often June before states released chronic absenteeism data from the year before — a fact that delayed efforts to help students. In Rhode Island, the public can the percentage of students at each school on track to be chronically absent by the end of the year. Malkus would like to see more leaders take that approach.

 “If we want to address it with eyes wide open,” he wrote, “chronic absenteeism needs to be studied in real time.”

Student absenteeism is one of the biggest problems facing South Dakota public education, said state Secretary of Education Joseph Graves.

Chronic absenteeism among South Dakota students jumped from 14% during the 2018-2019 school year to 21% during the 2022-2023 school year. That increase is more pronounced among Native American students, whose chronic absenteeism rates jumped from 31% to 54% in the same timeframe.

Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses 10% or more days of school within the school year.

Attendance and academic performance are directly correlated.

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“School is how we bring kids to understand their role in the world. You can’t educate kids who aren’t there,” Graves told South Dakota Searchlight. “The key to the American Dream is a great education. If you get a great education, you can go anywhere in life.”

The state Department of Education is handing out millions of dollars in grants to school districts over the next three years to address student absenteeism through research-based programs.

‘Doesn’t feel right’: Some schools with significant Native American representation miss out on grants

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated absenteeism in school districts across South Dakota.

“The pandemic put education as a lower priority over other issues,” Graves said. “That sunk in with a lot of people, and we saw a definite decline in attendance rates of students.”

Recovery is taking longer than expected — both in South Dakota and nationally, Graves said. Some demographic groups are faring worse than others — including Native American children, Hispanic or Latino children, and economically disadvantaged children.

Sioux Falls will be awarded $1.5 million over the next three years to address absenteeism. The district was one of nine to receive awards, including Pierre, Wilmot, Waubay, Sisseton, Watertown, Mitchell, Leola and Spearfish — all at varying amounts.

Out of the school districts selected, Sisseton has the highest representation of Native American students at 54% of its student body, according to . Waubay and Wilmot’s student bodies are 34% and 22% Native American. All of the other schools receiving grants have Native American student populations lower than 20%. School districts that serve majority Native American student bodies, such as Oglala Lakota County, Todd County and White River, were not awarded the grants. 

Superintendent Roberta Bizardie of the Todd County School District said the district applied and was surprised when it was not awarded a grant. Native American students make up 94% of the student body, and the school district has a chronic absenteeism rate of 40%.

“I just didn’t feel right,” Bizardie said when she saw which schools were awarded grants.

There are three social workers serving the school district’s 2,000 children — many of whom are economically disadvantaged. The application planned to use money to hire more social workers and attendance liaisons dedicated to absenteeism issues.

Since the district was not awarded a grant, Bizardie plans to work with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s truancy department to reach out to families. They’ll continue using their social workers, sending daily calls to parents when their child isn’t in school, creating more family engagement events and encouraging attendance with incentives for students.

A representative from the Department of Education told the district that the reason it did not receive a grant was because some of the line-item expenses listed in the budget weren’t “clearly listed in our narrative,” Bizardie said.

While Native American students, on average, have higher chronic absenteeism rates and lower academic achievement rates than other demographic groups, it goes hand in hand with socioeconomic status, Graves said.

Out of the demographic groups, low socioeconomic status is the most important to address, he added.

Graves said Native American education is seeing a “small renaissance” through private programming closely connected with culture and language. He plans to keep an eye on those programs.

“What I think public schools need to do, and what I’m hoping they’ll do, is that they’ll watch that renaissance of private education and think about what we can do to adapt and serve students who attend public education,” Graves said.

Districts spend grants on transportation, mentoring & engagement

The student absenteeism grant effort is funded through the federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022. The schools will report on progress at the end of each school year until the grant is finished.

The awarded districts are addressing absenteeism differently, though all will spend some of the money on transportation, mentoring or engagement activities to entice students to attend school.

Sioux Falls will target elementary and middle schools with predominantly economically disadvantaged students. Working with younger children will “catch them at an early age” before a student loses too much ground or incentive to attend school, said Assistant Superintendent James Nold.

“A significant way out of poverty is through education,” Nold said. “We can encourage attendance, have staff and programs in place all to give a meaningful education and pull children out of poverty. Education hits on so many fronts; it’s so important to have a child in school on a daily basis.”

Attendance liaisons focus on relationships, mentoring

The most popular use of the grant funds is hiring an attendance liaison or advocate to build connections with students and families who struggle with attendance.

In Sisseton, the school district hired Michelle Greseth to implement the national intervention program “Check and Connect,” which focuses on relationship building between a mentor and a student. During the 2021-2022 school year, 26% of Sisseton high school students were chronically absent. So far during the 2023-2024 school year — after implementing the program and an attendance awareness campaign for students and families — 11% of high school students are chronically absent.

Greseth or other trained staff plan to work with students and families for a minimum of two years, reviewing data and educational progress, behaviors, attendance and intervention efforts.

Greseth said she’s already seeing progress in the nearly dozen middle school and high school students she began meeting weekly during the fall semester.

“If you don’t have the relationship then the data isn’t that meaningful because they’re not willing to buy in — you really want to know the kid and what drives them and motivates them,” Greseth said. “They won’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Sioux Falls hired six liaisons committed to student attendance and one recovery teacher to help middle school students who have fallen behind in their academics. Wilmot School District Superintendent Larry Hulscher said about 10% of its students are chronically absent.

Hiring just one attendance advocate for the small school district will help alleviate the burden on already overworked staff, Hulscher said. Principals, teachers and school resource officers across the state have attempted to build those attendance relationships in years past.

“Quite honestly, we haven’t been able to dedicate much time to that as the other responsibilities that come with those jobs,” Hulscher said. “This person can dedicate all of their time to this.”

Watertown plans to hire three family support specialists. Watertown’s chronic absenteeism rate has hovered around 20% over the last three years, said Superintendent Jeff Danielsen.

“The principal represents authority and the SRO represents authority,” Danielsen said, using the abbreviation for “school resource officers,” the law enforcement officers present in some schools. “This position is for someone who won’t have those titles; someone who can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

Enhancing extracurricular activities

Getting students involved in at least one extracurricular activity they’re passionate about — sports, theater, debate, student government — will help carry them through school and to graduation, Graves said.

“Almost nobody liked every subject in school, but almost everybody got through it even though they didn’t like them,” Graves said. “Like a student who isn’t fond of English but has to pass the class because he loves football and can’t play otherwise. That engagement is huge. If you’re not engaging kids, you’re missing a large part of the boat.”

Graves served as the Mitchell superintendent before joining Gov. Kristi Noem’s administration.

The Mitchell School District plans to hire an attendance liaison and social worker like other awarded schools, but Superintendent Joe Childs also plans to build a “robust offering” of extracurriculars in the district’s “Kernel Club,” which is an after-school program for children transitioning from elementary school to middle school. The school district has an 18% chronic absenteeism rate.

Kernel Club activities are currently limited to two sports: volleyball and basketball. Childs plans to expand offerings to cover more sports, performing arts and visual arts opportunities.

Graves hopes school districts across the state will continue to invest in Career and Technical Education and Jobs for America’s Graduates programs, which have also led to higher attendance rates and student participation rates.

The goal, Graves said, is to course-correct and bring statewide chronic absenteeism and general absenteeism rates back down to pre-pandemic numbers.

The hope for Sioux Falls, Nold said, is that the programs implemented by the district are “so effective that we can’t do without them in three years.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on and .

Although the majority of Maryland’s public schools experienced no change this year in the state Department of Education’s five-star rating system, there was a statewide decrease of schools to receive top-star status.

According to data released Dec. 13, 85 schools received five stars during the 2022-23 school year, compared to 215 schools from the 2021-22 school year.

One main reason for the difference stems from absenteeism, a measure in the rating system that wasn’t used two years ago because of chronic absenteeism related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The new report cards also include an assessment of academic growth of elementary and middle school students and eighth-grade social studies scores from the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP).

“This is a new baseline year for Maryland, in terms of where we are and where we want to be,” interim State Superintendent Carey Wright said in a statement. “Due to the difference in calculating results between the two school years, we cannot make perfect comparisons. However, we celebrate those districts and schools that showed success and we will continue to support those that faced challenges.”

This year’s report card shows 557 schools garnered a three-star rating, compared to 431 from two years ago. Schools with a four-star rating are nearly the same with 409 schools in the new report card, versus 413 from the 2021-22 academic year.

About 234 schools received a two-star rating, compared to 213 schools two years ago.

Twenty-five schools received a one-star rating, according to the new state data. Approximately 39 schools garnered a one-star rating two years ago.

Slightly more than 1,300 schools received between a one- to five-star rating based on a 100-point accountability system that awards each school up to five stars based on a formula that seeks to measure overall performance.

Schools that receive at least 75% of all possible points receive five stars.

Factors assessed in the report card system in elementary, middle and high schools include academic achievement, progress in achieving English language proficiency and school quality and student progress.

Academic progress is an additional measure for elementary and middle schools; graduation rate and readiness for postsecondary success are additional measures in high school.

The state began the star system in 2018 in response to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. The state released a second , but star ratings weren’t issued in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.

School system data

Montgomery County Public Schools, the state’s biggest school system, housed the most schools with five stars at 24. Three high schools received five stars: Poolesville, Walt Whitman and Thomas S. Wootton. The other five-star schools are all elementary schools.

Nineteen schools received a five-star status in Baltimore County, including Fifth District and Sparks elementaries and Hereford High.

Howard County had 12 schools that received a five-star status, including Centennial Lane and Worthington elementaries and River Hill High.

The state’s second-largest school system, Prince George’s County, had three schools with five stars: Glenarden Woods and Heather Hills elementaries and Academy of Health Sciences at Prince George’s Community College.

Prince George’s had 27 schools that received a four-star rating and had the highest number of schools with three stars at 107, according to state data.

Baltimore public schools recorded the highest number of schools with two stars at 50 and those with one star totaling 15.

The city did have two schools that received a five-star rating: Baltimore School for the Arts and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute.

“Our focus is on making transformational educational change for students,” state board President Clarence Crawford said in a statement. “While there are signs of progress and many successes to highlight, we must continue to focus on seeing real, improved outcomes for children.”

For more information on individual schools and other data, go to the .

Editor’s Note: Due to a technical error, this story was updated to correct references to schools that received five stars on the state report card, as well as the number of schools that received a four-star rating. 

This was originally published in Maryland Matters.

The analysis, from and the at Johns Hopkins University, looked at that found more than 14 million chronically absent students during the 2021-22 academic year — an increase of nearly seven million students compared to 2017-18.

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said an “all hands on deck” approach is needed to address widespread absenteeism in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“If you can imagine a rising tide, students who were a little underwater are now underwater more and those that weren’t underwater before now are,” Balfanz told ���˶���.

This analysis served as a second look into the attendance trend which previously showed how across the country were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism — more than twice the rate compared to the 2017-18 academic year.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least , or roughly 18 days.

