Chalkbeat

7 key changes shaping NYC schools for the 2026-27 academic year

2026-09-04T15:19:01+00:00

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While all eyes this school year will be on New York City’s new artificial intelligence rules, that’s not the only new policy coming in 2026-27.

When it comes to instruction, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has yet to change things up, essentially just continuing to expand his predecessor Eric Adams’ curriculum mandates. The state is phasing in financial literacy and phasing out Regents exam requirements for diplomas. And all New York City schools now will have school avoidance liaisons to tackle student chronic absenteeism due to mental health or social emotional issues.

Here are seven things expected to change this school year.

The next phase of the city’s math curriculum mandate is coming to elementary schools.

Under the Adams administration, the Education Department overhauled its approach to instruction by phasing in curriculum mandates for literacy and math — a practice the Mamdani administration has continued.

All elementary schools must now teach one of three approved literacy curriculums, and all schools — from elementary to high school — must use one of nine city-approved intervention programs designed to help struggling readers.

Calculus students at a Manhattan charter school.

The city requires nearly all high schools to use a particular curriculum for Algebra 1, and all middle schools will be mandated to teach certain literacy and math curriculums by fall 2027.

Starting this fall, the city will require elementary schools in four local districts to use city-approved math curriculums.

It’s the last year that students will need Regents exams to graduate.

The Class of 2027 will be the last cohort that must pass Regents exams to graduate, according to the current timeline from the state’s Education Department.

After this year, students will no longer be required to earn their diplomas based on passing Regents tests — exit exams that date back to the mid-1800s — and instead will have to demonstrate they’ve mastered six high-level qualities that comprise a “portrait of a graduate,” including effective communication skills, critical thinking, and being a global citizen. The state’s Board of Regents has yet to formally approve the change but is expected to consider new regulations this fall.

In place of the exams, schools will have a variety of ways to assess students, including through research projects and internships, state officials have said. But officials have yet to provide more concrete examples of what the new graduation standards will look like.

“Teachers are going to need time to figure out what the requirements are and how to translate that,” Robert Effinger, a teacher at the Bronx High School of Business, previously told Chalkbeat. “There’s no information.”

School districts across the country have moved away from exit exams, and research suggests these tests do little to promote student learning. Many educators are hopeful the change could free them to focus on more hands-on projects and that it will help reduce some students’ test anxiety. But others have raised equity concerns, fearing the changes could push schools to graduate students even if they haven’t mastered key skills.

Get ready for financial literacy classes.

New York state is now mandating that schools teach personal finance — a topic that many students have said they want. Starting this year, students in grades 5-12 will learn about budgeting and money management, credit and debt, and saving and investing. The mandate will apply to K-4 students the following year. New York City already had been making inroads into financial literacy, with a pilot program to give students hands-on experience with saving and managing money through affordable on-site banking options.

“After high school, some of us will never again solve a calculus problem. Our test scores and GPAs will fade into inconsequential measures of past achievement,” a Stuyvesant student previously wrote for Chalkbeat. “But every single one of us will have to manage our finances. That is what we need to learn.”

Every school must designate a school avoidance liaison.

School avoidance — or school refusal as it’s sometimes called — is when students consistently don’t show up to class due to social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression. Between 1% and 15% of children are school avoidant, researchers estimate. Parents believe the problem increased after the pandemic’s shift to remote learning, and now the Education Department is mandating every school designate a staffer as a school avoidance liaison by Oct. 31 to help tackle the issue. Staffers, however, aren’t getting extra money for the role.

Without systemwide guidance, the city’s nearly 1,600 schools have responded unevenly to school avoidant students. The new policy is meant to change that. Liaisons will get a two-hour training on behaviors that lead to school refusal, and they will provide families information about mental health programs and options such as special education evaluations or reevaluations.

Middle schools are now required, along with high schools, to add students to their school leadership teams.

New York City students will now have a bigger say in shaping their schools’ direction.

School leadership teams, or SLTs, are committees of educators, parents, and students who collaborate to develop and evaluate school policies aimed at improving student outcomes and ensuring that a school’s goals and budget align. These teams create a blueprint for the school year, known as a comprehensive education plan.

The city already required high schools to have at least two students on their SLTs. In practice, however, this doesn’t always happen: Nearly a quarter of high schools have no student representatives assigned to their SLTs, Education Department officials said.

Now, the city is requiring middle schools to add at least two students to their SLTs. And officials are encouraging elementary schools to add students to their leadership teams. All SLT members can earn up to $300 for their service.

NYC plans to pilot virtual student OMNY cards at 7 schools.

Student OMNY cards have been a gamechanger for many kids since the city introduced them two years ago. Students now get four free rides a day, 365 days a year, at any time, a significant upgrade from the three daily rides during limited hours on school days. But complaints have been growing about the flimsy, paper-thin student OMNY cards and the delays in getting replacement cards.

Student OMNY cards from the 2025-26 school year.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said at a recent school board meeting that he was “deeply concerned” by the quality of the cards and that the city was planning to provide students with plastic sleeves for them. He also confirmed that the Education Department and Metropolitan Transportation Authority planned to pilot virtual cards at seven schools “some time” this school year, although names of the schools have not been released.

For virtual cards, students will be able to use their cellphones to tap for their commutes (though, of course, they can’t use phones in school). The school system has been in talks with the MTA about virtual cards for more than a year. Students who don’t have phones still will be able to use physical cards.

The Education Department is replacing its outmoded platform that manages student data, scheduling, attendance, and admissions.

For decades, New York City schools have relied on the Automated Teaching System, or ATS, a platform that manages everything from student biographical information — such as home language, contact information, and immunization records — to attendance, grades, standardized test scores, and admissions. The Education Department is in the process of transitioning to a new system known as the Online Academic and Student Information System, or OASIS. Officials switched to OASIS for its Office of Pupil Transportation this summer, and schools already had some issues using the tool to find routes for students attending summer school who required busing. Some school leaders are preparing for a bumpy rollout.

Issues during the summer rollout “were immediately addressed,” Education Department spokesperson Onika Richards told Chalkbeat after this story initially published.

The system is taking a “phased, module-by-module approach,” she said, “allowing us to carefully manage the modernization and support schools throughout the process.”

Additional reporting by Alex Zimmerman.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Newark’s chronic absenteeism rate drops to 8.5%. Here’s what district leaders say is working.

2026-08-28T01:12:51+00:00

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Newark Public Schools’ chronic absenteeism rate hit a historic low for the 2025-26 school year, dropping to 8.5%. District leaders said on Thursday that it’s also the sharpest turnaround seen in a few years.

New Jersey’s largest school district had a decrease in chronic absenteeism from 27% in the 2018-19 school year to 10% in the 2024-25 school year, per state data. Rates improved across all student populations, with Black students and students with disabilities seeing the largest improvements, according to Rochanda Jackson, executive director of the district’s Office of Data and Research, who presented the attendance data during Thursday’s board meeting.

The improvement puts Newark ahead of the state, although the New Jersey Department of Education has not yet released chronic absenteeism rates for last school year. In the 2024-25 school year, the state’s chronic absenteeism rate was 14.4%, according to school performance reports.

During Thursday’s meeting, Co-vice President Vereliz Santana said the improved rate is ”incredible,” given that under state operation, the district was at risk of being placed on a corrective action plan because of dismal chronic absenteeism rates. During the 2016-17 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate was 29.7%, per school performance reports.

“We have demonstrated great improvements,” Superintendent Roger León said about attendance and graduation rates and other student achievement data presented on Thursday.

The numbers mark a stretch of steady improvement in Newark’s chronic absenteeism rate even as school districts across the country continue to recover post-pandemic.

León told board members at their annual retreat meeting over the weekend that a change in how New Jersey calculates chronic absenteeism helped boost those rates. Jackson, who presented Thursday’s attendance data, said the district changed the way it calculates chronic absenteeism rates to align with the state’s new rule on how it counts chronically absent students. It’s unclear how much the change influenced Newark’s rates. Per the new state rule, students need to be enrolled for at least 90 days out of 180 to be included in the count, up from 45 days.

“We did extraordinarily well this past year simply because the state of New Jersey actually changed the rules to assist more school districts in their chronic absenteeism rates, at least that is from our perspective,” said León during the August school board retreat.

Advocates for Children of New Jersey, a nonprofit that works with state and local leaders to implement education policy, says the state usually flags when a rule change affects how attendance data is compared year over year. Chronic absenteeism, defined by New Jersey as missing 10% or more of the school year.

León pointed to the gains in chronic absenteeism as a sign that his strategies are working during a Wednesday presentation of the 2026 Newark Kids Count report from Advocates for Children of New Jersey. Since 2018, when León was appointed to his role, the district has revived the attendance department previously closed during state operation, created individualized intervention plans for at-risk students, established a truancy task force, and distributed district-wide attendance updates.

The district continues to use a back-to-school campaign called “Give Me Five,” requiring district employees to call families of five students to urge them to show up for the first day of classes, León said Wednesday. The district also has launched incentive programs offering gift cards and hockey tickets to high school students who improve their attendance.

The Kids Count report, released this week, also found that homeless students were chronically absent at a rate of 25% in the 2024-25 school year, more than double the district’s 8.5% rate in the 2025-26 school year, even as León touted progress. In the 2023-24 school year, 26.4% of homeless students were chronically absent, per state school performance data.

León on Wednesday added that he’s working with the city’s reengagement center to support students who face barriers in getting back to school. The center provides local services such as school placements, access to academic enrichment programs, and modified instruction.

The district also tracks attendance through dashboards divided by school, class, grade, and individual student. Those reports are sent to district and school leaders.

Lauren Meehan, executive director of Arts Ed Newark, said during Wednesday’s Kids Count presentation that the district’s efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism correlate with its efforts to expand access to arts education.

“We know that when students have something creative to do, something exciting to do, that helps motivate them to be in that building every day,” Meehan said.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Chronic absenteeism rate fell in Colorado schools last year, still well above pre-pandemic level

2026-08-27T16:47:18+00:00

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The share of Colorado students who were chronically absent last school year declined from the year before, although the percentage remained above pre-pandemic levels, according to data released Thursday by the Colorado Department of Education.

A student is chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of their school days. The more school days students miss, the more likely they are to fall behind academically. Chronic absenteeism has been an acute concern nationwide since the pandemic.

More than a quarter of Colorado students — 27.5% — were chronically absent in 2025-26, state data shows. That’s down from 28.4% in 2024-25 and about the same as in 2023-24.

Before the pandemic, in 2019-20, the chronic absenteeism rate was 22.6%. The Colorado Department of Education set a goal to cut chronic absenteeism to 15% by 2027-28.

“We’ve made progress, but we still have significant work ahead of us,” Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said at a press conference.

The department launched a campaign in 2024 aimed at boosting attendance called “Every School Day Matters!” State officials hoped 80% of Colorado school districts would participate. Fewer than half have so far, according to the department.

More than 230,000 Colorado students missed 10% or more of their school days in 2025-26. Big gaps remain in terms of which groups of students were more likely to be chronically absent.

High school seniors had the highest rate of any grade. Students with disabilities, English language learners, and students from low-income families had higher than average rates.

There were also major differences by student race. About 33% of Black students and 37% of Latino students were chronically absent last year, compared with 20% of white students. All three rates were lower than the year before, with the rate for Black students dropping the most.

The rate for Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students ticked up from 51.1% to 52.1%. That group of students is small, with just about 3,200 students statewide.

The chronic absenteeism rate went down in 109 of Colorado’s 182 school districts and boards of cooperative education services, or BOCES, and stayed the same or increased in the others.

The rate in the state’s largest district, Denver Public Schools, fell from 38.1% to 36.6%. The rate in Jeffco Public Schools, the state’s second-largest district, dropped slightly from 26.6% to 26.2%.

The rate in the tiny Sheridan School District south of Denver skyrocketed from 34.6% to 66.2%, likely because student attendance plummeted during a teachers strike this past spring. The Sheridan teachers union went on strike for more than three weeks in April.

The statewide attendance rate for 2025-26 held steady at 91.5%.

State officials highlighted the 4,600-student Garfield Re-2 School District in Rifle for slashing its chronic absenteeism rate from about 40% in the 2021-22 school year to a little under 18% in 2025-26.

Garfield Superintendent Kirk Banghart said the district invested in family liaisons who troubleshoot attendance issues with its largely Latino population, including in families’ home languages.

Garfield also started an online middle and high school last year that Banghart said currently serves 67 students. Staff monitor the students to make sure they’re completing their schoolwork, he said.

This story has been updated with information and quotes from a press conference.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

NYC revamps how schools handle school avoidance under legal agreement

2026-08-03T12:00:00+00:00

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New York City’s Education Department is changing how it responds to students who are chronically absent due to school avoidance, according to an agreement officials signed last week with the legal team that brought a class action lawsuit over the issue.

School avoidance, or school refusal as it’s sometimes called, is when students miss large stretches of school because of social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression.

The lawsuit, filed in October 2024 on behalf of four students with disabilities who stopped regularly attending school, claimed the nation’s largest school system had no policy or procedures to ensure students received the “free appropriate public education” they were entitled to under federal law.

The city spent more than a year hashing out an agreement with attorneys from the Legal Aid Society and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. The agreement signed Friday creates systemwide guidance and support, including a new mandate that every school across the five boroughs designate a school avoidance liaison.

The shift involves “amending policy, doubling down on training, and creating awareness,” said Flavia Puello-Perdomo, deputy chancellor for family partnership and community support.

“If we’re able to intervene earlier and address the needs of students and really get to the root cause of why students are not coming to school, then we are going to be able to address chronic absenteeism much better,” Puello-Perdomo said. “What is affecting that student from coming in? Is this related to anxiety? Is this related to depression? Is this … simply refusing to come to school because oftentimes not coming to school is, as we know, signs that kids are struggling.”

The Education Department began working on the agreement with the lawyers before a judge ultimately dismissed the lawsuit, believing the claims for each plaintiff could be handled through individual due process hearings. The lawyers, however, planned to appeal because they were challenging a lack of a systemic policy. But they continued working with the department instead, seeing the city was approaching it in “good faith,” attorneys said.

Building systemwide consistency and intervening earlier

Researchers estimate between 1% and 15% of children exhibit school refusal. Parents and educators believe the problem was exacerbated after the pandemic forced schools to shift to remote learning. Education Department officials said they don’t collect specific data on how many chronically absent students are avoiding school because of social or emotional issues. Overall, roughly 33% of city students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, and officials hope the shift in approach will help address school-avoidant students before their absences pile up.