Although the attendance trend affected students of all ethnic backgrounds, Latino students took the brunt of the declines — increasing from nearly 2.4 million in 2017-18 to five million in 2021-22, a 53 percent jump.

Pacific Islander students saw the second biggest jump of 46 percent, white students by 39 percent, Black students by 36 percent and Native American students by 29 percent.

Balfanz said pandemic-era challenges for low-income and immigrant families pulled students away from school and contributed to the widening attendance gaps.

“Many kids got jobs because their parents lost theirs and became a lot more restricted,” Balfanz said, adding how Latino students often faced this burden compared to other ethnic groups.

He added how “caregiving” also played a major factor in declining Latino student attendance — often coming from multigenerational families with stronger cultural expectations to look after younger siblings.

The attendance trend was also observed geographically, particularly impacting students in both suburban and rural areas.

Chronic absenteeism in suburban and rural school districts jumped to 5.1 million and 2.5 million students respectively in 2021-22 — a 46 percent and 47 percent increase compared to 2.8 million and 1.4 million in 2017-18.

Schools in cities experienced an increase of 44 percent and districts in towns jumped by 42 percent.

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said “inequitable access to needed [healthcare] services and poor transportation” during the pandemic contributed to the attendance gaps in rural areas.

The greatest increases in chronic absenteeism occurred among schools serving larger numbers of students living in poverty, the analysis found.

Among schools with 75 percent or more students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, chronic absence nearly tripled — from 25 percent to 69 percent. 

Chang said poverty was the driving force behind student chronic absenteeism nationwide.

“Kids who are living in poverty are much more likely to have all of these barriers when it comes to aversion and disengagement,” Chang told ���˶���.

“It’s hard for students to keep going when they feel like nobody knows them or nobody cares,” Balfanz added. “Solving that disconnect they have is a great first step.”

At 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles, a big, bright trophy goes to the class with the least absences and latenesses — and Cristales’ students are eager to win.

“My kids are motivated, we want that trophy, and we want to keep it,” said Christales, explaining the winning class gets to display the trophy in their classroom for a month. “They tell each other ‘Don’t be late, don’t be late.’ “

For Cristales, the nationwide problem of chronic absenteeism has hit home, with roughly three of her 22 students not attending class regularly, and the problem seeming to be getting worse. Last school year Cristales’ class won the trophy twice – but this year they have not won it at all.   

LA Unified schools saw a severe decline in students’ attendance post-COVID-19, with 40% of students chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year — a 19.8% increase compared to before the pandemic, an LAUSD spokesperson said. 

“Where do I start,” said Cristales when asked what challenges chronic absenteeism creates for her. 

“Each day is vital to the content being delivered to the students,” she said. “Each day missed is a loss. As an educator [we do] not have the luxury to waste any time.” 

Cristales compared learning to climbing a mountain, with each day in the classroom a step towards reaching the top. Missing just a day of school can impact a student’s learning, she said.

“You feel the obligation to help that student to catch up,” she said, “ [even] when you have other students to help…it is frustrating to me as a teacher because I know what the loss of the day means for those students.” 

Cristales’ school also has a partnership with the University of Southern California, which provides tutors and mentors to students twice a week for 30 minutes.

“But if the student is not present, they are missing out on the support that they so much need,” she noted. 

LA Unified identify students as chronically absent if have they missed at least 10% of school days or about three and a half weeks of classes. 

“We’ve seen a lot of difference [in my classroom] after COVID,” said Cristales. “Many of them are not coming, and when you ask them why, many will tell you they woke up late, the traffic was bad…It’s like their priorities have changed, and that’s what I’ve observed.”

Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of USC Rossier School of Education, said COVID has changed many students’ and parents’ behaviors toward school. 

“Certainly, COVID has made people more sensitive to illness and more likely to keep kids home if they’re not feeling well,” Polikoff said. “There’s also some evidence to suggest that kids are just less engaged in school than they were before.” 

Online classes also created an unintended consequence, creating the belief among families that it’s not a big deal if kids miss school, Polikoff added.

A conducted by Polikoff and his colleagues found there are clear demographic trends in the increases in absenteeism among Black and Hispanic students. These declines have been especially large for historically underserved student groups, with those students not recovering to pre-pandemic levels.

“What we know about the pandemic and its impact on students is that it just widened every gap,” Polikoff said. “The way that our education systems and our society are set up is that all these disadvantages are sort of stacked on top of one another.”

Polikoff said some factors that can lead Black and Hispanic students to have a higher absence rate are , which can lead to sickness or aversion to getting sick.

“There are a million reasons, but they all point in the same direction: Black and Hispanic students are subject to many different forms of cumulative disadvantage both within school and outside of school,” Polikoff added. To combat higher absent rates, LAUSD has established the aimed to improve student attendance and help prepare students to be “ready for the world” through accumulated data, community outreach, and improvement on staff education.

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

When I was growing up, going to school was not optional. Unless I had a fever and couldn’t get out of bed, I went — no “Price Is Right” on the couch for me. Schools made a big deal out of showing up, even giving away free bikes for perfect attendance.

But the data is clear now: parents are more permissive with their children’s attendance. And that hurts kids.

The Indiana Department of Education shocked many when it recently released showing that about 40% of Hoosier students missed 10 or more school days last year, and nearly one in five were absent for at least 18 days.

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The chronic absentee rate in the 2018-19 school year was just 11.2%. But it rose to 18.5% in 2020-21 — the first year after the pandemic — and topped out at 21.1% in the 2021-22 school year, according to state data.

The 2022-23 data indicates that 19.3% of students were chronically absent from school.

To put those percentages into raw numbers, roughly 221,000 Hoosier students were considered chronically absent during the last academic year.

More than 400,000 students missed at least 10 days of school — which, per Indiana statute — made them “habitually absent.”

And it’s not just in Indiana. The national chronic absenteeism rate has skyrocketed since the pandemic, from 16% in 2019 to . This is the highest rate since the U.S. Department of Education released its first national measurement of chronic absenteeism in 2016.

Reasons

So, the question is ‘why?’

There are always barriers, especially for children in poverty. Transportation is one area that is increasingly problematic, as bus driver shortages mean last-minute cancellations and parents with no backups.

But there is a clear correlation to the pandemic, when kids were sent home for much of the school year in 2020. At the time, it was the right call. We have lots of hindsight now, but back then, COVID-19 was a novel virus that no one had experience with, and officials did the best they could with limited and changing information.

Schools quickly set up remote instruction and students, parents and educators muddled through.

But somehow, parents and students took away from that pandemic that it’s not a big deal for their kids to miss school. They email; they receive assignments and send them back. Even snow days are now e-learning.

Technology is a supplement that should be used sparingly. Being in the classroom has a direct correlation to success.

A White House release last month said research shows that school absences take a  on  and . Beyond test scores, irregular attendance can be a , which has been linked to , , and increased involvement in the .

What’s next

It’s clear schools need to do more to encourage attendance, starting with direct outreach to parents.

One suggestion from the U.S. Department of Education is “nudging” — a type of communication technique that could include “sending families a periodic postcard with student attendance records and/or encouragement to strive for consistent attendance to reduce absenteeism, or sending weekly updates on missed assignments or absences.”

I do think maybe sometimes parents don’t track the absences in their mind and could be surprised by the high number when confronted with it. Anecdotally, I know parents more often now take children out of school for vacations more than in the past. They should strive to do that as a last resort. My daughter had plenty of days off for us to plan family fun.

Education officials should delve into whether transportation shortages are causing some of these absences and make recommendations for lawmakers for the 2024 session. I think the state could also incentivize attendance with scholarships or grants. Everything should be on the table, even if it costs money.

Unfortunately, police and prosecutors also have a role to play. I couldn’t find data on whether law enforcement is focusing more or less on truancy, but there are laws regarding parental responsibility and they should be enforced.

School resource officers that already exist in many schools could be a place to start interacting with parents about attendance.

And all this should happen fast — before the learning losses compound even more.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

Bilingual home assistants, more counselors and attendance arcades to reward students who arrive on-time were among the public school initiatives aimed at reducing chronic absenteeism, which spiked during the pandemic.

The push, which was funded by federal COVID-relief money, helped boost overall attendance rates during the 2022-23 academic year, with 30% of students statewide chronically absent compared to 37% in the previous year. However, the rates remain high compared with those before the pandemic, with the 2018-19 school year seeing 15% students chronically absent, meaning they missed 15 or more days of school.

Absenteeism among traditionally disadvantaged groups like homeless and low-income students as well as Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians was even higher. Within these groups, 55% to 40% of students qualified as chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year. That too was an improvement compared with 66% to 50% of students in those groups in the previous year.

Many students have struggled with the need to return to campus after spending months at home doing online or hybrid classes during the height of the pandemic.

Getting Kids Back To School

Chronic absenteeism rates are declining across the country, but many states still have yet to return to their pre-pandemic levels of attendance, said Hedy Chang, , a nonprofit addressing chronic absenteeism. During the pandemic, she added, absenteeism rates nearly doubled across the country, with 30% of students nationwide considered chronically absent. 

Students miss school for a variety of other reasons as well, from experiencing housing instability to feeling unsafe on campus, said deputy superintendent Heidi Armstrong. As a result, the state Department of Education used federal COVID-relief funds to support a range of initiatives addressing the problem. 

“Getting to know students and the causes of their absences help guide the schools in providing the appropriate wraparound support so we can address the issues that are prohibiting students from coming to school,” Armstrong said.

Those included the addition of more counselors to help students transition back to campus and attendance arcades to reward students who arrived on time.

But despite the imposing attendance rates, the question remains if the state can maintain the momentum as the COVID relief funds run out. 

Armstrong couldn’t provide an estimate of the total amount of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds spent on improving attendance because they covered other efforts as well. But as the ESSER funds expire next fall, she added, schools will need to find money in their own budgets or apply to outside grants to continue the initiatives. 

The absenteeism rates are included in . They reflect the performance of all public school students in Hawaii, including those attending charter schools.

Helping Underserved Communities

There’s also the question of whether the state can continue to provide more targeted support to communities struggling the most. 

Homeless, low-income and foster students saw some of the greatest gains in attendance over the past two years. Armstrong said some campuses received bilingual bicultural school home assistants who could speak to parents about the importance of regular school attendance.

Aiea Elementary’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped from 69% to 41% of all students between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. The decline for certain groups of students at the Oahu school was even greater, at 36% for Pacific Islanders and 30% for economically disadvantaged students.

Counselor Gavin Takeno attributed Aiea Elementary’s improvement in part to the school’s health practitioner, who was brought on staff in the 2022-23 academic year. The practitioner occasionally came along on counselors’ home visits to families and was able to offer check-ups for sick students, Takeno said.

Takeno also said he enlisted the help of a Chuukese translator on staff, who helped bridge the language barrier between families and teachers during home visits.

“We’re building a positive relationship, just so the parents understand and know that we’re not just here to harp on you guys,” Takeno said. “We’re here to help you guys, we understand there’s some challenges.”

Bus Problems

Principal Sharon Beck said bus transportation is a major issue for Ka’u High and Pahala Elementary, adding that one of the four bus routes to and from the school has lacked a driver since the start of the academic year. A  disproportionately affects low-income families, she added, who may be unable to take their children to school due to the costs of gas or responsibilities at work. 

Between Oct. 23 and Nov. 6, the school recorded an average daily attendance of 82% for its middle and high schoolers, Beck said. But the school always strives for an average attendance rate of 95% of students, she added. 

Other states have taken efforts to address chronic absenteeism a step further. 

In 2018, New Jersey passed a law defining chronic absenteeism and requiring districts with high absenteeism rates to create corrective action plans to address student attendance rates. The law also required schools to publish their chronic absenteeism rates in their report cards, said Cynthia Rice, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Children of New Jersey. 

While the law’s implementation coincided with the start of the pandemic, Rice said it provided a framework to hold districts accountable for their attendance rates as students returned in the coming years. 

“We’re doing OK,” Rice said, referring to the state’s overall absenteeism rates. “But when we look at individual (district) numbers it’s appalling.” 

In early 2021, Connecticut also introduced a home visitation program to promote student attendance as they returned to campuses, Chang said. The program, which spanned 15 districts across the state, promoted positive relationships between schools and families, particularly those who were from high-needs populations, she added. 

She added that targeted support around chronic absenteeism needs to continue, even as federal relief dollars expire and schools see slow improvements in their attendance rates. 

“A lot of this does require people power,” Chang said. “The ending of ESSER relief is a bit challenging because we might not be able to fully recover yet before the dollars go out.”

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”  

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.” 

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

A task force made up of school district representatives, advocacy groups and even juvenile court staff released recommendations on how the state of Ohio can improve student attendance.

The group, who worked with members of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce as well, said chronic absenteeism was “a growing issue” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but only worsened with the pandemic’s forced school closures and other issues.

“Attendance is a crisis in Ohio,” the group said in its final report, released this month. “While the number of chronically absent students declined slightly last school year, there is much more urgent work to do.”

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Chronic absenteeism is defined as having missed 10% all overall school hours, no matter what the reason is for the absence.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce says losing 10% or more school hours “can lead to younger students struggling with learning to read by third grade, decreased achievement in middle school and difficulty graduating high school.”

According to data from the state’s education department, 26.8% of students were chronically absent in Ohio for the 2022-23 school year. The percentage was down from the 2021-22 school year, when 30.2% of state students fell under the chronically absent designation, but it was still an increase from both the 2018-2019 school year and the 2020-21 year.

The task force praised the progress made in a that modified truancy laws and definitions of absenteeism and prohibited a school from “suspending, expelling or removing a student from school solely on the basis of a student’s unexcused absences,” according to an analysis of the bill from the Legislative Service Commission.

The 2023 task force said the law “forces districts to look at attendance data they may not have looked at before” and “provides a standardized process and framework for districts to identify root causes of absenteeism.”

But the group also said school districts are still experiencing “challenges” in implementing the law, because of the focus on “compliance vs. prevention” and the lack of enforcement districts feel they have since truancy was decriminalized under the law.

Those challenges could be addressed through “thoughtful refinement” of the laws, according to the task force, allowing schools to “adopt the interventions they know will work in their local context.”

“Policy change can allow for more effective communication with families to support increasing attendance and decreasing absenteeism and continue a statewide mindset shift toward prevention and early intervention,” the report stated.

There were positive results in some school districts, according to the report from the task force. Columbus City Schools said they have seen a 7.2% decrease in chronic absenteeism through all schools, using methods like family and text support and engagement activities to incentivize attendance.

Delaware City Schools saw an 8.6% decrease in chronic absence, from 25.9% in 2021-22 to 17.3% in 2022-23 with the help of staff outreach, an assessment center available outside of school hours and a “good relationship with juvenile court liaisons.”

The Ohio Supreme Court joined in with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to provide its own workgroup and concept for an “”

Members of county common pleas court’s probate and juvenile divisions and family courts joined with school district members to create a toolkit for courts and districts, that also included common reasons students can have for being chronically absent, ranging from physical health issues to trauma.

“When children are exposed to significant stress or violence in their home or community, it can trigger mental health issues that cause chronic absence from school,” the court said in its recent report.

The key part in addressing absenteeism, the court found, is engagement from courts, families, schools and everyone else involved. Breaking through barriers to attendance can include mental health counselors, children’s services agencies, public transportation organizations and domestic violence services providers.

“School districts and courts need the assistance of multiple community partners to be able to holistically address the needs of students and families,” the report stated.

With absences addressed, the court are less likely to have to intervene in a student’s lives, particularly juvenile court.

“Punitive responses to absentee issues can drive youth deeper into the juvenile justice system, decreasing the likelihood of educational success,” the state’s highest court stated.

The report recommends that courts “evaluate their current policies for handling truancy cases” and use their resources to find ways around juvenile court intervention.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18, the report found. Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.

, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows a fivefold increase in the percentage of elementary and middle schools with extreme rates, where at least 30% of students are chronically absent. 

In addition, the researchers released an at 2022-23 figures from . The data shows that overall chronic absenteeism levels remain extremely high at 28%  — well above the pre-pandemic level of 16%.

Empty desks have a on both teachers and students who are still trying to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.  

“It makes teaching and learning much harder,” she said. She finds the increase at the elementary level especially alarming because absenteeism becomes “habit forming.”

Many students started preschool and kindergarten remotely during the early years of COVID and missed out on a normal transition into school. “When they start off not ever having a routine of attendance, what does that mean for addressing it in middle and high school?” she asked. 

The analysis — the first of three researchers plan to release on the federal data — shows that the percentage of high schools with extreme rates increased from 31% to 56% during that time period. A November release will focus on demographic disparities and one in January will examine state-level trends.

Soaring absenteeism rates have contributed to declines in math and reading scores on national tests, the said last month. Despite billions available to schools to address learning loss, students of extra help if they’re not in school. Districts are tackling the problem by dedicating staff to attendance, offering home visits with families and targeting voicemail messages to alert parents that their children’s absences are piling up. Experts say it takes multiple strategies to make a dent in what might seem an insurmountable challenge.

“If we aren’t careful, the problem can feel overwhelming,” said Terri Clark, literacy director at Read On Arizona. The nonprofit began efforts to improve attendance seven years ago when that reading performance declined as chronic absenteeism increased. But when schools tailor their strategies to students’ needs, they can make progress, Clark said. 

“Often the focus is on awareness and getting the word out,” she said. “But you can’t stop there. What if a family can’t get [to school] everyday?”

Her organization is working with about 60 districts across the state to better identify the barriers that keep students from attending school regularly. One is the Tanque Verde Unified School District, near Tucson, where chronic absenteeism has more than doubled to 27% since 2018. Superintendent Scott Hagerman pointed to a practice that he hopes will bring the rate back down. 

When students are absent, teachers are required to make sure they get their assignments. He knows from experience how important that connection can be to a student.

“When I was a kid, I had a chronic health issue, and the back and forth, in and out of school, without any idea of what was happening when I was gone made coming back harder,” he said. “We are trying to deal with that issue — absences causing more absences.”

Health- and transportation-related issues before the pandemic, Chang said. But now a school has further complicated daily commutes. And in , she’s heard from kindergarten parents who are confused about when they can send children back to school after a fever or illness.

“These are lingering effects of COVID protocols that aren’t helpful,” she said. She stressed the need for frequent, two-way communication between parents and school staff and the importance of reversing a “more-relaxed attitude” about attendance that has permeated school culture. 

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

Sometimes a robocall from an NFL player emphasizing the importance of daily attendance is the added boost a student needs. That’s one of the methods an Ohio district used as part of the Cleveland Browns Foundation’s initiative.

“If you want to make your dreams become a reality, whether that’s getting into college, getting a good job or even becoming a champion on the playing field, it all starts with hard work,” said cornerback Greg Newsome II, one of three players to record the same message. 

The East Cleveland City Schools found that the player’s messages caused a 1.6% decrease in absenteeism among students who had missed school within the previous two weeks. That’s on top of a 6.3% reduction in absences after families received an automated message from a district staff member. 

The experiment was part of a Harvard University effort to help schools find the right combination of strategies to address absenteeism. 

“How do we layer in the right supports, at the right intensity, for the right students, at the right time?” asked Amber Humm Patnode, interim director of Proving Ground, a project of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. The team works with districts to test solutions before scaling them districtwide. Without gathering evidence on what works, Patnode said, “we risk wasting precious time, resources and energy on things that may not result in actual reduced absences.”

The Euclid City School District has also participated in Stay in the Game. One kindergartner last year received three tickets to a Browns game after making significant progress in attendance. Six-year-old Mekhi Bridges had a speech delay, which made his mother Tasia Letlow extra cautious about getting him to school everyday. 

“I wasn’t comfortable with him riding the bus because of not being able to necessarily communicate everything,” Letlow said. But she also had car trouble, and it wasn’t long before Mekhi amassed over 20 absences. The district sent a letter alerting her to the problem. 

Targeted letters are just one way the district has addressed a chronic absence rate that reached 73% in 2021. This fall, Jerimie Acree, attendance and residency coordinator for the district, is trying a different approach for middle and high school students who miss class — a deterrent he calls “working lunch.” Students who cut three times have to spend lunch in the media center away from their friends and without their phones. 

“It is totally in place to inconvenience them,” Acree said. 

The district’s attendance clerks — staff members who are supposed to focus on improving attendance — now report to him. Previously, they reported to principals, where they frequently got sidetracked with other duties. 

“[Administrators] would pull that person to do supervision of field trips” among other things, he said. “Attendance work wasn’t being done everyday.”

To respond to the absenteeism crisis, districts and nonprofits across the country have tapped for dedicated positions or to pay educators stipends for home visits. With the deadline to use those funds coming up next year, the ability of districts to sustain those efforts has become “a huge question,” Chang said.

Gina Martinez-Keddy, executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits — which began in Sacramento 25 years ago — said she’s talking to districts about how to use other sources of federal funding, like Title I, to support the efforts. the model can have what she called “spillover effects” on chronic absenteeism even if the original intention was to build trust with families.

“Relationship-building works,” Chang said. “That was proven before the pandemic. One-on-one engagement is really essential.”

About 40% of Hoosier students missed 10 or more school days last year, and nearly one in five were absent for at least 18 days, according to new Indiana data.

A presentation before the Indiana State Board of Education (SBOE) on Wednesday highlighted the staggering statistics that state leaders said should warrant immediate action.