“The moment that we see that student attendance is dipping down, or that students are showing any of these types of behaviors, then we can intervene earlier and ensure that students are remaining engaged with school,” Puello-Perdomo said.

When students don’t show up to class, they often fall behind academically, which can make returning to school harder. Without official guidance on how to respond to students struggling with school refusal, the city’s nearly 1,600 schools have responded unevenly, Chalkbeat previously reported. While some schools have developed strong partnerships with families to create plans that gradually bring children back to campus, others have blamed parents for their children’s attendance problems and refused to help students who weren’t in the building, several families told Chalkbeat.

Under the agreement, schools must designate a school avoidance liaison — a teacher, school administrator, or other pedagogue — by Oct. 31 each year and provide that staffer with annual two-hour training on behaviors that lead to school refusal. The liaisons, or other staff at the school, must provide families information about mental health programs and options such as special education evaluations or reevaluations.

The agreement requires the Education Department to create training materials for district and school staff, including liaisons, by Jan. 1, 2027. The materials must include guidance on talking with parents about school avoidance behaviors and resources like sample plans for bringing students back into the building gradually.

Schools should not expect students exhibiting school avoidance behavior to immediately have perfect attendance, Puello-Perdomo said. Schools instead will have to provide individualized plans to reintegrate the student, working closely with their families.

Experts say, for example, a student might first just enter the school lobby, then spend a morning with the guidance counselor before attending a favorite class. The student could gradually build toward a fuller return, with accommodations for easing back into class and catching up on missed work.

The goal, Puello-Perdomo said, is to “make it so that they can also experience a level of success.”

The Education Department also will post resources on its website to help parents address school avoidance behaviors.

Schools shift from blaming parents to addressing root causes

Susan Horwitz, director of the Legal Aid Society’s Education Law Project who worked on the class action suit, said the agreement will help schools look more closely at the reason kids aren’t showing up and shift the conversation from “What’s wrong with this parent? Why can’t they drag their kid into school?” to “Why is this happening?”

Most importantly, she added, “There will be consistency between schools in how they address school avoidance.”

The agreement tackles another major issue: Often, when students refuse to attend class, their schools say they can’t evaluate them for special education support since the child is not on campus. Now, schools will consider accommodating students at an Education Department-approved location closer to their home or approving an independent evaluation.

“So many times we hear from parents that when they say, ‘I can’t get my kid to go to school, she won’t get out of bed,’” Horwitz said. “The school says, ‘Well, we can’t do any evaluations because your kid’s not here.”

Jeffrey Metzler, a litigation partner and co-leader of Pillsbury’s education group, praised the Education Department for an agreement that is not only in the “the best interests of the kids, but that’s something that’s actually implementable.”

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect even with training for every school liaison officer to become an expert in all of the potentially complicated issues that could result in school avoidance,” Metzler said. “But they know enough, and they’ll have the resources to escalate to people who do have that expertise.”

The Education Department must report to the legal team by July 31 whether each school in the system has designated a liaison and whether each liaison has completed the training.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Facing state scrutiny, Memphis schools intensify efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism

2026-07-23T21:56:32+00:00

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On an early Thursday morning in July, around 150 Memphis school leaders and attendance staff convened in front of the district administration building, clutching handheld fans and wearing matching visors.

The group, decked out in matching “Recruit, Retain & Reclaim” T-shirts, was heading to northwest Memphis to knock on doors and encourage families to enroll their students in Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

It was the sixth excursion since April for the district’s Greatness At Your Door attendance campaign, this time focused on students displaced by the closure of Lucy Elementary.

MSCS enrollment has suffered in the past decade, declining by over 9%, compared with a 2.5% drop statewide. But the district doesn’t just struggle to get students in the door, it also has trouble keeping them in their seats day after day.

Just over 30% of MSCS students were considered chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, meaning they missed 18 or more days of school. Statewide, 18.3% of students hit that mark.

The district’s history of high chronic absenteeism is one of four criteria that induced the controversial state takeover of MSCS, which a federal court temporarily blocked at the end of June. Members of the new state-appointed oversight board would be tasked with reducing chronic absenteeism as part of their directive to improve overall district performance.

Students who are chronically absent are less likely to read on grade level by third grade and more likely to drop out of high school.

Final state data for last school year won’t be released until December. But Memphis officials believe, based on internal data, that the district improved its chronic absenteeism rate for the first time in nearly a decade. The rate increased from 13% in 2017 to last year’s decade high.

MSCS has seen the most improvement in reducing absenteeism in younger grades, said Stacey Davis, the district’s director of enrollment and attendance. But high school remains a challenge. In February, nearly 40% of Memphis high schoolers were on track to be chronically absent by the end of the year.

“A lot of our high school students are responsible for the younger siblings because their parents work,” Davis said. “A lot of our high school students need mental health breaks. We’re trying to help them to understand that we’re going to support your needs, but we still need you to come to school.”

The door-knocking campaign is one of the strategies MSCS is bringing back this year to boost enrollment and attendance.

“Putting a face to the name matters,” Eboni Williams, an attendance liaison at Raleigh-Bartlett Meadows Elementary, told Chalkbeat Thursday. “It significantly improves the community’s perspective of us.”

Davis said the team typically targets neighborhoods with low registration and high chronic absenteeism, such as Orange Mound and Frayser. Last year, Greatness At Your Door yielded mixed results across neighborhoods.

Over 1,000 previously unregistered students enrolled in MSCS after three rounds of the initiative. Daily attendance rates increased by around 5 percentage points in Frayser and South Memphis. But in Orange Mound, the rate fell from 78% to 63%.

At a board meeting last Tuesday, MSCS leaders said the daily attendance rate for the district increased by half a percentage point this year to 91.9%. That fell short of their 93.4% goal.

But Cathy Mumphrey, an attendance liaison at Cummings Elementary, said going door to door helps ease parents’ anxieties and identify specific barriers.

“We’re trying to make a connection with those parents,” she told Chalkbeat Thursday. “We’re trying to be that person they can rely on.”

Mumphrey said the staff come equipped with extra uniforms and public transportation vouchers to address barriers that keep students from attending school. They also pass out information about food pantries and mental health services.

During the school year, attendance liaisons are responsible for bridging those gaps in resources and access in real time. Last year, the attendance specialists split their time across multiple schools to cover the entire district.

This year, each of the 69 liaisons will work full time at one of MSCS’ lowest-performing schools or schools with the highest chronic absenteeism rates.

“We realized that we needed full time support at those particular schools,” Davis said.

Attendance liaisons make daily phone calls for absent students, track attendance data and trends, and hold family meetings for students on the cusp of missing 10% of the school year. MSCS charter schools that have had the most success in reducing absenteeism use the same strategy, though they often have more than one person dedicated to the job.

Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.

This Memphis charter school cut chronic absenteeism to only 3 students. Here’s how.

2026-07-14T11:00:00+00:00

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The year after COVID-19 hit, Memphis principal Kamie Cowan knew she needed to get students back in their seats.

More than half of the students at Compass Berclair, a local K-8 charter school, were chronically absent in 2022, meaning they missed at least 18 days of school, or more than 10% of the school year.

Last year, only three of the school’s 230 students met that mark. Cowan said that dramatic drop started in the 2022-23 school year, when she put together an attendance team that met every other week to review attendance data and problem solve.

“We just started paying attention, I guess, which sounds simple,” she told Chalkbeat. “But that consistent time of paying attention, that’s where this shift started to happen.”

Cowan said she believes any school can reduce chronic absenteeism with similar strategies. The key, she said, is relying on talented school staff and setting realistic goals.

“It can be very daunting,” she said. “So making that team is really important, and then picking goals that are really clear and bite-sized to start, so you get some quick wins.”

Memphis-Shelby County Schools leaders ramped up chronic absenteeism interventions this past year, aiming to reduce chronic absenteeism rates for the first time since 2017.

High chronic absenteeism is one of six criteria state Republicans included in the law creating an appointed board to seize control of key MSCS decisions, including charter authorizations and contract approvals.

The oversight board, which a federal judge temporarily blocked from operating last month, is meant to address district management and what Republicans say are years of academic underperformance. Students who are chronically absent are less likely to read on grade level by third grade and more likely to drop out of high school.

An MSCS spokesperson told Chalkbeat that official absenteeism numbers for the district are currently under state embargo. In February, district leaders said 27% of MSCS students were at high risk for chronic absenteeism. That’s down from 31.5% in June 2025 and just above the district’s year-end target of 26.5%.

They also said that close to 40% of MSCS high schoolers, or 12,000 total, were at risk of being chronically absent. That represented a 1 percentage point drop for Memphis-Shelby County high schoolers compared to last year. But it’s significantly higher than the state’s average high school chronic absenteeism rate of just over 23%.

This past year, MSCS expanded its spending on efforts to combat chronic absenteeism. The district invested $4.4 million to place 78 attendance liaisons in schools across the region. It also launched a door-knocking initiative that yielded mixed results.

Compass Berclair students monitor their own attendance data

Cowan, the Compass Berclair principal, credits most of her school’s success in reducing chronic absenteeism to the attendance team she formed, which includes herself, the school secretary, counselor, and dean of academics.

“All those roles are super significant,” Cowan said. “But if the principal is not on board and really supporting and navigating it, it can only go so far.”

The secretary makes daily attendance calls to families of any student that’s absent. Each quarter, the team plans a field trip or out-of-uniform days to celebrate students or classes that improved their numbers. The school counselor meets with classes weekly to go through attendance data with the students.

“The students at our school can tell you how many days they’ve been absent and how close they are to being chronic,” Cowan said. “It’s really important for them to be aware of that.”

Cowan and her team sort students into tiers of risk level for chronic absenteeism to better tailor interventions. They host family meetings once a student reaches five absences.

The meetings help school leaders identify specific barriers to attendance, Cowan said, most often including transportation.

“Our demographic does not have a lot of grandparents and aunties and uncles that live in Memphis,” she added. “And it’s really hard to get kids to school, especially when you don’t have many people to lean on.”

One strategy that’s worked well for her school is arranging parent carpools, Cowen said.

Compass leaders also focus on creating a school culture that makes students want to show up and show up on time, she said. Every school day starts with a morning meeting where teachers play games or answer random questions with students.

Cowan also uses free online resources from Attendance Works, a national nonprofit that works with schools and districts to boost attendance, to design the school’s tier system and brainstorm solutions. Compass Berclair also received coaching from Attendance Works through funding from the local nonprofit Hyde Family Foundation, which also is a Chalkbeat funder.

Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.

4 numbers that show how chronic absenteeism is becoming a long-term crisis

2026-06-30T04:01:00+00:00

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Chronic absenteeism rates have barely improved over the past year, signaling that school attendance problems that grew during the pandemic have remained a stubborn challenge, according to a new report.

The analysis released Tuesday by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute shows 22.6% of students in 44 states and the District of Columbia were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year. That’s down from 23.5% in the 2023-24 school year, but it’s still much higher than before the pandemic — a decade ago, the federal government considered a significantly lower rate to constitute an emergency.

Nat Malkus, a senior fellow with AEI and the author of the report, likened persistently high chronic absenteeism to a nationwide tax, in which states are spending the same or more on education than before the pandemic, but kids are getting less from education because they’re showing up less.

“If we accept that, then we’re just going to become comfortable with a school system that functions at lower productivity for the same cost, and what we need here is people to be fully engaged in schools,” he said.

Below are four numbers that show just how common chronic absenteeism has become, the states where it’s highest, and what parents think about it:

0.9

That’s how much chronic absenteeism declined from 2024 to 2025 in terms of percentage points.

After reaching a high of 28.3% in 2022, chronic absenteeism started improving in the 44 states tracked by AEI. But now even that incremental progress is slowing, while the rate remains well above the prepandemic baseline.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education called a chronic absenteeism rate of 15% — based on the Civil Rights Data Collection for 2013-14 — a “hidden educational crisis.”

Malkus said the numbers indicate that both schools and parents need to re-establish a “culture of regular attendance” for all students.

“There’s just some acceptance that this is kind of the way it’s going to be,” he said. “It seems very dangerous.”

AEI, along with the left-leaning Education Trust and absenteeism organization Attendance Works, developed a challenge for districts to cut their 2022 chronic absenteeism rates in half by 2027. The new report estimates that fewer than half of students are in districts on track to meet that goal.

48%

That’s how much higher chronic absenteeism rates were among kindergartners in 2025 compared with 2019.

Even though many kindergartners were not yet born or were newborns in 2020, they are still chronically absent at rates higher than their counterparts were in 2019. Malkus found similar conclusions for first, second and third graders, all of whom did not attend school during the first two school years of the pandemic.

Researchers recently were buoyed by increases in long-term test scores among 9-year-olds, indicating students who were largely not affected by pandemic school closures are showing promising achievement in reading and math. But chronic absenteeism numbers don’t seem to have followed the same pattern, Malkus said.

41%

That’s the chronic absenteeism rate for Alaska, the highest of any state in AEI’s analysis, though it has still declined from from 2022, when it reached 46%. Absenteeism remains stubbornly high in Michigan, Colorado, New York, and Illinois, among other states.

School districts pouring resources into fighting absenteeism have had attendance numbers go up.

Although nearly 61% of the Detroit district’s students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, the district has outpaced the rest of Michigan in reducing absenteeism since the pandemic. Officials believe that health hubs across the district that help families get to the root causes of problems that keep students from showing up to school are crucial. In May, researchers who studied Michigan schools found that strengthening relationships between families and schools through regular home visits or family engagement initiatives were effective.

Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee are among the states with some of the lowest chronic absenteeism rates. All three had rates of 18% or lower. In Memphis, the largest school district in Tennessee, leaders say a door-knocking campaign and more outreach has helped.

28%

That’s the share of parents who think absenteeism is a problem in their own children’s schools. But 60% think it’s a problem in other schools.

Malkus said the nature of absences in recent years point to a cultural shift in how families view attendance, with parents more apt to let kids stay home for a variety of reasons. And it’s easier for parents to view chronic absenteeism in the abstract than for parents to view it as their own responsibility, he said, citing survey data from the University of Southern California.

“Everyone agrees it’s a problem, and they seem to agree that it’s somebody else’s problem,” he said. “That’s oftentimes what cultural shifts look like, where people are like, ‘It’s bad, but it’s somewhere else.’”

Similarly, students said that they were most likely to miss school for illness, but thought other students missed school because it was too stressful or too boring. Even so, 32% of students reported “family vacation or event” as a reason to miss school and 16% reported “just didn’t want to go.”

Separate research this month from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found immigration enforcement activity caused a “substantial and persistent” increase in absences among foreign-born students.

Younger students were potentially less affected than students in higher grades, researchers speculated, because the older students “exercise considerably more individual discretion” in the decision to miss school.

Schools have struggled to put families at ease when it comes to immigration enforcement, particularly in areas where federal agents have detained parents and students around school property, areas that used to be regarded as off-limits by the Department of Homeland Security.

Malkus acknowledged that immigration enforcement actions can drive attendance numbers down, but said the broad decline in attendance over the past decade can’t be explained by immigration enforcement alone.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Housing, groceries, and medical needs: Detroit’s Health Hubs helping to get kids to school

2026-06-29T10:00:00+00:00

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Upbeat on-hold music blared from Jerrica Mickens’ cellphone for nearly 50 minutes as she searched on her laptop for affordable housing for a parent in Detroit.

Mickens was on a three-way call with a mother and a legal aide hotline the morning of April 21 in her Central High School office. As the two waited for a representative to answer questions about the mother’s landlord troubles, Mickens asked what else her family needed. Did they want to pick up a box of groceries for the month? Did the kids need new clothes? Did anyone in the family need mental health services?

Mickens is one of nine “navigators” whose job is getting to know school communities and discerning their needs. They play a critical role in the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s 10 Health Hubs. Since launching in 2023, the hubs have contributed to improved attendance in the district and helped thousands of families, officials say.

DPSCD Health Hub navigator Jerrica Mickens poses for a photo.

Mickens’ time and care is often a lifeline for parents in survival mode. Sometimes, she said, families just need someone to listen.

“My passion is serving people,” said Mickens. “So if that’s what a person needs, then I’m gonna be here for that.”

The navigators lead parents through a complex web of district resources, social services, and nonprofit assistance they may not otherwise know how to access. Their offices serve as a one-stop-shop to triage the root causes that keep students from regularly attending school, such as poor health, unstable housing, and food insecurity.

At the hubs, students are connected with vision and hearing screenings, as well as medical, dental, and mental health care. The centers connect families with housing, utility assistance, and legal services. The school community can stop in for food and hygiene product distribution.

From July 1, 2023, through June 14, the hubs served families 19,200 times and more than 1,100 referrals were made.

“We know that for students to show up ready to learn and focus on their academics, their basic health and well-being needs must be met first,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. “Schools are the natural, trusted, and most convenient hub for families to access these vital resources.”

DPSCD's 10 Health Hubs are distribution centers for hygiene products and food, as well as onsight health centers.

Prolonged absenteeism has long been a problem for Detroit schools due to systemic socioeconomic barriers, which in turn severely hinders students’ learning.

Michigan students are considered chronically absent when they miss 18 days or more in a 180-day school year.

Nearly 61% of the district’s students were chronically absent in 2024-25. Though the rate was considerably higher than the statewide average of 28%, DPSCD has outpaced the rest of Michigan in reducing absenteeism since the COVID-19 pandemic.

District officials attribute the improvement to many long-term efforts – like creating a culture of improving attendance among leaders, hiring more counselors to address mental health needs, and student incentives – but they believe the hubs are a key piece.

Students get lunch inside Osborn High School’s Health Hub.

Overall, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate decreased by 5.2 percentage points last year compared to 2022-23, the last year before the hubs opened. Academic performance has also improved, with third-grade reading proficiency and graduation rates reaching historic highs last year.

“K-12 students who accessed the Health Hubs during the 2024–25 school year had better average daily attendance and lower rates of chronic absenteeism than students who did not access the Hubs,” said Vitti, though he didn’t provide detailed numbers.

Jaiden Mabins' house burned down when he was a 10th grader at Osborn High School. Health Hub navigator Jerrica Mickens helped his mom find new housing close to the school.

Jaiden Mabins, who recently graduated from Osborn High School, said his attendance improved and his postsecondary plans were affected by Mickens’ work as a navigator at his school.

In 10th grade, Mabin’s home burned down, which meant moving in with his sister near 10 Mile – a considerable distance from his school on the east side of Detroit. The limited transportation options forced him to stay home many days, he said.

“Ms. Jerrica, she helped us find a new place, still close in the neighborhood for school,” said Mabins.

The navigator gave him new clothes, school supplies, and a laptop. When it came time to think about his post-high school options, she helped him fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Addressing Detroit families’ needs beyond the school day

At 11:50 a.m. at Central High School, 17-year-old Jeremy McKinney was led by a school employee through Mickens’ office door, held open by two stacked boxes of canned green beans overflowing from the hub’s food distribution pantry.

McKinney squinted when he introduced himself, struggling to see. His glasses had been stolen. The navigator got him on the waiting list to get a new pair from a nonprofit that regularly visits the school.

Around 185 pairs of glasses have been given to kids in the district since the hubs opened, according to DPSCD.

As Mickens got back to packing boxes of groceries for scheduled pick-ups, she paused periodically to answer calls from parents.

Jerrica Mickens updates case files at her desk at Central High School.

“Oh Lord Jesus, I hope I can help her,” she said of a mother whose house flooded. Once a new place was secured, Mickens said she knew an organization that would build new beds for the kids. She could also help them get gas cards to get to school and some clothing.

While DPSCD has always tried to fill gaps for students with attendance agents and wraparound services, district officials say the hubs streamline the process. Navigators have the time for deeper conversations with families and take detailed notes on their case files. They can also better track how the children are served by outside organizations beyond the initial referral.

All of the hubs are strategically placed so every school has a location within 3 miles.

Mickens is currently responsible for 10 feeder schools in addition to Central and Durfee Elementary-Middle School. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she travels to the other schools to get to know parent outreach coordinators, principals, and social workers who relay family needs.

There are currently hubs in 10 DPSCD schools – Central, Denby, Henry Ford, Marygrove, Martin Luther King Jr., Mumford, Osborn, Southeastern, and Western International high schools, as well as East English Village Prep Academy.

There will also be hubs at the new Cody and Pershing high schools when they open for the 2027-28 school year. There are plans for a Detroit Lions Academy location, though an opening date has not been set.

A sign outside of a DPSCD Health Hub provides information for students.

It costs around $500,000 a year to operate each hub, said Vitti. But because most of the expenses are covered by donations from community partners, the actual cost for DPSCD is around $172,000 a year per hub, he added.

Coordinated school health plan models in New York City’s school system and the Oakland Unified School District served as models for the district. Those districts reportedly saw improvements in attendance and academic achievement, as well as lower rates of student discipline.

A third-party evaluator is currently examining how the hubs affect DPSCD student attendance. It is expected to be complete in the fall.

Later that day at Central, Mickens grabbed two tuna snack packs and a chocolate milk for a teen boy in between classes.

The navigator asked if he’d filled out the dental exam permission slip she gave him days before. No, he said, because he wouldn’t be at the school for long.

She consoled the student after learning the reason he had to leave. “No judgment,” she said.

Mickens said she understands some of the challenges the students she serves face. She dropped out when she was a ninth grader at Central years ago.

“A lot of it was because of the disconnect of social services that I needed,” she said. “ I have a heart to not let kids go through what I have.”

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

NYC to overhaul attendance rules, requiring a ‘school avoidance liaison’ at every school

2026-06-16T19:15:16+00:00

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To address New York City’s stubbornly high rates of chronic absenteeism, the Education Department is proposing to overhaul its attendance regulations for the first time in nearly a decade.

One big change: Starting in September, every school must have a “school avoidance liaison.”

The city is requiring schools to designate a staffer — a teacher, administrator, social worker or guidance counselor — who will receive training on school avoidance and join their school’s attendance committee, which meets weekly to tackle student absences.

The Panel for Educational Policy is expected to vote Wednesday on the proposal.

Students who are school avoidant, or who exhibit school “refusal” as it’s sometimes called, might be unable to attend school for large stretches of time due to social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression. As they fall behind academically, it can be even harder to get them back to school.

Researchers estimate between 1% and 15% of children exhibit school refusal. Experts say that it tends to be more difficult for school-avoidant children to return to school after periods of transition or prolonged closures. And parents and educators believe the problem was exacerbated when school buildings opened after the pandemic forced buildings to close for remote learning.

Education Department officials declined to say how many of the city’s roughly 33% chronically absent students are avoiding school because of social or emotional issues.

“By strengthening training and coordination at the school level, we are providing staff with additional tools to work closely with students and families, address concerns early, and connect them with appropriate interventions and resources,” Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said in a statement.

The nation’s largest school system has lacked official guidance on how to respond to students struggling with school refusal, as Chalkbeat previously reported. That has led to an uneven response from the city’s nearly 1,600 schools.

Some schools might follow the gold standard for care, forming deep partnerships with families, customizing programs to slowly get kids back in the doors, and finding accommodations such as lightening the homework load. Other schools have left families to fend for themselves — or even involved child protective services when students fail to attend regularly.

A class action lawsuit filed last year claimed the Education Department was systematically failing to provide equal access to education for students with disabilities who were chronically absent. The city lacked a policy to track, evaluate, and get school-avoidant students back in school, the suit charged.

Education Department officials did not respond to questions about the lawsuit, but attorneys who filed it said they were continuing to hash out a settlement with the city.

“While we are still working to settle the lawsuit, DOE’s new proposal to add a trained liaison at every school is a crucial step toward helping students with school avoidance,” said Susan Horwitz, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s Education Law Project.

Advocates says struggling students need more intensive support

Having a liaison, however, may not be enough to address the needs of some students struggling with school refusal, some experts and advocates say.

Maleeha Chida, an attorney who is an Equal Justice Works Fellow at Advocates for Children, said the city should continue to explore additional avenues to help students, such as creating flexible school schedules, connecting them to mental health providers, and hiring trained behavioral specialists to coordinate plans to gradually re-reintroduce students to the classroom.

“Students who are facing school avoidance require significant supports and interventions to be able to return to school, and much more will be needed to address the needs of this student population,” Chida wrote in an email.

School avoidance often is not something that happens suddenly, said Jenn Choi, a special education consultant. It might start with a student making frequent trips to the nurse’s office because of stomach aches, asking to go home early, or missing one day then going in the next before stopping for longer stretches.

“How much time would this person use for preventing and not just treating the problem?” Choi asked.

Anne Marie Albano, the director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, said confronting school avoidance is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach and echoed the importance of intervening early as well as working with a child’s family.

It’s also critical to do a “school climate” evaluation to understand what staffers can do to make the environment “more welcoming,” Albano said.

“It’s a multi-level intervention that has to take into account the [child’s] development, the environmental issues, and the family issues, as well as, what are the schools’ resources, and what are the limitations,” she said.

A student, for instance, might need resources, such as getting access to transportation for therapy. Or if a relative is ill at home, the child might be worried to leave them, Albano said.

“You’ve got to think about what else we have to do to help the systems the child is involved in, so the child can learn how to thrive,” she said.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Nearly 84% of Detroit district high schoolers were paid for attendance this year

2026-06-03T20:07:48+00:00

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Nearly 84% of Detroit district high schoolers were paid for coming to school this year, with far more students in neighborhood schools receiving the payout.

Roughly 12,800 Detroit Public School Community District students received at least one $100 Visa gift card for showing up to each class every school day in five-day cycles from Jan. 5 through March 20, according to the district. The district has 15,247 students enrolled across 26 high schools in the district. Students could earn up to $1,000 total.

The chronic absenteeism rate for the district’s high schoolers decreased by 10 percentage points this school year compared to 2023-24, before the incentive began. This year’s rate was 54% by the end of April compared to 64% in 2023-24, according to DPSCD.

The program began last year as part of the district’s ongoing campaign to curb chronic absenteeism, which is defined as a student missing 10% or more of days in a school year. That’s 18 days of instruction in a typical 180-day school year.

Schools in Detroit and other communities like it have long struggled with kids missing too much school due to systemic issues, such as poverty. Though DPSCD had a chronic absenteeism rate of 60.9% in 2024-25, the district has outpaced the rest of the state in reducing rates since the COVID pandemic.

More students were eligible for the attendance incentive this year in part because eligibility was calculated in one-week cycles, Superintendent Nikoali Vitti said at an April board committee meeting. Last year, students had to have perfect attendance in two-week cycles to receive the money.

DPSCD data shows the incentive reached far more students attending neighborhood high schools, compared to last year when the majority who received the money went to students at application or exam schools.

“That was something that was a challenge last year that definitely improved this year,” Vitti said.

For example, only 16% of students at Pershing High School got the incentive at least once in 2024-25. More than 62% of the school did in 2025-26.

Data shows the program largely supported students who already had good attendance, however, and those who were at risk of becoming chronically absent.

“It’s still not at scale getting at those students that are dramatically absent,” said Vitti.

DPSCD defines dramatic chronic absence as missing 45 days or more of school.

The district’s data tracks with what studies on attendance incentives suggest: Such programs do not address demotivating factors like unsafe routes to school.

Still, Vitti said the incentive has been a success overall in improving high school attendance.

“I think it’s also creating greater advocacy among their students themselves,” he said, adding that students are making sure their attendance data is correct and following up with their teachers, principals, and the superintendent.

The district recommended the program expand to include middle school students next school year in a budget proposal presented to the board last month. If the board votes to adopt the idea, students in grades 6-8 would get $50 for each week of perfect attendance January through March.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit district: Yellow bus pilot improved attendance for Henry Ford High School students

2026-05-04T21:05:51+00:00

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The Detroit district began the school year with a $600,000 experiment: Would yellow bus service for high schoolers improve attendance?

As the school year wraps up, the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s data suggests it can – with caveats. A pilot program offering yellow bus service at two high schools – Henry Ford High School and East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney – produced different results.

The data indicates the pilot reduced chronic absenteeism for students who live near Henry Ford and frequently rode the bus, administrators said during a board committee meeting last week. The results were inconclusive for East English students, because few students participated, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said at the meeting.

“As we think about the budget process, I’m comfortable in saying that yellow bus services in a neighborhood school where there’s a larger concentration of students who live in the neighborhood can reduce chronic absences,” said Vitti.