Student absences have been on the rise since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indiana and across the nation, data shows. Although Indiana’s latest numbers show slight improvements, absentee rates during the 2022-23 school year were still 8% higher than before the pandemic.

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“It’s October — the first quarter is gone. We have to draw attention to this right now. And there’s no time to wait,” said Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner. “I think this is really a rally cry for us to look at our parents, families, caregivers, and also our community leaders to come up with some solutions that might help.”

Indiana fared better than most other states for chronic absenteeism — defined by the rate of students who missed at least 18 school days, either excused or unexcused. That’s equal to 10% of the academic year.

But in the last three years, the rate of Hoosier students who have been chronically absent more than doubled compared to before the pandemic.

Education experts note that being absent as few as three days out of the school year affects test scores and overall academic performance. The student demographic groups with the largest gaps in state language arts and math testing since the pandemic are more likely to be chronically absent.

Jenner told the Indiana Capital Chronicle this summer that high rates of absenteeism are likely contributing to .

By the numbers

According to the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE), roughly 221,000 Hoosier students were considered chronically absent during the 2022-23 academic year.

More than 400,000 students missed at least 10 days of school — which, per Indiana statute — made them “habitually absent.”

A school day is considered missed if a student is there for less than half of the day.

To put those numbers into perspective, state leaders emphasized that 3,086 school buses could be filled with kids if all of Indiana’s chronically absent students came to school on the same day.

“We’re trying to help people understand that we’re not talking about a small amount of people,” said John Keller, IDOE’s chief information officer. “When you think about it that way, that’s a big number.”

Keller added that Indiana is “far away” from chronic absentee rates in the 2018-19 school year, when just 11.2% met that definition.

The rate rose to 18.5% in 2020-21 — the first year after the pandemic — and topped out at 21.1% in the 2021-22 school year, according to state data.

The 2022-23 data indicates that 19.3% of students were chronically absent from school.

The issue is especially worsening among high schoolers, Keller noted.

State education department officials said the highest chronic absenteeism rates came from the most vulnerable students who were homeless or suffered from displacement, including children in foster care. Housing instability, in addition to mental health challenges, are also driving absentee numbers up, they noted.

Low-income status also increased a student’s likelihood of being chronically absent. A lack of transportation is additionally thought to be contributing to missed days at some schools.

Black students saw the largest percentage of chronic absenteeism of any racial or ethnic group last year. Only White and Asian students had below the state average.

Still, chronic absenteeism was higher in some schools than in others. Kenner said in 84 schools, 50% of students were chronically absent. Another 270 schools recorded one out of every three students as chronically absent, while 547 schools had one in four students.

Statewide, 1,651 Hoosier schools had at least one out of every 10 students marked as chronically absent, according to state data.

Rates were typically highest in high-poverty urban school districts and charter schools, while suburban schools reported lower rates.

Gary Community Schools had the highest chronic absenteeism rate among the state’s public school districts at about 66%.

Chronic absenteeism was higher than 40% in Muncie and South Bend schools and over 30% in Anderson, Richmond, Indianapolis Public Schools and at least two dozen other districts.

Multiple rural districts had high rates, too, including 43.2% in Cannelton, 37.5% in Madison and 32.1% in Medora.

Rates were mostly lower in suburban districts like Carmel Clay — at 8.4% — and in Zionsville, which recorded a 7.3% rate of chronic absenteeism.

How to get more kids in school?

SBOE officials doubled down on Wednesday that absenteeism is a problem without a single solution, though.

To start, Jenner said an “Early Warning Dashboard” is in the works to direct resources to at-risk students. The system will be piloted for some schools this academic year. She said the goal is for the dashboard to be ready for all schools by the start of the 2024-25 school year.

Included in the dashboard — which will be connected to Indiana’s — will be data on attendance, as well as information about which students at risk. Granular data could provide details about absences at the individual classroom and teacher levels, Jenner said.

“The reality is that culture eats policy for breakfast,” Jenner said, adding that while illness and quarantines kept many students home during the pandemic, the slow rebound in attendance suggests missing school has become a new normal. “So, if we have a national culture of chronic absenteeism, we could sit as a board and pass a number of policies today, but the culture is not there.”

Jenner said the state education department also plans to dive deeper into the academic performance statistics of students who are not chronically absent: “I think there’s more information that we need to know, and that will be helpful.”

Board member Pat Mapes said IDOE additionally needs more information from schools to better understand local responses to absenteeism that might or might not already be in the works.

“When you’re not there and present every day, you’re not going to get the same quality of education,” he said.

Another board member, Erika Dilosa, said the pandemic likely created a new — but dangerous — status quo for students and families.

“I feel like what happened with COVID is that a lot of parents saw that their kids didn’t have to actually come into the building, and then a lot of them passed,” Dilosa said. “They felt that maybe they don’t have to be there as often.”

Board member William Durham suggested that new penalties be put in place to compel students back into the classroom. It’s currently up to each Indiana county prosecutor to decide how to enforce truancy laws.

“In my opinion, there has to be a way to hold parents of minors accountable for those students not coming to school — other than they’re sick, or whatever the case may be. I don’t know what can be done about that,” Durham said. “But in my opinion, something has to be done, because in my household growing up, it was not an option.”

Byron Ernest, also on the board, cautioned the state’s education and political leaders to take a closer look at the issue and the various causes before codifying any responses, however.

“The thing that I want to implore us — and any legislators that are looking at this report — is let’s not knee-jerk policy that we think could work, but it won’t,” Ernest said. “We need to make sure that we really study the root causes … and we’ve got to figure this out and really look at it from the complexity that it is.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

As a new school year gets underway in California, districts are desperately trying to lure thousands of missing, tardy and truant students back to the classroom in what many view as a pivotal moment for education in California.

In 2021-22, 30% of students in California’s public schools were chronically absent, an all-time high and more than three times the pre-pandemic rate. Advocates fear that unless schools can reverse the trend, so many students will fall behind that they may never catch up.

“This is a crisis, and it’s not going to change until we do everything we can to get kids back in school 100%,” said Heather Hough, director of Policy Analysis for California Education. “What we all fear is that this will become the new normal.… It is hard to overstate the importance of this issue, and it is absolutely a pivotal moment.”

Before the pandemic, about 10% of students in California’s public schools missed at least 10% (or 18 days) in a school year, which the state defines as chronically absent. But COVID-related school closures, remote learning and quarantines have created a new habit for millions of families: optional, not mandatory, daily school attendance.

Even though California requires all children ages 6 through 18 to attend school every day, nearly 2 million students were chronically absent in 2021-22, the most recent year data is available. Nearly every group of students had high rates of absenteeism, but the highest rates were among kindergartners. Kindergartners who are Black, Pacific Islander or have disabilities all had rates of 50% or higher. 

Students’ specific reasons for missing school are varied. Lack of transportation is among the most common reasons, but sometimes students have to look after younger siblings or go to work. In some cases, students stay home because they’re being bullied or don’t like their teachers. After COVID, some parents have become overly cautious about sending their children to school with minor ailments.

Personal connections have made all the difference at an elementary school in Salinas — thanks in part to a school secretary the students call “Miss Cathy.” 

As students and their parents file into Loma Vista Elementary every morning, Catalina Cisneros greets them by name, gives them hugs and catches up in Spanish, the predominant language in that part of the city. Cisneros, a Salinas native, said she understands the struggles that families face as they raise their children while working long hours, sometimes starting their days at 4 a.m. in the nearby lettuce fields.

“I treat the parents how I’d like to be treated, with empathy and compassion,” said Cisneros, who started working at Loma Vista Elementary three years ago. “We have to, because we want the kids in school. The parents want their kids in school, too. They’re doing the best they can, and sometimes it’s hard. I get that.”

Absenteeism has myriad negative impacts. For students, they’re more likely to fall behind academically, drop out and not graduate. For schools, lower attendance means less revenue from the state, which bases its funding on how many students show up every day. For teachers, poor attendance means half–empty classrooms, with some students who are weeks or months behind their peers.

There are legal implications, as well. In extreme cases, local district attorneys can get involved, citing and fining parents or students who persistently flout the mandatory attendance law. 

Alarmed at the extent of the crisis, the Legislature is intervening. The Assembly recently asked Hough’s organization, Policy Analysis for California Education, to study the issue and come up with recommendations. 

The findings could lead to legislation that would address the issue directly. A few possibilities include increased accountability at the local level, such as offering districts more incentives to get students back in class; better data collection; and broader efforts to make school a more attractive place for students to be.

In response to the pandemic, the state has already invested billions in initiatives aimed at boosting student engagement, including:

• .
• . 
• , which offer social services to students, their families and others in the neighborhood.
•  counselors, on-campus wellness centers and staff training on social-emotional learning.
• .

It’s unclear how much impact these programs have had so far, or if they’ll survive once COVID relief funding expires or the state budget tightens. But in any case, the state needs to do more, said Assembly Budget Chair Phil Ting, a Democrat representing San Francisco.

“It’s worrisome that kids are still staying home from school in record numbers,” Ting said. “Our investments in universal school meals, after-school programs and home-to-school transportation have not been enough to bring students back.” 

Ting said he’s hopeful that studying the issue will lead to solutions.

“When children don’t regularly attend class, they fall behind on their lessons, and they are more likely to drop out – some as early as kindergarten. The implications of a less-educated generation are great,” he said. “We need to understand why attendance is below pre-COVID levels, so that we can better direct state resources and education leaders where they’ll be most effective in re-engaging students.”

Absenteeism has been so high in the Salinas City Elementary District – approaching 40% last year – that the district convened a group of teachers, administrators, counselors and others to brainstorm how to get students back in the classroom. Among the steps is encouraging office staff to be friendly, welcoming and non-judgmental, even when students are late or absent for long periods. Another step is talking to the families and students who have struggled the most with attendance, and addressing the specific reasons they can’t get to school. 

In some cases, families said the bus pickup time was too early. So the district purchased a fleet of vans that could do shorter bus routes, allowing for later pickup times. Other families said their children didn’t want to go to school because they felt anxious or bullied, so the district connected students with counselors, tried to end the bullying and worked to improve the overall campus climate. Some students said they simply hate school, so the district arranged for them to transfer to a school that might be a better fit.

The efforts appear to be working. In 2021-22, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate was 38%, almost triple the pre-pandemic rate and well above the state average. By January, it had fallen to 29%, and last week it had fallen to 21%. Loma Vista, which had one of the district’s highest absenteeism rates – 46% in 2021-22 – saw its rate drop to just over 24% so far this school year. 

The numbers are important, said Superintendent Rebeca Andrade, but students’ success is more important. The pandemic was particularly hard on the community, and families in the low-income agricultural region have struggled to rebound.

“To see so many kids missing school – it wasn’t just frustrating. It was heartbreaking,” Andrade said. “School is supposed to be a safe place, and too many students were missing that. We knew we had to do something.” 