The bus rides were only available to students who lived within the feeder pattern of the two high schools.

This likely reduced the number of riders at East English Village, Vitti said, because a smaller percentage of its students live near the school.

Board Chair LaTrice McClendon said during the meeting the district should also continue to search for transportation fixes for students on the east side, where population density is lower.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t still need to provide buses,” she said. “We need to think outside of the box.”

The district spent around $600,000 to run four buses twice a day at each of the schools for the entire school year, according to DPSCD. A total of 102 Henry Ford students rode the buses through April 2. Only 29 did at East English Village.

Ridership increased significantly at Henry Ford in the winter months, as the district expected. In November, an average of 15 students rode the bus every day.

Both schools had higher chronic absenteeism rates in the 2024-25 school year than the DPSCD average – 82% at Henry Ford and 77% at East English Village. The district’s overall rate was 60.9%.

Students are considered to be chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of days in a school year, or roughly 18 days of instruction in a typical 180-day school year.

City buses are the main mode of transportation for most Detroit high schoolers because DPSCD does not provide yellow bus service to most. Though city bus rides are now free for all Detroit students, service remains unreliable. Some students say it takes them hours to travel to school due to inconsistent schedules and inconvenient routes. Others report feeling unsafe while they wait at bus stops.

Yellow bus pilot results varied at the two schools

Most high school principals in the district want yellow buses for their students, Vitti said during last week’s committee meeting.

“I feel that the Henry Ford pilot can tell us that it’s worth exploring,” Vitti said. “I would not scale at every high school, but it is something to explore maybe at certain schools.”

The 59 Henry Ford students who rode buses more than 10 times reduced their chronic absenteeism by 8.5 percentage points so far in 2025-26 compared to the year before, according to DPSCD. The change represented the biggest reduction in chronic absenteeism of all student groups across ten neighborhood high schools, administrators said.

The 43 Henry Ford students who rode between one and nine times reduced chronic absenteeism by 7 percentage points, according to DPSCD.

The remaining 263 Henry Ford students who were in the boundary for bus pickup but did not ride at all increased their chronic absenteeism rates by 3.8 percentage points, the district said.

Another 141 students at Henry Ford were not eligible for rides because they lived too far away, DPSCD data shows. They represented about 27% of students at the school.

More than 300 East English Village students who were eligible for rides at the school never participated. Another 266, or 55% of students at the school, did not qualify for rides.

Only 18 East English students rode buses more than 10 times. Eleven rode between one and 9 times.

Board member Monique Bryant, who rode along on the buses with McClendon a couple of times, said during the meeting many of the East English Village stops were not in areas “conducive for students to walk.”

“We saw an overwhelming number of students being dropped off, or they were in vehicles waiting in those areas that were too dark, where there were abandoned houses,” she said.

Both Bryant and McClendon had concerns about the district’s data collection around bus riders, saying there were likely more students participating than were captured.

In order to continue the pilot or expand it to other schools, a majority of board members must approve the plans. The district has not made any formal proposals to do so.

Budget discussions for the 2026-27 school year will begin at next month’s committee meeting. The board must approve a budget by the end of June.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois education officials vote to overhaul accountability for schools

2026-04-15T17:40:04+00:00

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The Illinois State Board of Education unanimously approved an overhaul to its system for deciding how well schools across the state are performing.

The changes to the federally required school accountability system include some new labels that indicate how well a school is doing. The new system would also calculate the designations differently.

The proposed changes now go to the federal government for final approval; State Superintendent Tony Sanders said he expects a green light. With federal approval, the new accountability system would go into effect by this fall.

Under the current system, schools were labeled as Exemplary, Commendable, Comprehensive, Targeted, and Intensive, with the latter three that deemed a school needed more support.

The new system has the following labels: Exemplary, Approaching Exemplary, Commendable, Developing, and Comprehensive. Using 2025 school data as an example, officials found that this new system would more evenly distribute schools across these designations, with the Commendable label applying to 23% of K-8 schools and 29% of high schools, versus 73% for all schools currently. More schools also would have been considered “exemplary” under the new system — roughly one-fifth of K-8 and high schools, compared with 10% under the current system.

Schools that earn the lowest designations are supposed to get extra state funding to help improve.

Sanders described the changes as one of his biggest goals, and board members described the public feedback process as a thoughtful one that resulted in tweaks to the original proposal.

“Everybody is not going to be happy about it, and that’s OK,” said ISBE board vice chair Donna S. Leak. “What we’re trying to do is find ways to connect to student achievement in a more meaningful way.”

ISBE officials extended the timeline for getting feedback on its proposed changes, which it unveiled last fall. Still, ahead of ISBE’s vote Wednesday, several education advocacy groups remained opposed to some elements of the overhaul, including the removal of a measure for whether ninth graders are on track for graduation and another measure for capturing student attendance that the groups argue isn’t sufficient.

Federal education law has long required states to craft accountability systems for its schools and required them to administer state tests. ISBE created its current system in 2017 after an overhaul of K-12 education law under former President Barack Obama.

The current system, which ranks schools based on a weighted system, was giving many schools “the wrong signal” that they were doing better than they actually are, Sanders said at an ISBE meeting last month.

“I don’t think there’s anybody that I’ve met in public education that would say that our current accountability has worked effectively at moving school improvement for student outcomes over these past few years,” Sanders said.

ISBE spokesperson Lindsay Record said state officials will share resources such as infographics, short videos, and FAQs with the public ahead of this fall to help the families understand the new system.

To earn the new designations, schools will be scored based on what ISBE is calling “core indicators,” or what it considers the most important markers of academic performance; those include student academic growth, proficiency on core subjects, and graduation rates for high schools.

Under the new system, a school’s label is determined by its strongest core indicator. But if any of the indicators score at the lowest “comprehensive” level, then the school’s designation would be knocked down a level. For example, if an elementary school’s student growth ranks at the exemplary — or the highest — level, but its student proficiency is considered comprehensive, or the lowest, then that school would be given the designation of approaching exemplary, or the second highest label.

Schools can earn higher scores if they do well on “elevating indicators,” including how well English learners are growing and if many students are attending school at least 90% of the time — the opposite of the definition for chronic absenteeism.

Some groups have argued that threshold is too low, citing research that has found students do better academically when they’re attending school more often than 90%. In Chicago, the state’s biggest district, the chronic absenteeism rate was around 40% last school year compared with about 25% statewide.

Some education groups have lingering concerns

The department made some changes between the fall and now in response to concerns, such as clarifying the labels for schools and adding an additional indicator for determining whether high schools are successful, according to its amended accountability plan.

But it didn’t reinsert the 9th Grade On-Track measure, arguing that it is important but not “meaningfully” different from a school’s graduation rate. The measure will still be publicly reported on the state report card.

But some education advocacy groups argued that 42 states measure college and career readiness in some way. They said they hope ISBE will explore a process to consider adding these measures back in somehow.

Weighing school performance based on graduation rates without another readiness measure “can obscure whether students are truly prepared for what comes after high school,” said Hal Woods, chief of policy for Kids First Chicago.

In Chicago, a Chalkbeat and WBEZ investigation found that student absenteeism was growing as the graduation rate grew, even as research shows that absenteeism is linked to lower academic performance.

Perla Santoya, senior government relations associate at Advance Illinois, said losing such an indicator sends “an incomplete message about the experiences and skills we want our young people to have.”

Still, some other educator groups said they were pleased by the changes and praised the state for being open to feedback.

“What you have in front of you today, I believe, is fair,” Emily Warnecke, chief of staff at the Illinois Association of School Administrators. “It is reflective of the great work that is happening in our schools across the state, and it still maintains very high expectations for our students.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Gas cards, bikes, and money for parents considered in Detroit district’s chronic absenteeism fight

2026-02-26T00:04:23+00:00

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More financial incentives, gas cards, and stronger early pick-up policies may be in the Detroit school district’s future as part of ongoing efforts to improve attendance.

The potential strategies were mentioned on Tuesday during a Detroit Public Schools Community District board work session on chronic absenteeism. Board members requested the meeting to springboard new strategies and better understand current efforts.

With a new mayor who has promised to focus on city issues that affect youth and education, there could be momentum to address root causes of chronic absenteeism.

Mayor Mary Sheffield, has already begun conversations with the district around improving transportation, district officials said. Those conversations have included the possibility of expanding city bus routes in specific areas where school-age kids have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism and hiring staff to make sure students feel safe riding the bus.

“If we’re going to partner with the city, maybe we should try to galvanize our community,” said Board President LaTrice McClendon during the meeting.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the school year, or about 18 days of instruction in a typical 180-day school year. Even as the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has climbed in the years following the pandemic, DPSCD has made substantial ground reducing its rate.

Last school year, 60.9% of DPSCD students were chronically absent, an improvement of nearly 5 percentage points from the year before. The district also decreased the rate by nearly 16 percentage points from the 2021-22 school year, when quarantine rules caused many students to stay home.

Still, the district’s rate was nearly 30 percentage points higher than the state average last year.

Districts in communities like Detroit, where 84% of students come from low-income homes, have long grappled with kids missing too much school due to systemic issues such as inadequate transportation, poor health, dangerous routes to school, and parents’ inflexible work schedules.

Gift cards, carpooling, bikes, and city partnerships

The district is considering building on existing financial incentives for attendance, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said during the meeting.

Instead of an across-the-board incentive, like its perfect attendance payouts for high schoolers, the district could offer gift cards to families of early-grade students living in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of poverty, Vitti said. The district could even target the incentive to neighborhoods and grade levels with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, he added.

The chronic absenteeism rates in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade were higher than the district average last year, according to the district’s data. The kindergarten rate, for instance, was 68.3%.

The district may also give more gas cards to parents who carpool, bringing students from the same neighborhoods to school together. Attendance agents would organize this strategy at schools, Vitti said.

The district will also recommend updating school policy to curb the frequency of early pick-ups, said Vitti. Caregivers would still be allowed to pick up students early, but the new policy would set a standard about how often is acceptable.

“This has been a big problem for a lot of schools where we have parents consistently removing children from school before the end of the day,” he said. “It disrupts the learning process.”

This spring, the district will give some students at Cody and Osborn high schools bicycles to get to school, Deputy Superintendent Alycia Meriweather said during the meeting.

Students told the district in a recent survey that bikes would help them get to school. They are already being used at Davis Aerospace Technical High School, where the chronic absenteeism rate dropped by more than 14 percentage points last school year compared to the year before.

The bikes will be given to a targeted group of students to create data around whether the move can improve their attendance, she added.

DPSCD will continue to explore the idea of adding more yellow or shuttle bus services. Vitti said specific student data will be needed in order for those efforts to pay off.

“You will hear, ‘Why don’t we do more transportation?’” he said. “We can add a bus, but if we don’t have any assurance that there’s actually kids that are going to go from point A to B, then we’re just going to have an empty bus.”

The district does not currently provide yellow bus service to most high school students. Exceptions are made in some cases, including for those with disabilities or experiencing homelessness.

Although the district’s yellow bus pilot at Henry Ford High School and East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney served few students last year, the district said it may have helped improve attendance at one campus.

Chronic absenteeism declined by 8.5 percentage points last semester at Ford compared to the 2024-25 school year, according to the district. In the same time frame, the district’s nine other neighborhood high schools’ rate decreased by 0.1 percentage point.

Ford went from having the highest chronic absenteeism rate of all 10 neighborhood high schools to the third lowest, according to the district.

The same was not true at East English – the chronic absenteeism rate there went up by roughly 1 percentage point in the fall compared to last year, the district said.

Board members want to see more parent, community investment

At an October board meeting, some members asked what could be done to hold parents more accountable when their kids miss too much school.

This year, the district began more coordination with its police department in issuing “parental responsibility” citations for egregious truancy cases, according to the district. The citations require parents to improve their child’s attendance or enter the court system.

The citations are a “last resort,” said Meriweather, the deputy superintendent.

Board members asked whether the district could expand attendance contracts to students at risk of severe absenteeism in neighborhood schools.

Currently, the contracts are used for students who attend a school outside of their attendance boundary who are at risk of missing 45 days. They are asked to sign contracts, with their parents, agreeing to improve their attendance or risk being transferred to their neighborhood schools.

The policy was adopted for the 2024-25 school year. More than 2,900 students were identified under the policy and 434 were transferred, according to the district. The average chronic absenteeism rate went down by 7 percentage points for the group who signed contracts. Chronic absenteeism reduced even more for the group of students who were forced to transfer back to their neighborhood schools, with the average rate dropping by 10.1 percentage points.

Board members asked if the at-risk threshold could be reduced from 45 days.

“We can definitely look at bringing that number down,” said Vitti.

McClendon suggested the district partner with community organizations, parent-teacher associations, volunteers, and block clubs to help get kids to school. The groups could help walk kids to school, monitor bus stops for safety, make phone calls to parents, drive carpools, and more, she said.

The district spends around $14 million a year on improving attendance, said Vitti, and most of the funding pays for attendance agents.

The district has hired more attendance agents and concentrated them in neighborhood schools with the most absenteeism in recent years. The agents have a number of duties, including home visits, data collection, dropping off resources to families, making connections to wraparound services, and more.

Board members said they would like to discuss whether it would be possible to hire more agents in future budgets.

“We need to talk about capacity to help, whether it’s on an office level, whether it’s on the school level, to ensure that we’re able to touch every student,” said McClendon.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Almost 40% of Memphis high schoolers are on track to be chronically absent this year

2026-02-25T22:01:16+00:00

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Memphis schools are reducing chronic absenteeism rates this year but still lag far behind state averages and in some cases behind the district’s own goals.

In a presentation Tuesday, district leaders shared that close to 40% of high school students are at risk for being chronically absent this year. That means around 12,000 high schoolers would miss more than 10% or 18 school days in a year.

That’s around a one percentage point drop for Memphis-Shelby County high schoolers compared to last year. But it’s significantly higher than the state’s average high school chronic absenteeism rate of just over 23% in the 2024-2025 school year.

“This is where the work comes in,” said Stacey Davis, director of the district’s attendance team. “I’ve always said that if we address our attendance issues on the front end, that will certainly help us with truancy on the back end.”

District leaders said in the fall that they hope to have around a quarter of MSCS students hitting the chronically absent mark at the end of this year. Statewide, just over 18% of students were missing 18 or more school days last year.