Stemming absenteeism ultimately may be up to individual schools and staff, said Hedy Chang, executive director of the advocacy group Attendance Works. 

For starters, health standards need to change, she said. Schools should promote better preventative care for students, but also convince parents that COVID is no longer a public health emergency and children should not miss school “for every sniffle or tummy ache.”

But more importantly, school staff must work directly with families to address the specific reasons for absenteeism, taking into account language and cultural barriers, and build strong personal relationships with parents and students, she said.

“We need to create those deep connections, so every child knows that there’s an adult waiting with open arms to welcome them to school,” Chang said. “That needs to be the new normal.”

Maria Perez, a parent at Loma Vista, said she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to get her fourth grade daughter to school in time to be at her job at a Castroville fruit distribution center by 8 a.m. It doesn’t help, she said, when her daughter oversleeps or doesn’t feel well. 

“Sometimes it’s a challenge. I tell her, it’s going to be a good day, it’s alright, don’t worry,” Perez said. “It’s important she goes to school because I want her to meet people, to make friends, to learn, to be someone in life.”

Parent Leslie Naranjo, who dropped four of her six kids off at Loma Vista on a recent morning, said getting out the door every day can be a Herculean task. She hasn’t always been as punctual as she’d like to be, but she’s trying: She now puts out her kids’ clothes the night before, bought a shoe rack so they’re not constantly searching for lost shoes, and has them shower before bed instead of in the morning.

It’s all helped, she said, but it’s Miss Cathy’s smiles that have made the difference.

“When we come in, she always says, ‘Hi!’ She’s always so happy to see us,” Naranjo said. “The kids see she’s excited to be here, so they get excited. It works.”

That dramatic decline obscures much lower school-going rates among students who have already suffered disproportionately in the COVID-19 crisis. In some of Minnesota’s highest-poverty schools, fewer than 1 in 4 students go to class on a regular basis. 

Despite the dismal numbers, there has been virtually no public discussion about the link between students’ chronic absences and continuing declines in reading and math performance post-pandemic. Also unmentioned is the widening gap in attendance and academic recovery between affluent and disadvantaged students.

The new numbers are available on the state’s school data , but visitors must navigate through several sub-menus to find the relevant information. Data from past years is contained in a very large spreadsheet found on another part of the website.

Defined as missing 10% or more of school days, chronic absenteeism was a crisis before the disruptions of the pandemic and has only worsened. According to , a joint report from the think tank FutureEd and nonprofit Attendance Works, more than 1 in 5 U.S. students — at least 10 million — missed more than 10% of the 2020-21 school year. Since schools have reopened, the number of chronic absences has risen, more than doubling in many states.

As alarming as that is, the Minnesota numbers underscore an even harsher reality: As with declines in student wellness and academic achievement, the pain is not distributed equally. The children who were already behind before the pandemic have suffered continuing, compounded impacts.

In Minneapolis Public Schools, for instance, the overall attendance rate fell from 79% to 46% from 2019 to 2022. But while the number of white students attending school 90% or more of the time dropped from 90% to 59%, the number for Black students fell from 71% to 32%; for Native Americans, from 44% to 24%; and for Latinos, from 78% to 44%. Attendance among children receiving special education services plummeted from 63% to 37%. 

Research showing why it matters is clear. A middle schooler who misses two or fewer days each year has a 93% chance of starting high school on track to graduate, for a child who misses two or more weeks. By ninth grade, a week’s absence each semester equals a drop of more than 20% in the likelihood of earning a diploma. 

On the most recent NAEP exam, the students who scored the worst had missed the most school before the test. The White House Council of Economic Advisers also tying increases in student absenteeism to “a meaningful portion” of post-pandemic learning loss. 

Barriers to regular attendance are higher for low-income families, according to Phyllis Jordan, a longtime absenteeism researcher who authored the FutureEd-Attendance Works report. The gap between attendance at wealthy and under-resourced schools has widened.

In 2019, 77% of Minnesota students statewide who qualified for subsidized school meals attended regularly, compared with 57% in 2022. At the district’s wealthiest schools, attendance was high in 2022 — 87% at Armatage Elementary and Burroughs Community, for example. Meanwhile, 25% of children consistently attended high-poverty Nellie Stone Johnson, and just 17.5% at economically disadvantaged Bethune Arts Elementary. 

Even more shocking: At Minneapolis’s Harrison Education Center, just 3% of students — one child — attended classes regularly. The center serves students who fit three demographic categories where attendance is historically low: high schoolers living in poverty and on special education plans because of challenging behavioral issues. 

Education leaders should be mining attendance data for patterns, says Jordan, whose report outlines for boosting attendance that range from in-school health care to mentorship and student engagement.

“Sometimes it’s a daily pattern, like a lot of kids miss on Fridays, which is not that surprising. There’s some schools that are trying to do some special thing on Fridays now to get kids to come. Maybe it’s everybody in a certain part of town. Maybe they need to start running more school buses,” Jordan says.

The data can also reveal positive outliers that might yield possible solutions. In Minneapolis Public Schools, for example, 57% of students are impoverished and the overall consistent attendance rate is 46%. But in adjacent Robbinsdale Area Public Schools, 61% of students live in poverty but 73% attend regularly.

Similarly, Minneapolis’ Lucy Craft Laney Community Elementary has an impoverished student body and a 49% regular attendance rate — even though it’s located a stone’s throw from similar high-poverty, low-attendance schools. 

Minnesota chose to as a non-academic measure of school performance under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, as did 35 other states and the District of Columbia. As with test scores, public reporting of absentee data was suspended in the and 2020-21 school years because pandemic-driven shifts in and out of remote learning made defining attendance tricky. 

Given that lagging attendance was an issue for years even before the pandemic, education leaders should have been mining whatever data they had for information showing which children were engaged in instruction and academic recovery efforts, says Jordan. At the Minneapolis School Board’s June meeting, for example, staff reported that students who used online tutoring appeared to be making good academic progress — but said it was hard to draw definitive conclusions because poor attendance at school, where the digital tutoring took place, meant participation was spotty.

Even though September’s was the first Minneapolis School Board meeting since the state released the 2022 attendance data, the topic did not come up. Instead, board members heard a presentation on the result of 2023’s annual state reading and math assessments, on which disadvantaged students continued to backslide. 

Often, low attendance may be linked to obvious causes such as transportation and stable housing. But leaders also need to consider whether a school’s climate is inviting, and if staff have solid relationships with parents — who may have had bad experiences with school themselves, says Jordan. 

“There’s often this parent engagement piece you need to do with lower-income families to make sure that parents recognize that these absences make a difference,” she says. “Having a community person or a school liaison or teacher [visit parents at home] to get a sense of what the kid’s home life is like, talk to them about attendance and then have repeat visits, builds that connection.” 

Families often have unmet needs, but students also may not feel welcome at school, she adds: “A lot of times if kids don’t feel safe or respected, they don’t come. … The school also needs to create a climate that makes kids want to come to school.”

The from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress rattled the education sector, pointing to learning loss in math and reading on a national scale during the pandemic. Pundits have tied the test score declines to prolonged school closures, student mental health issues and an easing of academic rigor in many schools. 

But a new analysis by a former senior federal education researcher suggests another potential contributing factor: the extraordinary number of students who have missed substantial amounts of school. We know from state data that chronic absenteeism, frequently defined as missing 10% of the school year or roughly two days a month, has since the pandemic began, doubling in some states. And we know from that students who are chronically absent are less likely to master reading by the end of third grade and more likely to drop out of high school.

We can’t know exactly how many students taking the NAEP were chronically absent. But each time the test is administered, students are asked how many days they missed in the previous month. Education researcher , a former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Policy and Program Studies, analyzed the results of that question from the past several years and found that the rate of low-income fourth-grade NAEP test-takers who reported missing three or more days the month before taking the exam climbed from 22% in 2015 to 41% in 2022. 

For more affluent students, those who don’t qualify for free and reduced-price meals, the absenteeism rate in the month before taking the NAEP went from 15% to 29% in the same period. There were similar trends among eighth graders, suggesting that many of the same forces affected attendance among elementary and middle school students.

Ginsburg found a correlation between missed days and lower NAEP scores: Fourth graders who said they missed three or more days in the previous month scored 17 points lower on the reading test than those who missed no days and 12 to 13 points lower than those missing one or two days, regardless of poverty level. Given that researchers suggest that 10 to 12 points is roughly equivalent to a year’s worth of learning, those are substantial differences. 

On the eighth-grade math test, low-income students who missed three or more days in the previous month scored 15 points lower than those with no absences and 10 points lower than those missing one or two days. For students who don’t qualify for free or reduced-price meals, the gaps were 17 and 11 points, respectively.

The NAEP attendance question is a fairly crude metric, relying on students’ recollection of their absences in a single month (though the students’ reports largely mirror state-reported increases in chronic absenteeism since the pandemic). And you can’t draw a straight line between attendance and the NAEP score declines; there are certainly other contributors. 

But common sense and considerable research suggest that students perform better academically when they show up for school regularly. Districts looking to close the learning gaps that emerged during COVID would do well to invest in the sort of that can bring students back to school.  

At this point, we as a country have a clear answer to one pandemic-fueled question: “What can America’s students know and do post-COVID?” Lost instructional time, combined with the tragic impact of the pandemic on the livelihoods and health of millions of Americans, has resulted in a cohort of students that are not matching the academic achievement of their predecessors. 

What is less clear is how to answer a second, even more important question: “Where do we go from here to help all students reach their full potential?”

My answer to questions about how to improve student learning is centered on ensuring each child has a highly qualified classroom teacher, as research consistently shows teacher quality is the . However, students spend far more time out of school than in, so the best efforts to boost achievement also require creative ways to support learning after the dismissal bell rings. How to do this can be informed by some striking results in accompanying the Long-Term Trend Report. 

One shocking survey finding is that fewer and fewer kids read on their own, just for fun. A mere 14% say they do that daily, down 3 percentage points from 2020 and 13 percentage points from a decade ago.

Research shows that reading for pleasure produces benefits . I have experienced these benefits personally, first as a kid in Tennessee reading the works of Tolkein and every biography I could find. It makes me sad to think about today’s kids missing out on the magic of a great book they picked out or that a friend recommended. 

Today, I see the importance of reading for fun as an Advanced Placement U.S. Government teacher, as most of my top-performing students are also avid readers. And I’ve seen the value of reading as a parent of 12- and 15-year-old daughters who end nearly every day diving into a book they picked.

A second survey finding that has me worried has to do with chronic absenteeism, a problem that has since the start of the pandemic. The percentage of students who say they missed five or more days of school a month has doubled since 2020. 

These survey results illustrate big out-of-school challenges for students, meaning any hope of reversing academic trends will require greater collaboration between schools and families.

This has to start with making sure families are informed about their children’s progress, but still don’t have great visibility into student data or a clear understanding of how their kids are doing academically. 