By December, 27% of all MSCS students were at high risk for chronic absenteeism. That’s down from last year’s rate of 31.5% in June and just above the district’s target of 26.5% for the end of this year.

Two MSCS regions — the Northeast and Southeast — are hitting that target right now. By contrast, the two western regions also have chronic absenteeism rates higher than the district’s goal of 26.5% for 2025-2026.

And over 40% of students in the district’s CSI schools, the lowest-performing in the state, are on track to be chronically absent this year.

Less than 30% of MSCS students in elementary and middle school are at risk of being chronically absent this year, but no grade levels come close to the state average of 16% for K-8 students.

Board members did not discuss the attendance data during Tuesday’s meeting, and they didn’t define what being at “high risk” of chronic absenteeism means. MSCS leaders said in November that they were on track to reduce chronic absenteeism for the first time since 2017.

Davis said then that the district was expanding the work of attendance liaisons, who are making more daily phone calls for absent students. While some work in multiple MSCS schools, Davis said Tuesday that the district is assigning full-time and more experienced attendance specialists to each CSI school.

The district also launched a door-knocking campaign to increase attendance at the beginning of the year. Davis said Tuesday that she hopes to meet with members of the MSCS student congress to learn more about the factors preventing high school students from showing up to class.

Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago study: High school attendance makes a big difference

2026-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

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Middle and high school attendance still matters enormously post-COVID, and schools can do a lot to improve it, according to a new report from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research.

In Chicago and across the country, student absenteeism surged during the pandemic. In Chicago Public Schools, the increase has been especially significant and unabated in the high school grades, where a 2025 Chalkbeat and WBEZ investigation showed a quarter of students missed 35 or more days the previous year. Nevertheless, the graduation rate has continued to inch up in the district, where leaders say CPS has rightfully moved away from penalizing students for missing school and instead gives them more opportunities to make up work or submit assignments virtually.

But the Consortium on School Research study released Tuesday found absenteeism has a clear impact on learning: The more school days students missed, the lower their test scores and grades. And, even as the authors acknowledge that many factors outside schools’ control affect attendance, they stress that schools can make a big difference. Campuses with similar student demographics and in similar neighborhoods have had markedly different post-pandemic attendance, the report notes.

At schools that maintained strong attendance, students reported feeling safer, more connected to their teachers and peers, and more challenged and engaged in their classes, the study found.

“Post-pandemic, we were hearing all these questions: Does attendance matter as much any more? And can schools really do anything about it?” said Elaine Allensworth, one of the report’s authors. “All the studies we do suggest that attendance is still vitally important at all grade levels.”

Next, Allensworth and her fellow researchers plan to dig deeper into the practices that help schools improve attendance despite serving high-needs student bodies.

The report compared attendance and other metrics during three pre-pandemic and three post-COVID schools years through 2023-24. It found chronic absenteeism rose dramatically across all grades, by 20 percentage points overall. Students are considered chronically absent when they miss 10% or more days in a school year.

Last school year, 40% of the district’s students were chronically absent, CPS data shows.

More widespread absences took a toll. In fact, the study suggests that attendance had an even stronger impact on test scores and grades than it did before the pandemic.

At the same time, the researchers noted that grades post-COVID were higher both for students with high attendance and for those who miss a lot of school — a development they said calls for further study. For instance, sixth graders who were absent 10% of the time had an average GPA of 2.9 before COVID and 3.2 in the more recent years. Possible explanations the study offers are changes in grading practices and standards, or technology use that enables students to complete assignments even when missing class.

These findings echo those of Chalkbeat and WBEZ’s recent series, which found a districtwide push to give students more grace that intensified during the pandemic and more lenient grading scales at some high schools. In response to that reporting, former CEO Pedro Martinez told Chalkbeat that while he was greatly concerned about absenteeism in the early grades, he was less worried about high school absence, where he said students are eager to use technology to give them more flexibility.

But Allensworth said being in school still matters, noting previous research linking high school attendance to college going and performance.

“The more students are in class, the stronger their learning gains and their later outcomes,” she said.

In a statement in response to the study, the district said attendance at all grade levels is a key focus. It pointed to school-level work to closely monitor student data so teachers and staff can intervene promptly if attendance or other metrics start lagging. It also noted stepped-up outreach to families and efforts to increase participation in after-school and other enrichment programs, which has been shown to improve attendance.

The University of Chicago research affirms the district’s “commitment to creating schools where every student feels seen, safe, and connected,” the statement said.

The study notes schools alone are “neither the cause nor the solution to increases in chronic absenteeism rates,” noting that neighborhood safety, transportation options, and economic instability affect attendance. But schools have considerable power to boost attendance, and in fact the study found a school’s neighborhood did not appear to be a major factor in the COVID-era absenteeism increases. As previous research has suggested, school climate was key — even more so post-pandemic.

The researchers looked at the connection between attendance and schools’ scores on 5Essentials, a student and staff survey designed by the University of Chicago. One influential factor that stood out to Allensworth was the strength of the relationships between teachers and parents. Studies have suggested that those relationships are really important for attendance at the elementary level, but Allensworth was surprised to see the key role they appeared to play in high schools as well.

“It’s much harder for some students to get to school every day than for others — we have to acknowledge that,” she said. “But you can’t just say there’s nothing we can do about it. If you don’t do anything, the students who have the most barriers will be the ones who will miss the most school.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

New state task force could help Newark Public Schools curb chronic absenteeism rates

2026-01-08T20:30:14+00:00

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A new state task force will explore what’s driving chronic absenteeism in schools and how districts can improve attendance. New Jersey could find some clues in Newark Public Schools, where chronic absenteeism rates have dropped in recent years.

A new bill, signed into law by Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way on Dec. 30, directs the state Education Department to create a 17-member task force made up of educators, community members, policymakers, and researchers to study the root causes of absenteeism. The task force will also identify the barriers keeping students out of school, research best practices other states have adopted, and develop recommendations for districts.

Chronic absenteeism, defined by New Jersey as missing 10% or more of the school year, has become an ongoing challenge for schools nationwide, especially in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. Research shows that high chronic absenteeism rates can result in poor academic performance, dropout risks, and disengagement from school.

According to the most recent state data, nearly 15% of New Jersey students were chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year, a slight improvement from the previous school year’s rate of 16.6%. That means students are missing more school than before the pandemic, when the absenteeism rate was 10.6%.

In Newark Public Schools, the chronic absenteeism rate has significantly dropped since before the pandemic. During the 2023-24 school year, 11.5% of district students were chronically absent, down from 26.8% in 2018-19 school year, according to state school performance data.

As of November, 8.3% of Newark’s public school students have been marked chronically absent or severely chronically absent, meaning students missed six to 10 days of school or more than 10.5 days so far, according to data shared at December’s school board meeting. New Jersey does not have a severely chronically absent category.

Nelida Valentin, vice president of grants and programs for the Princeton Area Community Foundation, a philanthropic organization helping nonprofits tackle local issues, says students miss school for a number of reasons, such as home life struggles or mental health concerns. A coordinated state approach can be useful to “help strengthen and connect what is happening on the ground” with budget priorities to reduce chronic absenteeism rates, Valentin said.

“If we can identify what a healthy community looks like, what a thriving community, what a thriving state looks like, then we need to get down to the nitty-gritty and understand whether that’s happening or not, and how to provide support,” Valentin told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

In previous years, Newark’s public schools have cited housing instability, student health needs, transportation challenges, and the lingering efforts of remote learning as factors that impacted their student attendance. An unstable home life, violence, or trauma could also impact a student’s likelihood of attending and staying in school.

Attendance issues are also far greater in urban school districts compared to rural and suburban districts.

The district, under Superintendent Roger León, has worked to expand its attendance efforts in recent years by launching attendance campaigns such as “Give Me Five,” where each district employee was required to call the families of five students to urge them to show up to school on the first day and launched incentive programs offering gift cards and hockey tickets to high school students who improved their attendance. Despite the efforts, attendance gaps persist.

Valentin said schools have found success in reducing absenteeism rates when “they started to think about their environment, how they collect data,” the ways that they talked, worked, and approached families. In Trenton, the “Arm in Arm” approach funded by their All the Kids Thrive initiative helped place a bilingual “navigator” who worked closely with an elementary school’s attendance team to conduct home visits and find the root causes of absences.

That often looked like connecting families to food pantries, helping install wifi and computer equipment so students could learn at home, and offering referrals to essential services to meet families’ needs, Valentin said.

“The task force is looking at developing recommendations about effective ways to promote family engagement and combat chronic absenteeism. But the next level of that, what kind of modeling would that look like?” Valentin added.

Under the new state law, the task force will also be charged with looking at the disparities in absenteeism among student groups such as low-income families, students with disabilities, English language learners, and homeless students. In Newark Public Schools, 26.4% of homeless students, 11% of low-income students, 15.4% of students with disabilities, and 9.1% of multilingual learners were chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year.

The task force will also examine the role mental health and school climate play on absenteeism and develop recommendations on the ways school districts can promote family engagement to tackle chronic absenteeism.

The state is expected to appoint members to the task force within the next 30 days and must issue a report to the governor and legislature no later than one year after its formation.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

‘Moving in the wrong direction’: Colorado’s chronic absenteeism rate went up last school year

2025-08-27T23:04:47+00:00

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Colorado education officials relayed some bad news Wednesday: The percentage of students who were chronically absent last school year increased, while attendance stayed nearly flat.

A student is chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of their school days. The more school students miss, the more likely they are to fall behind in their academics.

More than 1 in 4 Colorado students, or 28.4%, were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, according to data released Wednesday by the Colorado Department of Education. That’s up from 27.7% in 2023-24. Chronic absenteeism rates had been falling since a pandemic-era high of 34.5%, but last year’s rate reverses that trend.

“While we did see some promising gains at the local level, our overall statewide results for average daily attendance and chronic absenteeism, unfortunately, are moving in the wrong direction of what we had hoped to see,” state Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said.

The statewide attendance rate last school year was 91.4%, a slight dip from 91.5% in 2023-24.

Even though the statewide rates are trending in the wrong direction, most individual school districts saw improvements. The chronic absenteeism rates in 105 of Colorado’s 178 districts went down in 2024-25, meaning fewer students missed a lot of school.

But in the state’s two largest districts, Denver Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools, chronic absenteeism rates went up. Jeffco’s rate increased from 25.3% in 2023-24 to 26.6% in 2024-25. Denver’s rate went from 37.1% to 38.1%.

In a statement, DPS said it was a challenging year for attendance.

“Between the necessary school closing process that we faced last fall and the Presidential Executive Orders and ICE activity in our community in the spring, students and families have understandably felt frustrated and even vulnerable at school,” the statement said.

The Denver school board voted in November to close seven schools with low enrollment and partially close three more, a contentious decision that was unpopular with many families and teachers. Those schools shuttered in June.

In February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided apartment buildings in Denver and Aurora, causing fear among families and prompting protests from students.

DPS pointed out that despite the overall trend, 82 of Denver’s nearly 200 schools reported improvements in attendance and reductions in chronic absenteeism.

Colorado is one of several states that signed on to a nationwide challenge last year to cut chronic absenteeism by half over a five-year period. The Colorado Department of Education’s goals calls for the chronic absenteeism rate to hit a low of 15% by the 2027-28 school year.

Hispanic students had biggest increase in absenteeism

Big gaps remain in which students are chronically absent most often. Colorado’s youngest and oldest students have the highest rates of absenteeism, although the rates among kindergarten, first, and second graders were down, which state officials said was “welcome news.”

Students of color are more likely to be chronically absent than white students. English language learners and students who receive special education also have high rates of absenteeism.

Statewide, Hispanic students had the biggest increase in chronic absenteeism last year, with their rate jumping from 37.1% to 38.4%. Black and white students also had small increases, but their rates remained below those of Hispanic students.

In raw numbers, nearly 121,000 Hispanic students missed 10% or more of their school days last year. Nearly 89,000 white students and about 13,800 Black students also missed that much.

Students learning English as a second language also had an increase in chronic absenteeism rates. This group of students scored lower on state literacy and math test scores last year than in previous years, a trend Córdova said may be due to lagging attendance.

Increased immigration enforcement by the Trump administration in the second semester of last school year may have kept some students out of school, state officials said. Families were fearful after the administration abolished a decades-old federal policy that treated schools as sensitive locations for the purposes of immigration enforcement.

Denver Public Schools sued the Trump administration over its abolishment of the so-called sensitive locations policy, arguing that the move had caused drops in attendance. But a judge sided with the Trump administration, and DPS eventually dropped its lawsuit.

Some schools are bucking the trend

Amid the disappointing news, state officials highlighted some bright spots. York International School in the Mapleton Public Schools district north of Denver cut its chronic absenteeism rate over the past several years to the lowest in the district.

One of the strategies the K-12 school uses is called “attendance refocus,” said Assistant Principal Ben Schneider. High school students who have one unexcused absence or four unexcused tardies in a week are required to attend a lunchtime session where they take a survey about the reasons they missed school or were late to class. The school then groups students based on those reasons and provides them targeted help.

For instance, Schneider said, several students were struggling to wake up early enough to make it to their first class. So Schneider had the students gather together to set wake-up alarms on their phones. He also sent messages home to their parents.

Other barriers, like a lack of transportation, are harder to overcome. For one family with children at three different schools, Schneider said he suggested they enroll all of their children at the same school to ensure a single morning drop-off time.

While effective, attendance refocus is a big lift, Schneieder said. He said he spends about 15 hours per week meeting with students and connecting them with resources to boost their attendance, including mental health counseling and academic tutoring.

“The takeaway I’ve had from tackling attendance for the last couple of years is that it takes an immense amount of time and precious resources on the school level to tackle this,” Schneider said. “And, you know, time is our most precious resource.”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Can bikes help curb chronic absenteeism? Some Detroit students say yes.

2025-07-10T19:45:22+00:00

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As the Detroit school district continues to explore ways to reduce chronic absenteeism, providing bicycles to students could help them travel to and from school, some board members say.

The bike idea was brought up by Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti during a school board meeting on Tuesday. He said district officials recently completed interviews with high school students who were chronically absent this past school year and weren’t eligible for any of the incentives the district provided, such as its gift card program. One of the recommendations the teens made to curb chronic absenteeism was bikes, Vitti said.

“They felt like if they had bikes, that might help get them to and from school,” he said. “It makes sense in the spring and fall, it’s more complicated in the winter. But I thought that was interesting that it came directly from students.”

Board Vice President LaTrice McClendon said the district has a warehouse full of bikes that could be used as part of an attendance incentive. BridgeDetroit reached out to a DPSCD spokesperson to find out where the bikes came from and how many are in the warehouse, but has not gotten a response yet.

“I hope we can take those bikes and immediately fill the needs of the students who have the request,” McClendon said. “When I went in there to tour the warehouse, I was told those bikes have been sitting for two or three years.”

The comments were part of a larger discussion on curbing chronic absenteeism in DPSCD. Board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo asked Vitti if he had a survey highlighting why students are chronically absent from school.

In response, Vitti said he will have a report soon for the board based on the interviews with the absent high school students. During his superintendent’s report, Vitti said the average daily attendance rate for the district slightly increased this past school year. In the 2023-24 school year, daily attendance was at 82%, and for 2024-25, the rate was at 84%. When Vitti first became superintendent in 2017, the average was at 80%.

Chronic absenteeism rates for DPSCD have dropped 10 percentage points since the 2017-18 school year, from 70% to 60% for 2024-25. Meanwhile, Michigan’s chronic absenteeism rate has increased since 2017, going from 20% to 30% in 2023-24.

“There’s still more work to do with student attendance, but we’re certainly making a difference in getting students to come more regularly and declining chronic absenteeism as well,” Vitti said.

Will bikes work as an incentive for better attendance?

Chronic absenteeism continues to be an issue not only in Detroit, but statewide and nationally as schools recover from the pandemic. According to a study released last year by The Associated Press and The Detroit News, roughly 1 in 4 students in the 2022-23 school year remained chronically absent. That represents about 12 million children in the 42 states and Washington, D.C., where the data is available.

During the 2023-2024 school year, 29.5% of Michigan students were chronically absent, down from 30.8% the previous year. Michigan defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10% or more of school days or 18 days or more during a 180-day school year.

Lack of transportation for families plays a significant role in why kids aren’t getting to school every day, especially in Detroit. A third of residents don’t own cars. DPSCD provides only limited school bus service, and none at all to high school students, who instead get passes to ride city buses. In the fall, there will be an exception to that rule, with the district launching a new transportation pilot program that will provide yellow school busing for students attending Henry Ford High School and East English Village @ Finney in an effort to reduce chronic absenteeism.

All Kids Bike, a national program that aims to teach kids to ride bikes by providing schools with a biking curriculum, stated that providing bicycles for students promotes their health and well-being and can boost their self-esteem while serving as a way to address chronic absenteeism.

School districts across the country have used bikes as an incentive to improve attendance.

Earlier this year, about 170 students who regularly miss school in Volusia County Schools in Florida were gifted bikes. A local hospital, AdventHealth Daytona Beach and the East Volusia Market, donated the money the district used to purchase the 168 bikes and helmets. Volusia County serves Daytona Beach and several surrounding cities.

For the Carson City School District in Nevada, Carson City Mayor Lori Bagwell launched a “Mayor’s Attendance Hall of Fame” campaign last year to help reduce chronic absenteeism. In January, the city and community partners awarded the district with six bicycles per elementary school and one bike for each middle school and high school, totaling 40 bikes. Additionally, they have provided gift cards, movie tickets, and other incentives.

During the first semester of the 2024-2025 school year, eight of the nine schools in the district saw a decline in chronic absenteeism, with two schools lowering their chronic absenteeism rate compared to pre-COVID percentages.

And in 2023, students in the Springfield Pubic Schools district in Missouri were gifted bikes through giveaways.

Board Secretary Ida Simmons-Short suggested at the meeting that the district send out a survey to parents to find out the reasons why their children are not going to school. She noted that transportation is a big issue for families.

“Even though we are the Motor City, we have a lot of parents who do not have cars,” Simmons-Short said.

Micah Walker is a reporter for BridgeDetroit. You can reach her at mwalker@bridgedetroit.com.

Some Chicago high schools are rethinking lenient grading amid surging absenteeism

2025-05-22T04:00:22+00:00

Teachers at Richards Career Academy High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side raised a question last spring that took principal Ellen Kennedy aback: Should the school stop giving students so much leeway on grades and go back to stricter standards?

The school — which serves mainly low-income Latino and Black students — had piloted a new grading approach in 2019, then embraced it when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted students’ lives and learning. Students could redo assignments repeatedly and turn in work late. Even if they didn’t complete the assignment, the lowest score they could get was 50 rather than zero — a concept known as no-zero grading.

In Chicago and around the country, no-zero grading started to take hold at least a decade before COVID struck — part of a larger push to give students more chances to show what they learned. Its supporters argue that giving students zeros for missed or badly bungled assignments makes it too hard for them to recover, leading some to stop trying — and to stop showing up to class.

But teachers at Richards and at least one other high school in Chicago are pushing back on the controversial approach to grading. They worry it allows some students to eke out passing grades with little effort and undermines the importance of turning in work on time and coming to school regularly.

Read the full story.

A quarter of Chicago high schoolers missed more than a month of school last year

2025-05-16T14:00:01+00:00

Morning after morning in her junior year, Carmelia McKeehan thought about making the short walk to Farragut High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side, only to retreat to her bedroom, twiddling away hours on YouTube still in her pajamas.

She didn’t realize just how many days she was absent last school year — until a worried school counselor printed out her attendance record to share with her mother.

Carmelia, 18 at the time, recalls staring at the printout and asking the counselor: “I missed this many days of school?”

She had only shown up for about a quarter of the year.

“I was totally shocked,” she says now.

Carmelia’s experience reflects a dramatic rise in absences among high schoolers in the country’s fourth largest district — a spike that comes as schools nationwide grapple with lower attendance after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Across Chicago Public Schools, nearly 25,000 high school students — or a quarter of all high schoolers — missed at least 35 days last year, according to CPS data obtained by WBEZ and Chalkbeat. That’s double the number of students who missed that much school in 2019 — and twice the number of days the state deems troublesome enough to flag a student as chronically absent.

And yet, Chicago Public Schools’ graduation rate has continued to inch up — from 81% in 2019 to 85% in 2024. Part of the reason: School district officials are giving students more chances to make up work and pass their classes even after weeks of absences.

In short, it’s easier now to miss a lot of school and still graduate.

WBEZ and Chalkbeat looked into this trend. Read more here.

This Brooklyn mentor understands why students don’t show up. He was once in their shoes.

2025-05-07T21:49:33+00:00

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As a success mentor at Brooklyn’s A-Tech High School, Keiron Darnley helps students at risk of being chronically absent.

A big reason he clicks so well with them: He was in their shoes less than a decade ago.

Darnley, who graduated from Brooklyn Collegiate in 2018, had a complicated relationship with school. Though he was passing his classes, he didn’t really see the point in showing up, he said. He typically stayed home one or two times a week, watching TV, playing video games, or sleeping. When he did attend, he’d often arrive late.

“The idea of going to school was like a fulfillment to make sure my parents don’t have any issues,” he said, “or that it’s just a placeholder in my day.”

After a school counselor’s check-ins with Darnley fell flat, he connected Darnley with a colleague who changed his trajectory. This staffer, from Counseling in Schools, a nonprofit that provides counselors to dozens of New York City public schools, made Darnley feel that school was “worth it.” She would greet him at the school’s front door. He’d go to her office during lunch to do schoolwork.

Eventually, the counselor got him a high school internship that put him on his current path as a Counseling in Schools success mentor at A-Tech, where he’s worked the past five years.

As the school, formerly known as Automotive, has been transforming in various ways, moving beyond car mechanics into digital design and business, its gender balance is slowly shifting. This year’s freshman class enrolled the most girls it’s ever had, Darnley said. The school was 89% male last year.

That shift is changing the school’s vibe — and possibly helping boost attendance as well, Darnely believes.

At the end of Darnley’s first year at A-Tech, the chronic absenteeism rate was 49%. This school year to date, it’s about 15%, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat. The school has leaned heavily on data to pinpoint whether students are on the cusp of being chronically absent — defined as missing at least 10% of the school year — enabling staffers to target interventions, including credit recovery programs and mentors, like Darnley.

“It takes time, but it’s definitely worth it to build that relationship, because some of them very well need it, and kind of just need to know there’s somebody here who cares,” said Darnely, who is also studying to be a nurse.

Chalkbeat spoke recently with Darnley.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you decide to become a success mentor?

It’s always so funny how life works out. I was never really like a ‘school person.’ I never saw myself working at a school working with kids, but when I was in high school, I interned for my counselor and mentor, and she got me an internship with Counseling in Schools, so I’ve kind of been on and off with them. One day, she reached out to me after I graduated and was like, “Hey, I have a job opportunity.”

Are there any anecdotes you can tell me about a particular student who, like yourself, didn’t want to come to school, and how you got that student to come to school?

I work with the idea of, hey, I’m trying to get them not to be like me.

Last year, when one of my old students graduated, he was telling how much it really meant to him and how much of a difference it really made. All I really did was the same thing somebody did for me. I was there when he was in the building. First thing he saw in the morning was a ”good morning,” a good smile. Like, “Hey, how are you doing?” When he was late, I would text him like, “Hey, what’s up?” or “Where are you at? Are you coming to school today?”

[When he was absent], I would get his work for him. I’d make sure he was staying on top of what he has to do, even though he’s not in the building, because being online now, more than ever, things are a lot more accessible, so they can still do their work.

I even went to the extreme because he loved to tell me that he slept through his alarm. So I used to take his phone, set all his alarms for him, and know when they go off, so I used to call him after his alarm goes off, because I know kids love to hit their snooze button. So their 8 a.m. alarm turns into a 10 a.m. alarm.

For some students, if they’re not going to school, the further behind they fall. That makes them even less likely to want to go to school because there’s the stress of having to catch up. How do you address that?

I’ve had a lot of students who felt like there was no point in even coming anymore, because they’re like, “I’m missing credits, I’m failing the class. I don’t have the motivation to do it. It’s too much work.” And I’m just like, “It’s too much work, but you can have help doing the work.”

What I’ve noticed, specifically in this school, is that they have so many methods to catch up, whether it’s through after-school tutoring, somebody like me, or even just the teachers themselves willing to stay back past their hours. Even over the breaks, they’ll all log in, and they’ll do online work together. The teachers will push back some of the due dates.

It sounds like you’re really able to connect with the students. Can you tell me more about that?

They very well see me as a student myself.

Maybe it’s because of the dialect, or how young they think I look. And the same issues they went through, I went through. So it’s easy to connect to them and understand, “Hey, I’ve been there. I know what’s going on. So let me just help you.” And I think, when they see you from the first minute they walk into the building to their lunch period to the end of the day, they’re like, “Hey, this is somebody I can trust and talk to.”

And we have a wellness room where they come and they do their work at lunch, or if they just want to come and hang out. One of their key moments of the day is their lunch period because this is their decompress period. They get to come here, [and] they don’t have to worry about the pressure of education, or their grades, or their teachers.

And I think just being able to relate to somebody like me who can talk to them outside of their teacher [makes them] feel comfortable opening up about their problems, about their education issues, or just how school in general makes them feel.

I know you’re also working toward a nursing degree. Why nursing?

My goal has kind of always been to help people. I think that’s why I clicked so well with this job — kind of helping people who are like me. At first, I wanted to be a doctor, but being how much I don’t like school, I can’t see myself doing all those years in school, medical and residency, so I’d rather start with nursing and kind of work my way through. As long as I’m in a profession where I’m giving more than I’m getting, I think I’ll be happy,

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

NYC looks to parent volunteers to help tackle chronic absenteeism in Aviles-Ramos’ first initiative

2025-04-03T20:58:42+00:00

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New York City’s Education Department plans to train hundreds of new parent volunteers to help families overcome challenges affecting school attendance, Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said Thursday.

The department will also launch new student-led anti-vaping and anti-bullying campaigns.

These programs are the first steps in a plan called NYCPS Cares, created in response to the problems Aviles-Ramos heard during a five-borough listening tour she held in recent months. Among the issues that came up at these sessions: youth struggles with mental health, students feeling unsafe commuting to school, calls for more support for new immigrants, and the need for expanded access to sports and other extracurriculars.

“We cannot punish parents when kids cannot get to school. We need to ask the question; ‘Parents, what is keeping your children from getting to school and how can we help you?‘” Aviles-Ramos said Thursday in East Harlem kicking off the initiative. “Our parent leaders are our best partners to make sure we give our parents everything they need so our babies can get to school every single day.”

The “family connectors” program will train participants on how to help families in their schools access such city resources as housing support, food benefits, and mental and physical health providers.

Officials will begin rolling the program out in 12 of the city’s 32 community school districts that have higher levels of poverty, chronic absenteeism, and teacher turnover, but said people from other districts can also apply. The city ultimately plans to have a family connector in each of the city’s 1,600 public schools, a spokesperson said.

The program is unpaid for parent volunteers, unlike a previous COVID-era initiative that paid parents $500 stipends to become “wellness ambassadors.”

Brooklyn parent leader NeQuan McLean, who spoke at Thursday’s event, joked that he was looking forward to “another unpaid job.” Many of the primary roles for parent leaders — including serving on Community Education Councils and the Panel for Educational Policy — are uncompensated.

But McLean said the effort could still be a “gamechanger” by “codifying” and offering additional support for the kinds of work that many involved parent leaders already perform.

The advantage of keeping the position unpaid is that parent volunteers may feel less beholden to the Education Department, he added.

“Once they begin to pay you, then you are limited to what you can say or do,” McLean said.

Aviles-Ramos echoed that the initiative is largely about “formalizing the work [parent leaders] are already doing organically.”

The anti-bullying and anti-vaping initiative is expected to tap students to deliver the message to their peers rather than adults, officials said.

Annual student surveys show that bullying, particularly online, is a rising concern for city students. Roughly 43% of students in the most recent survey reported seeing regular bullying and harassment online, up from 35% in 2024.

“These campaigns will tell you more than ‘don’t vape’ and ‘don’t bully’ because we know how effective that is,” Aviles-Ramos said.

Jesus Peguero, a middle school student wearing an “Escape the Vape” shirt at Thursday’s event said he’s been part of a group brainstorming effective messages to steer peers away from vaping. That includes, for example, telling athletes “they won’t be able to continue what they’re doing” if they vape, he saId.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the campaigns would require additional funding. State Attorney General Letitia James announced last year she was sending $27 million to New York City for anti-vaping campaigns. The money came from a settlement in a successful lawsuit against the e-cigarette giant Juul, which was accused of illegally marketing its products to youth.