In my own community, I see less family attendance at school events and less programming tailored to them than before the pandemic. In important ways, it’s understandable. Schools have a host of problems they didn’t have before, most notably that force some things to get pushed to the back burner simply because educators are being asked to do everything.

Too often, schools are expected to have all the answers. But they can also tap families for ideas. For example, my family deploys a reading strategy at this time of year that we call reading bingo. My wife instituted the idea when our daughters were little, but they still enjoy it. Each girl gets a bingo card, and they have to complete the reading challenges on it. These can range from reading in a hammock to reading in a bathing suit, and the novelty spurs reading for pleasure. I’m sure other families have great ideas, and schools can facilitate opportunities for families to share these with one another.

Teachers alone can’t reverse chronic absenteeism, either. Young people are reporting , and there is surely a connection between that awful reality and declining attendance. As a teacher, I’ve had to deal with students persistently missing class in recent years. I try to work with students and families in an empathetic way while balancing creative and flexible approaches with the need for accountability.

Policymakers and education leaders should prioritize the issue and family engagement as areas worthy of their time, attention and resources. They might look to and other educational models with a track record of success in this area for ideas. As an example, is an organization demonstrating the power of bridging relationships among schools, students, families and neighborhoods in 39 high-poverty schools in order to, among other things, .

The experiences of the past three years have shown conclusively that moments in school matter greatly for student achievement. But this latest Nation’s Report Card is a reminder that helping students reach their full potential likely requires rethinking how to support and inspire students in the moments beyond the school day, too.

Brooklyn Laboratory Charter High School can most certainly be counted among the borough’s hidden gems for its innovative approaches to challenges that now plague schools nationwide.

Getting students back on track to graduate. Decreasing absenteeism. Supporting students’ and teachers’ well-being, all while preparing for the end of pandemic relief funds next year.   

Two Brooklyn-raised Black women, who reflect much of the student body at the small 9th to 12th grade college prep school, are leading into a new era coming out of the pandemic, revamping the status quo that left many educators exhausted and students dissatisfied.

Leaders and staff went to the drawing board, mining for solutions that filled gaps and brought joy back into school. 

Brooklyn Lab Charter’s social workers visited nearly 100 homes to find students, as absenteeism soared post-pandemic. Each student has a personal advocate both at school and with their families, an advisor who starts each day with a non-academic meeting to build relationships and discuss health or current events over free breakfast. Free photobooths, music, dinner, sports and games await those who show up on-time at weekly “No-Tardy Parties.”

Two teachers now lead each class, at least one of whom is special education certified, as the school adopts an all-inclusion-model. Morning office hours and a 6-week night school offer more chances for students to bridge academic gaps made worse by the pandemic. Teachers are now paid to lead and attend professional development sessions. 

“I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done to strengthen us where we need to be strengthened,” said CEO Garland Thomas-McDavid, who became a career educator after growing up in a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood, becoming a teen mother and dropping out of high school. 

“Most schools are experiencing a lot of the same challenges… Everyone was facing staff shortages, everyone was facing a great resignation.”

Amid the uncertainty, she and her team are finding new solutions to provide rigorous academic opportunities for students of color and students with disabilities who are frequently ignored and left unchallenged. 

“I’m not going to lower the bar,” she said. “I’m not going to go quietly into the night because I always think, what about the parent who can’t speak up? What about the parent who doesn’t have the resources? What about the parent who doesn’t even know what to ask for?”

Excellence is for Thomas-McDavid, a mother of five and parent to a 10th grader at Brooklyn Lab Charter. Having navigated special education services for her youngest, she knows how draining it can be for parents trying to advocate for what their children deserve. And being a native of East New York, where some students also live, she knows the difference schools can make.

The change at Brooklyn Lab Charter is palpable. Since October, the school has seen a 15% decrease in daily absences. Students and staff say students are more excited to come to school amid an almost-180 degree shift, after years of feeling flatlined. Nearly all, about 96%, of teachers are returning next school year.

“It was visible to some teachers that things had to change,” said Jeckesan Mejia, dean of instruction. “This year at every opportunity, we’re trying to implement feedback, changes, updates… Just be in a space where we are not only reacting, but intentionally reacting.”

Over a hundred students participate in nine new sports, from e-Gaming to basketball.  A washer and dryer is open to all and a prayer room was set up during Ramadan. 

Roughly 80% of teachers are Black or brown, serving about 450 students who are predominantly Black, Latino and low-income. 

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“When you’re a school of this size, you have the ability to respond and cater to the community that you’re serving, and be more personable with the families that you meet, the people that you work with, and the staff that you hire,” assistant principal Melissa Poux told ���˶���.

The school’s high expectations have continued since the school’s inception. 

External partnerships bring students into college classes at nearby universities. Mandatory AP classes and a microeconomics course at a local college helped senior Daniel Shelton see a future in law. His time management skills got better; he learned how to keep focus and retain info from long lectures. 

“It really opened my eyes,” Shelton said. “Prior to that, I would have really never known and been able to prepare myself to have the level of dedication to study — I had to devote all my weekends to it. And honestly I wouldn’t take any second back.”

“Back in the Lab”

Many of the Lab’s innovations this school year address multiple goals. 

In daily advisory, led by teachers or administrators, students discuss anything from mindfulness and health to current news and how to advocate for yourself. Low-cost “No-Tardy Parties” hosted in the gym help reinforce that school can be a joyful, positive place. 

Their inclusion model for special education also reduces isolation among students, while making classes more accessible and boosting teacher morale.

“Ms. Morales, my co-teacher, is not only my favorite person to work with but she has expedited my development more than I could even imagine,” said first-year earth science teacher and pre-med advisor Branden Medary, who came to the classroom after a career in neuroscience and has bridged a partnership to offer aerospace workshops by New York University students.

“If I’m doing something whack, she will happily pull me aside and be like, ‘Hey, you can do this, this, or this. I know those to work. What do you think?’”

Co-teachers lesson plan together as well so lessons are modified to support students of all ability levels.  

Some families have come specifically because of its inclusive approach to supporting students with disabilities. 

Administrators and teachers at Brooklyn Lab Charter are leaning on each other, too. Staff get paid extra to lead or attend professional development sessions, and now have free access to a local gym. Academic teams are probing deeper into assessment data to see how more subjects can reduce gaps. 

At the start of this school year, math scores showed many students struggled with word problems — at its core, a literacy problem. 

English and history teachers built in more time for reading comprehension, while math teachers introduced a “word problem checklist” to help students past initial panic and freeze-up: read the problem, restate what it’s asking, identify variables, etc. 

“The sheer fact that kids have the ability to check something off allows them to feel that progress, to be a little bit more resilient with what’s in front of them, and hopefully get to that last check.” 

Teachers also offer morning drop-in office hours, usually more amenable to teen’s schedules, particularly those who work. 

Those who need to finish more credits to graduate than is possible during the school day attend a 6-week night school program. 

Cultural responsiveness in and out of the classroom

Innovations underway boil down to understanding students and their families — being culturally responsive. 

At Brooklyn Lab Charter, administrators, a few of whom spent years at larger network charters criticized for pushing students with disabilities out or cultivating rigid or racist cultures, embrace the bustle that comes with being a school.

Students are themselves in hallways — as loud or as quiet as they want to be. Through the glass walls of the once-office space, hugs, fist-bumps, waves and smiles abound. 

Though their adjustment to being fully back in person was challenging at first, students describe the environment as more engaging and challenging than their previous schools. That they still feel a sense of community, feel welcomed. 

When asked why, the differences that stick with them speak to their experiences and dreams:

In February, dozens of local Black professionals presented and met one on one with students at their first ever “Success Looks like Me” , shaped by student input. 

“It’s not everyday that you find somebody from Coney Island who’s up there,” said Brooklyn Lab Charter senior Jayla Eady, an aspiring dermatologist. “Being that we’re from the same place, it shows that I can do it, too.” 

Like all schools, Brooklyn Lab Charter is still working through challenges, including enrollment – which dropped by nearly 100 after they ended remote options this school year – and a $5 million decline in funding as ESSER funds expire in 2024. 

On the student side, attention spans are dwindling as students adjust to the daily grind.

“The only way to allow for the attention to come back is to make things culturally relevant, make things relevant to them and what they can literally walk outside of this building and utilize today,” added Mejia.

Eleventh graders in Karen Asiedu’s AP Environmental Science course, learned about blood diamonds, cocoa farming, food supply chains and the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio in the weeks after the AP exam. 

Anaya, a senior, compared her experience of walking into the building to showing up for family Thanksgiving: even if you didn’t know everyone beforehand, you fit in, feel comfortable and look after each other. Coming to the Lab after being treated like a nerdy outcast at her last school felt like a fresh start, a place where, “I can maybe be who I am.” 

“I feel very confident that like everyone that we’re in class with now will not just walk across the stage but be given their diploma,” she said. “That’s what I like — I’m glad it’s a no one left behind type thing.”

Disclosure: The XQ Institute provides financial support to Brooklyn Lab High School and ���˶���.

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]]> /article/as-reading-instruction-shifts-absenteeism-and-tardies-can-lead-to-poor-outcomes/ Tue, 23 May 2023 13:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=709439 This article was originally published in

Administrators at Whiteville Primary, a school for kindergarten through second grade in Whiteville City Schools, schedule the day down to the minute. Teachers sometimes schedule their literacy blocks down to the second.

During phonics instruction, teachers might build on things their students learned while working on phonemic awareness earlier in the day. Comprehension work and read-alouds bring in vocabulary words that students worked with that day.

With the shift to instruction grounded in the science of reading, not only has instruction become more explicit — it follows a specific scope and sequence. Each lesson builds on the one before.

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A student can fall behind a lot missing just one day.

That makes the state of student attendance, and on-time attendance, troubling for a state in the beginning stages of implementing the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021.

“We just have a different mentality now about the urgency of schooling,” said Pam Sutton, the instructional coach at Whiteville Primary. “We’re seeing problems with attendance. I’m not sure if it’s due to the pandemic or what, but the mentality of parents is like attendance isn’t a big deal.”

But it is a big deal, especially for children learning to read.

This year, the State Board of Education heard data showing that chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10 or more days a year, doubled to almost 20% among elementary students in 2020-21, compared with before the pandemic. Elementary students are missing an average of 11 days of school per year.

Several studies show a negative correlation between missing school and academic outcomes. A noted that only 17% of students who were chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade went on to read at grade level in third grade.

“We’re doing everything we can and then you have a child who’s out, so the continuity of the instruction isn’t there,” Sutton said. “If they’re not here, they miss that instruction and they miss that intervention and they miss that extra help. It all adds up.”

It’s not just days missed, either. Getting to school late – even by just a few minutes – can have a major impact on students’ ability to stay on track for grade-level proficiency, Sutton said.

Her school uses a program that adds up instructional time missed when kids come in late or leave early. That report shows how many days students are effectively missing through tardiness.