The chancellor expects to announce other aspects of the NYCPS Cares plan closer to the start of next school year. It’s the first major initiative Aviles-Ramos has announced since taking over in October after her predecessor David Banks unexpectedly retired. She has largely committed to continuing Banks’ major initiatives, including literacy and math curriculum overhauls.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Parents’ inflexible work schedules impact student attendance

2025-03-28T20:42:07+00:00

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Challenges faced by working parents can contribute to chronic absenteeism, according to a new book.

“The shift is like a twelve-hour shift,” said one parent whose experience was recounted in “Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve It Alone,” which was written by two Wayne State University education researchers. “It’s hard to work around that and her going to school.”

The parent ended up quitting that job because of the strain of needing to rely on her mother to ensure her daughter made it to school. It’s a frequent reality for Detroit parents.

Housing instability, transportation inequities, and health challenges are among the most commonly reported causes of chronic absenteeism. Less focus has been paid to the role employers can play in the fight to improve attendance.

“It’s a perfect example of a sector that is likely not thinking at all about student attendance,” Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, one of the authors of the book, told Chalkbeat in an interview. Employers, she said, “could have a major impact on how much kids get to school.”

Frequent absences are a problem across the U.S., but particularly in the Detroit school district, where 66% of students are chronically absent. Students are considered chronically absent when they miss 10% or more of a typical 180-day school year. Citywide, the rate is more than 50% for district and charter schools. The high rates have a huge impact on schools, making it difficult to improve academic achievement and maintain continuity in the classroom.

Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer, who co-authored the book with her, were among a group of researchers that published a paper in October in the journal “The Urban Review” on the relationship between parent work schedules and their children’s school attendance.

“Parents’ work schedules in Detroit did have a strong association with their children’s attendance,” said Lenhoff, the Leonard Kaplan Endowed Professor and an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State. “Essentially, kids who had a parent with a more flexible work schedule were more likely to get their kids to school regularly.”

Like the parent above, they heard from parents who quit their jobs because they couldn’t make their jobs work with their kids’ school schedules.

“Employers might want to know … they’re actually losing employees because of this issue,” Lenhoff said.

They’re now trying to explore the topic further to see for instance, what schools can do to ensure parents are able to communicate with their employers in advance about school schedule changes as well as “what are some things that employers could maybe think about being more flexible about, whether it’s schedule, whether’s it’s time off in the middle of the day to go to events or things like that.”

The book takes a wide-ranging look at chronic absenteeism in Detroit and offers a solution to solving it: getting policymakers as well as community organizations and coalitions involved in improving attendance.

Here’s more of what Lenhoff and Singer said in a Chalkbeat interview:

Charter schools also struggle with chronic absenteeism

More than half the school-age children in Detroit attend charter schools in the city or in the suburbs, or are enrolled in suburban school districts. The book, though, is focused on the district.

“We’ve been fortunate to have a strong research partnership with the district,” said Singer, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State. “It’s obviously easier to study what they’re doing at scale, because it’s one governing entity, whereas, of course, we have a number of charter operators.”

They have done some research on the strategies being used in charter schools and early evidence has shown that the way charter schools are approaching the issue tends to mirror each other and what the district is doing, Singer said.

“There’s, frankly, a pretty limited toolbox that schools are drawing from to figure out how to solve these issues,” Lenhoff said.

Some families struggle because they lack a support system

In interviews with parents, the researchers found that they often rely on a strong network of family, friends, or neighbors to help with getting their children to and from school.

Some lack that network, though.

“In a few cases, parents described being truly socially isolated,” they wrote in the book. Others have a network, but its members are less reliable for various reasons, such as their own inflexible work schedules, lack of transportation, or financial struggles.

“Scientists have been documenting this for 50 years — there’s been this just societal erosion of our social linkages between each other, such that, you know, all of us have fewer people who we can call in a pinch,” Lenhoff said.

Another factor, she said, is the effect school choice policies have had. The city has a number of charter schools, and a large percentage of children in the district attend a school outside their neighborhood.

“if you live in a neighborhood where none of the other children go to your children’s school, then it’s pretty hard to call on a neighbor or friend to, you know, give your kid a ride or pick your kid up at the end of the day,” Lenhoff said.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit and writes about Detroit school issues. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

‘Why schools can’t solve it alone’: New book tackles chronic absenteeism

2025-03-26T19:51:45+00:00

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Researchers Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer have been studying chronic absenteeism in Detroit for years, talking to scores of parents, students, educators, and school administrators along the way, and keeping track of many school efforts to reduce absenteeism.

One thing they’ve learned during that time is that no matter how much passion schools put into solving the chronic absenteeism problem, they may be fighting a losing battle. That’s because while chronic absenteeism “is a problem for schools,” it’s not a problem that can be solved by schools.

Their new book, “Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism: Why Schools Can’t Solve it Alone,” which was released Tuesday by Harvard Education Press, explains why and provides a road map for what they describe as an “ecological” instead of an “educational” approach to addressing chronic absenteeism.

Why? Because poverty weighs heavily into the reasons students miss school, particularly in communities like Detroit where the overwhelming majority of students come from low-income homes.

Chronic absenteeism has been a problem in Detroit for years and is also affecting school districts across Michigan. Statewide, nearly 30% of students were considered chronically absent, meaning they missed 10 or more days of school, during the 2023-24 school year, according to state data. In the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the rate was nearly 66%. Many charter schools in the city also have high rates of chronic absenteeism.

Sarah Winchell Lenhoff is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University.

The pandemic fueled a surge in chronic absenteeism, though rates have since decreased.

The book has a number of recommendations for policymakers, school and district leaders, and community-based organizations and coalitions.

“I hope that folks outside of education pick up the book and think yes, there’s a role for me in health, or for me in housing, for me in transportation, or for me as a lawmaker,” said Singer, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University.

For policymakers, who have the power to legislate change, the authors recommend they substantially increasing efforts to reduce poverty, eliminate punishments for schools and students for chronic absenteeism, invest in systems to ensure students have the resources they need, and reduce the emphasis on chronic absenteeism within school accountability systems.

Jeremy Singer is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University.

Lenhoff said she hopes the book will shatter stereotypes people may have that children who are chronically absent aren’t motivated to attend school and that their parents don’t care.

“Detroit parents want their kids in school,” said Lenhoff, the Leonard Kaplan Endowed Professor and an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State. “Many parents, even parents who have kids with really good attendance, are going to extremely great lengths to get their children to school, coordinating all kinds of different resources and backup transportation.”

Lenhoff and Singer lead the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research, or Detroit PEER, with Lenhoff as its director and Singer as its associate director.

Chalkbeat talked with Lenhoff and Singer in a wide-ranging interview about chronic absenteeism.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Stay tuned for more later this week.

Your book makes the argument that an ecological approach to chronic absenteeism is needed. Why is there such a need to rethink the way communities approach this problem?

Lenhoff: That’s a big reason why we wrote this book was feeling a real need to have an intervention on the current discourse around chronic absenteeism and attendance in schools. In Michigan, and the majority of states around the country, chronic absence is counted against schools when they have many students who are missing lots of school. We have observed how that has seeped into the everyday practices of schools, such that lots of people are thinking about chronic absence, lots of people are trying to do something about it. They’re spending a lot of time on things that may not have a lot of benefit for students, may not be able to improve attendance, which means that they’re not spending time on other things that might be more within their scope of influence.

The second big thing is we really wanted to expand the table of people and institutions who are thinking about student attendance as part of their scope of work. Primarily schools are like the only institutions where we look to solve this issue. Lots of other institutions are maybe even in a better position to solve some of the root causes that are keeping kids from school … things like housing instability, things like transportation inequity, health inequity, you know, a lot of these things are really far outside what schools can do, and so looking to other institutions to see what they can do to improve conditions for student attendance seems like a really important move.

What will it take for school districts, Detroit in particular, or communities, to pull off what you’re recommending?

Lenhoff: It’s all the more difficult in the current political climate where schools are likely to have less funding, not more. There’s going to be a deemphasis on things like social welfare programs and affordable housing, and equitable transportation. Things we think can make a difference are in this current federal political climate going to be really challenging to pull off. What I would say now is that working closely with the nonprofit community, with the kind of local government agencies that you already have connections with that are maybe already trying to do things around youth programming or supportive work with families, and just trying to connect the dots with attendance. A lot of groups are already thinking about kids. They’re thinking about families with kids — how to better support them, how to increase employment opportunities, increase extracurricular engagement. All these things, we think could have a positive effect on attendance, and they might require a little bit of coordination on the school side.

Singer: If there are policymakers who are thinking, ‘What could we do now, knowing that we have an important role to play,’ it could make sense to even just try small block grants or pilot programs that can help schools try some creative things in partnership with community organizations or other state agencies. The same goes for philanthropy. Foundations might be able to play a role in just helping to pilot something that might be otherwise unattainable financially, like giving rideshare credits or experimenting with some new form of … transportation, or some kind of new health intervention or providing health services. If there’s a way to try them at a smaller scale and start to identify promising models that we could then expand to other places that would be a great opportunity.

There’s no lack of advocacy around tackling these issues in Detroit. But what role should or can the City of Detroit mayor’s office play, and how pivotal that involvement would be?

Singer: We have a mayoral race coming up, and I’d love to see the next mayor of Detroit both acknowledge this as an issue but acknowledge the roots of this issue in the right way. We’ve heard Detroit Superintendent [Nikolai] Vitti speak to this issue in terms of identifying the root causes of poverty and inequality and the long history of that. Public figures can play a really great role in helping to set the tone for how we think about these problems. And so hearing the mayor speak to the fact that the city and departments within the city need to play a role in the solution — because the problem lies in things like transportation challenges, health problems, financial strain on families, housing issues —would be a really great place to start.

Lenhoff: it’s likely to be a priority for any new administration focused on economic and neighborhood development, right, and trying to increase the population of Detroit, or at least stabilize it, those conversations by and large, you know, to the extent that I’m aware of them, largely don’t have have much to do about schools. Schools are not often at the table in those conversations about which neighborhoods we’re going to invest in, where we’re going to cite affordable housing, where we’re going to invest in new commercial activity. if you’re trying to make a walkable neighborhood, a school should be part of that calculus, that you should be able to walk to a local public school, and because it’s an important resource. The affordable housing piece is essential. You know, investing in affordable housing that is big enough for families and that’s near schools, right? I’ve heard folks talk about building affordable housing for families, and they’re like, one-bedroom units. What does a family actually need to live in a home over the long term and stay there?

Sarah, you mentioned that you know that there are some things that that schools have done that aren’t necessarily beneficial? What are some of those methods?

Lenhoff: Some of the big ones have to do with the punitive approaches to student attendance. We’ve seen some move to deficit thinking about family … leads to this dynamic where the school is maybe not trying to build a trusting relationship with a family so that they can (learn) what barriers they face. The book shows that it’s really time consuming to build strong relationships with families. But that can be the root of figuring out what’s going on and solving those issues. Instead, schools are spending a lot of time on things that maybe take less time, and maybe are less costly, but maybe don’t have the weight of building those strong relationships. One example is we see a lot of short-term, incentive-based approaches. Schools love incentives. They love, you know, they love to celebrate the kids, and they should. But there’s very little evidence that those sorts of things actually improve attendance.

What do you say to those who feel very strongly that there needs to be some kind of punitive consequence for chronic absenteeism?

Lenhoff: It’s ultimately a reflection of schools and districts getting to the end of their rope and feeling like they’re not able to fully solve this issue alone. But these are counterintuitive ways of solving the problem, because they erode the very things that are at the core of good attendance. So punitive approaches like court prosecution can erode school family relationships and weaken families, parents and students, ties to the district, that sense of belonging or engagement. You know, taking away social services is getting rid of resources that are crucial to actually enabling regular participation in school if a family has financial issues or some, some host of problems relating to those that cause them to miss school.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit and covers Detroit school issues. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

The Detroit district offered gift cards for perfect attendance. 4,936 students have earned it.

2025-02-18T19:11:39+00:00

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Nearly 5,000 Detroit high school students have earned at least one $200 incentive for perfect attendance since early January.

High school students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District can earn $200 gift cards for each two-week period in which they have perfect attendance, from Jan. 6 through March 21.

There have been two cycles so far for which students have received the gift cards and, in addition to the 4,936 students who had perfect attendance in at least one of two-week periods, 2,028 have had perfect attendance in both cycles, according to data Superintendent Nikolai Vitti shared with Chalkbeat this week.

The attendance incentive is aimed at improving attendance in the district, where two-thirds of nearly 49,999 students were considered chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year. The incentive is among a number of efforts the district has employed over the years to create an attendance-going culture among students. The district has invested heavily into attendance agents to improve attendance and this school year announced that students with extremely high rates of chronic absenteeism will be held back a grade at the K-8 level and required to repeat classes at the high school level.

The number of students earning the perfect attendance incentive is a fraction of the nearly 15,000 high school students in the district, leading one school board member to question last week whether the incentive is working. But Vitti said he is encouraged that the program is getting more high school students to class and resulting in a small decrease in the chronic absenteeism rate for high school students. He said the district and board will have to evaluate the program’s success at the end of the school year.

Chronic absenteeism has been one of the district’s biggest challenges for years. The chronic absenteeism rate has declined, from a high of nearly 80% at the height of the pandemic, when quarantining rules meant many students missed school because of COVID exposure. But last school year’s much lower chronic absenteeism rate of 66% still means it is difficult to have consistency in the classroom and improve academic achievement.

Students in Michigan are chronically absent when they miss 10%, or 18 days in a 180-day school year. Statewide, 30% of students are considered chronically absent, compared to 23% nationally. A recent education scorecard cited the state’s rate as being a factor in students’ slow academic recovery from the pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights of the students who’ve received the incentive so far::

3,473 students had perfect attendance during the first cycle.
3,492 students had perfect attendance during the second cycle.
About 10% already had perfect attendance.
About 4% were considered chronically absent at the time the incentive began.
About 16% had missed 10% of the school year at the time the incentive began.
About 25% had missed 5-10% of the school year.
About 44% had missed 5% or fewer days in the school year.

At a Detroit school board meeting last week, Vitti said the statistic showing that just 10% of the students who earned the incentive already had perfect attendance is an indication that “this is not just rewarding those that have already been going to school.”