“And it’s kind of an eye opener to some parents because they didn’t think it was such a big deal,” Katie McLam said. “But everything matters.”

At Whiteville Primary, some kids had racked up 30 or more tardies just 70 days into the school year. Sutton sees them come in, sometimes just 10 minutes late. Then, they walk to their classrooms — rarely with urgency. Sometimes it takes them a few minutes to figure out what the rest of the class is doing. Other times, they go get breakfast if they haven’t had anything to eat.

“So now your 10 minutes late has turned into 30 minutes,” Sutton said. “And you haven’t started your instruction, but the class has moved on.”

Sutton says there’s a compounding effect of being late on the student’s ability to catch up — either that day or in the course of a few days.

“Some of them, it’s that anxiety of, ‘What are they doing, what am I supposed to be doing,’” she says of students’ mindsets. “And then, ‘Oh wait, my homework. Oh wait, my snack. Did I get my snack?’ There’s this whole thing happening in their minds, and it takes time to bring them down so that they can focus to learn.”

But those are precious minutes not spent on instruction. Especially, McLam said, when teachers are already pressed for instructional time.

“The day goes by so quickly when you’re trying to fit everything in that you want the students to know, and all the other things you have to do,” she said. “There’s not a lot of downtime.”

Disciplinary measures have similar effects, school leaders say. It’s important to teach students acceptable behavior, but whether the student is out of class because of absences, tardies, or disciplinary punishment — the impact on learning for the brain is the same.

At Perquimans Central, a school for pre-K through second grade, building leaders identified reading struggles as a contributor to disciplinary issues.

For years, Principal Tracy Gregory said, teachers did the best they could. But some practices they used in the past were not effective in teaching students to read. That caused anxiety and issues with self-esteem, she said, which translated to behavioral outbursts.

So they redesigned reading instruction, going all in with science-of-reading implementation. At the same time, they did all they could to avoid disciplinary measures keeping kids away.

“Kids act out because they don’t want to look dumb, even in first and second grade,” she said. “And they would be a class clown rather than being a target. But when we identify their needs, we give them the instruction they need, and they have a safe environment, you’ll see a lot of that reduced.”

And Gregory’s already seeing results. Incidence reports are down significantly, she said, this year compared to previous years.

“We are doing awesome,” she said. “I feel like this has made my job easier.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

]]> /article/come-to-class-win-a-toyota-districts-launch-campaigns-to-boost-attendance/ Wed, 28 Sep 2022 20:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=697260 Across the country during the last two pandemic school years, the rate at which students missed class skyrocketed. In the nation’s two largest districts, New York City and Los Angeles, some last year, meaning they missed at least 18 days, putting them academically at risk, experts say. In many school systems in between, rates also reached perilously high levels.

Now, to correct the troubling pattern in the new academic year, some school leaders are launching attendance campaigns in hopes of luring more students into the classroom. The techniques include an “” in Charlotte, North Carolina; and new bikes in a district outside Kansas City — and, in San Antonio, the possibility of .

“Not only is it a chance to win something amazing for your family, but it also shows our families and our students, we really want you in school every day, that your attendance matters,” said Judy Geelhoed, executive director of the San Antonio Independent School District Foundation, which coordinated the campaign.

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Whether induced or not by incentives such as the prospect of new wheels, early signs show students coming to school at higher rates this year than last, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. She works with educators across the country and has been encouraged by their anecdotes.

“I actually am hearing folks saying this year is better,” she said. “Everyone I speak to is like, ‘This is almost like a normal school here. Fingers crossed.’”

Preliminary attendance data for the new school year will not be released in most school districts for several weeks or months. But in Oakland Unified, one of the few school systems that publishes in real time, the numbers are hopeful. So far, just 25% of students have been chronically absent, compared to 45% last year.

That’s a good sign for the rest of the year, said Chang, because “absences in the first month of school … predict absences later in the school year.” 

Last year was particularly difficult, she noted, because the start of the fall and spring semesters each aligned with a COVID surge: first Delta, then Omicron. With most districts having ditched hybrid learning at that point, students forced to quarantine often found themselves more than a week of content behind before they even began the semester.

But as leaders seek to reverse the trend this year, experts doubt whether attendance incentives are the most effective strategy. 

“Both learning and attendance … they rely on your intrinsic motivation,” said Jing Liu, a University of Maryland education professor who researches absenteeism. “I don’t think this is a very good approach to solve this issue. You might see a bump of attendance in the short run, but I don’t think it can work in the long term.”

indicates that financial incentives tend to be effective in motivating young people only when they reward behaviors students feel they can control; for example, how thoroughly they prepare for a test as opposed to how well they score once they sit down to take it.

Schools can, however, adjust their incentive structures to reward even students who may face more challenges showing up to class, the Attendance Works director pointed out. 

That’s exactly what San Antonio, with its Toyota challenge, has done. Students will earn raffle tickets every marking period not only for high attendance levels, but also for posting rates that improve on their attendance from the 2021-22 school year. 

“We wanted to give an incentive to folks [for whom] … things were holding them back. Sometimes there’s issues happening in the family and we wanted to give families an incentive to say, ‘I’m going to do my best to get my student there every day,’” Geelhoed said.

The $28,000 cost of the car, which the Foundation director noted would be more expensive on the showroom floor, will be covered by sponsors Frost Bank and Cavender Toyota. 

But while a ribbon-adorned shiny SUV may be a tantalizing prospect for many, she knows “this kind of incentive can’t mitigate all the challenges that our students may have.”

The district also deploys specialists to monitor chronically absent students and assist them in getting to campus, including home visits when they aren’t able to contact families, communications manager Laura Short said in an email. They analyze data across the school system to identify which students might be most at risk, she added.

“We believe it takes a whole-district approach to work on student attendance.”

]]> /article/chronic-absenteeism-nuance-variations-jing-liu-university-maryland/ Wed, 27 Jul 2022 11:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=693290 Students who miss at least 10% of school days are more likely to face by third grade, less likely to and are at . There’s a word to describe when students surpass this troubling threshold: chronic absenteeism.

It makes intuitive sense. Students who spend less time in the classroom have a harder time keeping up with their peers and may face difficulties developing positive relationships with school staff.

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During the pandemic, rates of chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed, hitting , New York City and Los Angeles, and reaching dangerously high levels in many districts in between. 

In many cases, difficulties with remote learning, fear of COVID-19 spread in schools, poverty-related barriers such as students being forced to pick up jobs or a mix of those and other factors have added obstacles to students’ school attendance.

But with all eyes on absenteeism as schools nationwide seek to recover from the lasting impacts of the pandemic, Jing Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, argues that officials should begin by gaining a more complete understanding of the issue.

That starts with expanding what is usually a binary statistic — whether or not a student is absent 10% of days — into a multi-dimensional measure.

In two , Liu and co-authors find key differences based on when in the school year absences occur and whether they are excused or unexcused. The trends can help schools more quickly identify at-risk students, so they may intervene to support them in getting back on track, he said.

���˶��� sat down with the researcher, over Zoom, to glean the key takeaways from his timely work.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

���˶���: Why do we care about absenteeism? What are the typical differences in outcomes between Student A, with perfect attendance, and Student B, who misses school a few times a month?

Jing Liu: We care about absenteeism for several reasons. First of all, students have to be in school to learn. So for any education policy intervention to work, you have to have students in school. 

Second, I have this published with Dr. [Seth] Gershenson that shows there’s this strong impact of absenteeism on student learning in the short run and also for longer-run outcomes including high school graduation and college enrollment. So if we care about those outcomes, we have to reduce absenteeism. 

Lastly, absenteeism is also linked to drug abuse, crime, teen pregnancy, a host of undesirable outcomes. So cutting absences can also benefit students in those different aspects.

One pattern that you and your co-authors found in the that caught my attention is when a student has an unexcused absence early in the year it tends to precipitate increased levels of truancy later on in the year and in future grades. But that trend doesn’t hold for excused absences like a doctor’s appointment. So can you tell me a little more about what you saw there?

Sure. So for this study, we are able to use really nuanced data. We were able to look at the patterns in how absences evolve within a school year and also as students progress over grades. 

So what do we see? Unexcused absences grow pretty dramatically within a school year while the excused absences stay relatively stable over time. If we look at just absences in the first month, especially unexcused absences, you can do a pretty good job of predicting their [increased] trajectory in the rest of the school year. For students who are really disengaged in the first month, they are likely to be very disengaged for the entire school year.

Why is that?

There’s some existing research looking at how absences beget absences. For example, if you’re missing a few mathematics classes at the beginning of the year, when you come back, you’ll find it harder to keep track of the content. And that may generate additional absences. 

It might also be related to personal relationships. Because if you are absent, now you are not having a strong connection with your teacher, with your classmates. And that might make you more disengaged, not wanting to come to class even more in the future. 

My research team is planning to do some surveys of students to understand more about their experience.

What sort of interventions should educators be thinking about to remedy those issues?

A first place to look is how to intervene early instead of waiting until the end of the school year. By just relying on the first month of absenteeism data and students’ reasons for absences, we can get a pretty good sense about who’s going to be the most disengaged. Although all loss of instructional time is bad, what we show is, really, those unexcused absences in middle and high school are driving the growth of absences. By looking out early, district leaders and school principals can decide with whom to intervene. Timing really matters.

Secondly, it’s very telling that growth of absences was linked to perception of school climate. We would want to intervene in terms of improving someone’s perception of school climate, so it’s either a sense of belonging or support of their learning. Starting there, I think we might be able to prevent the accelerating growth of absences down the road.

For school districts that want to operationalize some of this, is there a magic formula they could use instead of the typical 10% threshold that gives issues like absence type and timing their proper weight?

First of all, I think chronic absenteeism is still a useful metric. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, more and more states are using that as an indicator for school quality. Before we didn’t really actually have an indicator on absenteeism. So I don’t want to just critique [the approach]. 

However, we can do better than just using a binary measure [of whether absences are above or below 10% of all school days]. A lot of places are now collecting this detailed level data that includes the timing and also the type of absences. But they’re not systematically putting the data together and using it in useful ways. 

We are actually working with a middle school team in [an undisclosed district] to use those absenteeism data to create our own on-track/off-track indicator and see whether we can flag kids for a risk of disengagement very early in the school year. And then by intervening in a dynamic and targeted manner, we’ll see if we can change kids’ trajectory.

In hard and fast terms for a school leader who is collecting these data, when would you say is the right time to check in with the numbers and see which kids are at risk? Is it October 1, October 15? Halloween? 

I think one month after the school year starts, that’s what we did with our research. 

Although to actually address the question, we not only need a timing, we also need a threshold. So how many kids are going to be put in the bucket to intervene? We need a little bit more work to look at how setting different thresholds can change the results and how predictive those early absences are for other outcomes we care about. This is one of the first studies doing this kind of thing and we need a bit more research to provide more actionable suggestions.

In words that folks who aren’t statisticians can understand, can you say a little bit more about how you and your team crunched the numbers to get these results?

Basically, we just look at the growth of absences over time. So we basically put all the absences into weekly measures. So for example, for Jing, for me, if I’m absent for two classes in the first week, three classes in the second week, then we can see this growth by using a model and the number we get is just the slope. So we use this metric to indicate the level of engagement [in school].

Any last points? What topics haven’t we covered yet?

One detail is that as we look more deeply into the reasons for absences, we know that the excused/unexcused division is not perfect. Sometimes maybe an unexcused absence is just that the parent forgot to contact the school. And sometimes it’s really an unexcused absence, but the student is able to make up a reason. 

I remember when I turned 18 as a high school senior, that was when I could call myself out of school. So then I had a lot of “excused” absences.

Exactly. So from a practical perspective, given that the volume of excused absence is pretty minimal, I think if we are going to design interventions for use in practice, I probably would suggest school districts to not differentiate between absence types, because it creates an additional data collection burden and it probably won’t impact results that much.

]]> /article/7-things-we-learned-about-covids-impact-on-education-from-survey-of-800-schools/ Tue, 19 Jul 2022 21:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=693129 The pandemic years have taken a dramatic toll on the nation’s public schools, according to , affecting staffing, students’ behavior, attendance, nutrition, and mental health.

“There was a lot of disruption in actually providing quality instruction to students whether it is access to a teacher, a live teacher, or the mode of learning was chaotic and vacillating, and it ,” said Commissioner Peggy Carr of the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the institute. “This is an important way to understand the impact of the pandemic on our country.” 

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The School Pulse Panel is a series of surveys from January 2022 through May 2022 measuring COVID-19’s impact on public education. The surveys were sent to 800-850 public schools, with principals, administrators, superintendents, and staff responding. Here are some takeaways from IES’s School Pulse Panel:

1. COVID-19 negatively affected student’s development

A May 2022 survey found more than 80% of public schools reported “stunted behavioral and socioemotional development” in their students because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” a 56% increase in “classroom disruptions from student misconduct,” and a 49% increase in “rowdiness outside of the classroom.” All schools surveyed reported a 55% increase in “student tardiness.” The use of cell phones, computers, or other electronics when not permitted for all schools increased by 42%.

2. Chronic teacher and student absenteeism has increased

Student and teacher absenteeism in the 2021-2022 school year increased in comparison to school years before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2021-2022 school year 61% of public schools also reported it is “much more difficult” to find substitute teachers; and that

• 74% reported having “administrators cover classes.” 
• 71% reported having “non-teaching staff cover classes.” 
• 68% reported having “other teachers cover classes during their prep periods.”
• 51% reported “separate sections and classes… combined into one room.”

Carr said she had heard from colleagues in Boston and Florida school districts that because of staffing shortages, superintendents had to return to classrooms to teach “because it was so bad. I had heard that, but to see it in a nationally representative sample of schools that prevalent, is sobering.”

Carr also said COVID quarantines are a factor in student absenteeism. “It is normal to have students out because of quarantine, so when we talk about student absenteeism, it’s not all just because a student is just out, sometimes it is that they’ve been quarantined because of COVID,” she said. “That’s part of the new normal.”

3. There is a greater need for mental health services among students and staff.

70% of public schools reported that “the percentage of students who have sought mental health services increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic;” and that 34% of public school students seeking out mental health services more than others were “economically disadvantaged students.” The second highest percentage (25%) of public schools who sought out mental health services more than others were special needs students (25%).

“The teachers are having a rough time…too, is what these data are showing,” Carr said. 29% of public schools reported that the “degree to which staff have sought mental health services from the school since the start of COVID-19” has increased. “They are overworked, they don’t have the staff there to help them, teachers are quitting. They are having to teach courses they have not taught before. All of these things culminate into an unhealthy work environment for the teachers,” she said.

4. Public schools face barriers to getting students the mental health services they need.

Most public schools (61%) said a limitation was “insufficient mental health professional staff coverage to manage caseload,” 57% of the schools said it was “inadequate access to licensed mental health professionals,” and 48% said “inadequate funding.”

“A licensed professional is expensive,” Carr said. “Too few professionals are available in these schools to actually provide those services and inadequate access to licensed professionals that can really provide the level of quality of services that they need.”

5. Schools changed their calendars to support students and staff

Nearly one third of the schools — 28% — surveyed reported making changes to their “daily or yearly academic calendar to mitigate potential mental health issues for students and staff.” In early July, went into effect to make high school and middle classes start no earlier than 8:30am. , New York, and Massachusetts lawmakers have had similar discussions about making school start times later.

6. Most schools are in-person 

By May 2022, most schools — 99% — were offering full-time in-person instruction, a slight increase from January when it was 97%, the survey found. In January, 40% of all public schools also offered a full-time remote option, which decreased to 34% in February, 33% in March, April, and May, the survey found.

7. School Breakfast and Meal Programs faced challenges.

Nearly 40% of the schools that operate USDA school and breakfast meal programs, “reported challenges obtaining enough food, beverages, and/or meal service supplies.” The top three most reported reasons for these challenges were “limited product availability,” “shipment delays,” “orders arriving with missing items, reduced quantities, or product substitutions.”

“I think we are continuing to be surprised by the range of experiences that schools are having to deal with as a result of COVID. It hasn’t subsided,” Carr said. “It is not over yet is what I believe these data are saying.”

]]> /article/student-voice-pandemic-attendance-crisis-is-about-more-than-covid/ Mon, 18 Jul 2022 16:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=692928 When it comes to students missing class, most people think it’s about COVID, and COVID only. But in reality, it’s more than that. Some students had trouble making friends, and some had no friends at all. Some, like me, struggled with certain classes. And then the number of absent students began to breed more of the same: Some students weren’t going to show up if their friends weren’t there. It gave them motivation not to come as well. 

I got sick with COVID on November 8, two days after homecoming. The sickle cell disease I have heightened my symptoms, and I was in the hospital for about three weeks. The symptoms were really bad, some of the worst pains I’ve ever experienced: excruciating headaches where I felt pain in my eyes, and feeling like I couldn’t breathe.

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During my time in the hospital, I was incapable of completing work. All of my grades dropped. I had a 3.5 GPA at the start of the year, but a 1.7 when I was released. I felt left out and kind of dumb, but I knew I had to get back in the grind. 

This whole experience opened my eyes to some of the reasons parents were scared to let their children come to school.

But COVID wasn’t the only reason attendance tanked at my school. I heard from other students that they weren’t coming because they didn’t have any friends. They were too nervous about developing friendships. Some of them were coming straight from the 8th grade of virtual learning into a strange new high school. It’s hard to adapt to a new school that not only has a different culture, but an entirely new experience of learning.

When we started school on September 3, 2021, everyone was really excited for a fresh start at DRW College Prep, where I was a junior. It felt good. Things were finally normal for a second, and I had the grades to prove it.

We were given new rules to follow but also additional freedoms. We could wear jeans! We had new uniforms! We could have phones in class! At first, it was smooth, but then things started to unravel. We started to hear loud noises in the hallways from student altercations, which continued throughout the year.

Once the rules settled in, everyone got used to them — and learned how to abuse them.

That’s when attendance started dropping. Attendance at Noble Charter Schools, which my high school is a part of, dropped from 84 percent in September to 72 percent in April 2022. 

Some kids weren’t coming to school because of high COVID rates. Students were scared, and so were their parents. My friend Davion didn’t come to school for a month and a half because his mother was scared he’d get sick. 

Some of my friend’s parents were worried their kids would go to school and bring the virus home. My friend Burnett has a 2-year-old brother he has to take care of. That’s why his mom was afraid to let him go to school. For young caretakers, getting COVID puts the whole house at risk. When my mother and sister had COVID, everyone had to quarantine.

It was difficult to go to school when I knew some of my classes would be half empty. The social aspect just wasn’t there. Plus, when you notice your peers aren’t coming more than three days a week, you start to worry about them. I want to graduate with my friends, but it’s impossible if they don’t pass. This makes me feel helpless. I can’t help my friends if they aren’t at school. We planned to go to college together, but this might be a real problem if they can’t graduate with me. 

Not only that, our time management abilities were thrown off when we were virtual. When we took classes at home, we woke up later. Now, it’s been hard to wake up on time and get ourselves to school. I have to wake up at 6:30 a.m. and be out of the house by 7 to make it to the Division bus, which takes me from South Austin to North Lawndale. I then switch to the always-packed-with-students Homan bus that takes me to school. I travel with my younger sister, and we usually don’t arrive until 8:20 a.m., 25 minutes after we’re supposed to.

And to be honest, another reason we weren’t going to school was that at first, it felt like we weren’t learning anything. There was a lot of repeat material from last year, like 10th grade math. Once students realized this, they checked out. My friends said, “We already learned this, so I don’t need to be here.” Some started to develop an outside life, like getting jobs, and only came back temporarily. 

“I feel like the lessons somewhat have been all over the place because sometimes kids have not been paying attention and not learning,” said Tamyra Buckner, who is in 10th grade. 

But sometimes, the lessons in some classes were too hard. We felt like we weren’t prepared, which also gave us an excuse to not want to show up. A lot of the time, I would procrastinate going to math because I knew it would be stressful. 

“I think students aren’t coming to school because some teachers are not making it worth the students’ time,” said Connor Showalter, a math teacher. 

Absenteeism has been so bad at DRW College Prep that students were told attendance was exempt from our transcript, which was not surprising since so many of my classmates weren’t there. But that only gave students an extra reason to not show up when they were simply not feeling school. 

Students coming in and out of school when they feel like it can take a toll on teachers, too. When theater arts instructor Donier Tyler realized that her class kept getting smaller, she had to cancel the planned play for the semester, Twelve Angry Men. 

“Students are still caught in the mode they were in during quarantine,” she said. “It has made all of us lazier and harder to adjust back to ‘normal.’ Our cycles were off for a year and a half. It’s hard to wake up like normal.”

And it’s hard for teachers to give a grade when no work is being done. Seeing so many F’s is a sad sight, she said.

Also, it has become far too easy for students to call the school and say they have symptoms. My friend Shaun Taylor, who’s in 11th grade, said teens “feel like they can take advantage of the system.” 

I 100% agree with that. The teachers are aware of the problem, and they are listening to our voices. I would like to see administrators listen more as well.

Now, heading into my senior year, I feel that I should help resolve the problem of students not attending school. My friends and I want to start a student government because we don’t have one. We want to work to make DRW a better place before we leave. 

Andre Young is going into his senior year at DRW College Prep in Chicago. This story was produced as part of the Medill Media Teens journalism program for Chicago Public School students at Northwestern University. The writer worked under the mentorship of Medill graduate Jane Vaughan.

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