Board member Monique Bryant questioned what school leaders are doing to promote the incentive to students who haven’t earned it.

Bryant suggested that data Vitti shared at the meeting showing that chronic absenteeism is down by 5 percentage points for high school students since the incentive began is an illustration that most students aren’t rising to the goal of the incentive.

Vitti responded that it depends on how you look at the data.

“Right now, chronic absenteeism at the high school levels improved by five percentage points,” Vitti said. “That means that 700 high school students are not chronically absent where they were last year. I’d also say that at least on the 97th day, our chronic absenteeism at the high school levels is the lowest it’s been since the pandemic.”

The question for board members to decide at the end of the school year is whether the incentive “is the right investment with other challenges that we have districtwide,” Vitti said. “But I think the data is suggesting it’s working for many students … but not all.”

Board member Ida Simmons Short urged the district to survey students to learn more about what is preventing them from coming to school.

The causes of chronic absenteeism are numerous and include physical and mental health reasons, lack of transportation,and lack of affordable housing. Most of them tie back to poverty. Vitti specifically cited transportation, because half of the students in the district don’t attend their neighborhood school and the district doesn’t provide school bus transportation for high school students, who must take city buses to get to school.

“Sometimes they’re unreliable, they’re late, they’re too far away from where the child lives,” Vitti said.

Vitti said traditional school bus transportation for high school students “was decimated” under emergency management and it could cost between $50 million and $100 million to bring that level of transportation back.

Another factor, Vitti said, is that for some students, school isn’t relevant. Middle and high school students, in particular, “struggle to understand, ‘why am I going to school every day? How is this connected to what I’m going to I need to know for life.’”

Mi’Kah West, a Cass Technical High School student who serves as a student representative on the board, said that when talking to other members of the District Executive Youth Council last week, many said students overall are excited about the incentive.

One thing that stuck out, she said, was council members saying they heard students in the hallways or on social media saying they were coming to school because they want the money.

“And, while we don’t want to just say we want to come to school for the money,” West said, “I think it’s important to see that students … may have stayed home because they don’t want to come to school, but they’re willing to come to school now.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Cutting absenteeism, boosting 3rd grade reading among Colorado education department’s goals

2024-12-14T00:21:13+00:00

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Slashing chronic absenteeism rates, boosting third grade reading scores, and ensuring high school graduates earn college credit or work experience alongside their diplomas are among the Colorado Department of Education’s new strategic goals.

The department has set five “wildly important goals” it aims to achieve over the next several years. Other state agencies, including the Colorado Department of Early Childhood Education, are setting similar goals. Together, they represent some of the state’s biggest public policy priorities.

Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said her department’s goals are meant to address some of the 880,000-student system’s thorniest challenges.

“Schools continue to face pandemic-related challenges including poor attendance, teacher shortages, and learning loss,” she told the Colorado State Board of Education last month.

Here’s a look at three of the department’s goals and the state’s progress toward meeting them.

Reduce chronic absenteeism

Goal: Cut chronic absenteeism to 15% of K-12 students by the 2027-28 school year.

Progress: In the 2023-24 school year, 27.7% of students were chronically absent.

A student is considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the school days in a school year, or approximately 18 days. Chronic absenteeism is a problem because students who miss a lot of school can fall behind academically and find it hard to catch up.

“If they’re not there, I don’t care how great your instruction is, how great your building is, how many programs you have,” State Board of Education member Lisa Escárcega said at a meeting this week while discussing the goals. “If they’re not there, they can’t learn.”

Chronic absenteeism has always been an issue, but it was made worse by the pandemic. Schools across the country have struggled to improve student attendance in the years since. While some are seeing success, absenteeism rates largely remain higher than they were before COVID.

Here’s how Colorado’s doing in bid to meet key early childhood goals

That’s true in Colorado. The state’s chronic absenteeism rate hit a high of 35.5% in the 2021-22 school year. It was a huge jump from before the pandemic, when the rate ranged from 18% to 24%.

Colorado is one of several states that have signed on to an ambitious pledge to cut chronic absenteeism by half over a five-year period. The department’s goal of a 15% chronic absenteeism rate would be a big improvement on the pre-pandemic rate.

The department has already launched a statewide campaign called “Every School Day Matters!” According to the website, more than 30 districts and schools have signed on. The department hopes 80% of Colorado’s 178 districts will agree to participate by next October.

The department also aims to increase training for educators and grow the number of visitors to a website with guidance and resources for school staff on how to foster a sense of student well-being and belonging in their schools — an element that students say is important.

Increase third grade reading scores

Goal: 60% of third graders will meet or exceed state expectations in literacy by 2028.

Progress: In 2024, 42% of third graders met that bar on the state literacy test.

Third grade is considered a key year for reading. Some studies have shown that students who can’t read proficiently by third grade are less likely to graduate from high school.

Colorado tests students in grades 3-11 in reading, writing, and math each spring. The tests for third graders are called Colorado Measures of Academic Success, or CMAS.

Student test scores plummeted during the pandemic and are now climbing back up. Colorado’s third grade reading scores were actually slightly higher in 2024 than they were in 2019 before the pandemic. But state officials say the state still has work to do.

State Board of Education members emphasized the importance of helping students early.

“I’ve heard teachers say, ‘Don’t worry about your kid. They’ll get it later on. It’ll come to them,’” said board member Angelika Schroeder. “Folks, it doesn’t come to a lot of kids.”

Colorado has never come close to 60% of third graders meeting or exceeding expectations in literacy since it rolled out the CMAS tests in 2015. Córdova called this goal “very ambitious.”

To get there, the department plans to offer more training to educators and ensure more school districts are using what it calls “high quality instructional materials.”

The department also plans to redesign its awards to “celebrate schools with strong results.”

Boost postsecondary readiness

Goal: 100% of the Class of 2029 will have earned 12 college credits, a non-degree credential, or participated in a work-based learning opportunity.

Progress: The state doesn’t currently track this metric in this way.

Colorado has for several years been focused on a concept called the “big blur,” which refers to blurring the line between high school and students’ next steps. At its simplest, it’s an attempt to better prepare high school graduates for college or the workforce.

Dual enrollment programs, which allow students to take college-level classes in high school, have become wildly popular. Dual-enrolled high school students now account for nearly half of the students at Colorado’s community colleges.

But most dual-enrolled students leave high school with only a few college credits. The department wants to drastically increase that number.

Officials also want to increase the number of students earning non-degree credentials that would allow them to work in high-demand fields, such as health care or early childhood education.

And they want to boost the number of students participating in apprenticeships, on-the-job training, internships, and other work-based learning experiences.

Colorado has a host of programs meant to accomplish these goals. But the system is fragmented and confusing, with different programs overseen by different departments. The programs also have differing amounts of funding from the state and buy-in from school districts.

A new report commissioned by state lawmakers includes recommendations for improvements, some of which may be taken up by policymakers in the upcoming legislative session.

The department also wants to increase the number of school districts participating in training sessions about postsecondary workforce readiness and the number that are including postsecondary workforce readiness strategies in their required improvement plans.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

These Native tribes are working with schools to boost attendance

2024-12-03T05:02:00+00:00

WATONGA, Okla. — As the Watonga school system’s Indian education director, Hollie Youngbear works to help Native American students succeed — a job that begins with getting them to school.

She makes sure students have clothes and school supplies. She connects them with federal and tribal resources. And when students don’t show up to school, she and a colleague drive out and pick them up.

Nationwide, Native students miss school far more frequently than their peers, but not at Watonga High School. Youngbear and her colleagues work to connect with families in a way that acknowledges the history and needs of Native communities.

Hollie Youngbear serves as the Indian Education director for the Watonga school system. Youngbear and her colleagues work to connect with families in a way that acknowledges the history and needs of Native communities.

As she thumbed through binders in her office with records of every Native student in the school, Youngbear said a cycle of skipping school goes back to the abuse generations of Native students suffered at U.S. government boarding schools.

“If grandma didn’t go to school, and her grandma didn’t, and her mother didn’t, it can create a generational cycle,” said Youngbear, a member of the Arapaho tribe who taught the Cheyenne and Arapaho languages at the school for 25 years.

Watonga schools collaborate with several Cheyenne and Arapaho programs that aim to lower Native student absenteeism. One helps students with school expenses and promotes conferences for tribal youth. Another holds monthly meetings with Watonga’s Native high school students during lunch hours to discourage underage drinking and drug use.

Oklahoma is home to 38 federally recognized tribes, many with their own education departments — and support from those tribes contributes to students’ success. Of 34 states with data available for the 2022-2023 school year, Oklahoma was the only one where Native students missed school at lower rates than the state average, according to data collected by The Associated Press.

Trophies are displayed in a case at Watonga High School.

At Watonga High, fewer than 4% of Native students were chronically absent in 2022-23, in line with the school average, according to state data. Chronically absent students miss 10% or more of the school year, for both excused and unexcused reasons, which sets them behind in learning and heightens their chances of dropping out.

Native American students miss school at higher rates than other kids. The pandemic made it worse.

About 14% of students at the Watonga school on the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation are Native American. With black-lettered Bible verses on the walls of its hallways, the high school resembles many others in rural Oklahoma. But student-made Native art decorates the classroom reserved for Eagle Academy, the school’s alternative education program.

Students are assigned to the program when they struggle to keep up their grades or attendance, and most are Native American, classroom teacher Carrie Compton said. Students are rewarded for attendance with incentives like field trips.

Alternative Education Director Carrie Compton takes turns with Indian Education Director Hollie Youngbear visiting students at their homes when they don't show up to class.

Compton said she gets results. A Native boy who was absent 38 days one semester spent a short time in Eagle Academy during his second year of high school and went on to graduate last year, she said.

“He had perfect attendance for the first time ever, and it’s because he felt like he was getting something from school,” Compton said.

When students do not show up for school, Compton and Youngbear take turns visiting their homes.

“I can remember one year, I probably picked five kids up every morning because they didn’t have rides,” Compton said. “So at 7 o’clock in the morning, I just start my little route, and make my circle, and once they get into the habit of it, they would come to school.”

Empty storefronts line the Main Street of Watonga, Oklahoma.

Around the country, Native students often have been enrolled in disproportionately large numbers in alternative education programs, which can worsen segregation. But the embrace of Native students by their Eagle Academy teacher sets a different tone from what some students experience elsewhere in the school.

Compton said a complaint she hears frequently from Native students in her room is, “The teachers just don’t like me.”

Bullying of Native students by non-Native students is also a problem, said Watonga senior Happy Belle Shortman, who is Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. She said Cheyenne students have been teased over aspects of their traditional ceremonies and powwow music.

Senior Happy Belle Shortman, who is Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, says that bullying of Native students can be a problem in Watonga schools.

“People here, they’re not very open, and they do have their opinions,” Shortman said. “People who are from a different culture, they don’t understand our culture and everything that we have to do, or that we have a different living than they do.”

Poverty might play a role in bullying as well, she said. “If you’re not in the latest trends, then you’re kind of just outcasted,” she said.

Watonga staff credit the work building relationships with students for the low absenteeism rates, despite the challenges.

“Native students are never going to feel really welcomed unless the non-Native faculty go out of their way to make sure that those Native students feel welcomed,” said Dallas Pettigrew, director of Oklahoma University’s Center for Tribal Social Work and a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Associated Press writer Sharon Lurye in New Orleans contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Native American students missed more school during the pandemic. Here’s how schools responded.

2024-12-03T05:01:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press.

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Bernalillo Public Schools had attendance struggles before. But not like this.

Prior to the pandemic, a third of students in the New Mexico district missed 18 days of school or more in a year, marking them chronically absent. By the 2022-23 school year, that had spiked to over three-quarters. For Native American students, the problem was especially acute: One in 3 missed nearly two full months of class that year.

Bernalillo’s schools serve seven Pueblo communities north of Albuquerque, and just over half of the district’s 2,900 students are Native American. Leaders knew they had to do something, but the response took teamwork.

Schools added events that made campuses feel more welcoming and brought families in the door. Several Pueblo leaders pledged to bring kids to school if they missed their morning bus. Truancy officers, who are from the communities they serve, made sure kids had clean clothes and access to laundry facilities.

And when school staffers called home to inquire about an absent child, they emphasized that they were not calling to get the family in trouble.

Attendance Clerk Katrice Grant speaks to siblings Melanie Pacheco, 8, left, and Marilynn Pacheco, 5, in the hallway before they head to their classrooms at Algodones Elementary School.

“It’s about: We’re here to help, we care about you, we care about your families,” said Lynette Deuel, the district manager who oversees attendance. “It’s also your tone when you’re talking with families. Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it.”

Years after COVID-19 disrupted American schools, nearly every state is still struggling with attendance. But attendance has been worse for Native American and Alaska Native students — a disparity that existed before the pandemic and has since grown, according to data collected by The Associated Press.

These Native tribes are working with schools to boost attendance

Out of 34 states with data available for the 2022-2023 school year, half, including Colorado and New York, had absenteeism rates for Native students that were at least 9 percentage points higher than the state average. In two dozen states, including New Mexico, absenteeism rates increased more sharply for Native students following the pandemic than they did for students statewide.

Many schools serving Native American students have been working to strengthen connections with families, many of which struggle with higher rates of illness and poverty. Schools also must navigate distrust dating back to the U.S. government’s campaign to break up Native American culture, language, and identity by forcing children into abusive boarding schools.

Loretta Trujillo, a veteran educator who worked with Native youth in New Mexico during the pandemic, saw how many Native teens took jobs with long hours to help their families stay housed and fed. Often that got misinterpreted to mean “that they didn’t care” about school. That’s still happening now, she said.

“It’s really important to be sensitive to that history of under-serving that has happened and the instability that Native families are often entangled in,” said Trujillo, who now leads Transform Education New Mexico, a coalition working to implement remedies for the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, which led to a court ruling that the state had shortchanged Native students in their education. “Those are reflections of systems that have not served them. It’s not a reflection of apathy or lack of valuing education.”

Algodones Elementary School second grade teacher Lori Spina takes a photo of her class for her newsletter.

Schools invest in family engagement, affirm student identity

New Mexico saw the nation’s biggest jump in chronic absenteeism during the pandemic, as well as the largest increase in absenteeism among Native students in the 34 states with sufficient data.

State education officials say bringing those rates down is a top priority. Over the last two years, state lawmakers set aside $10 million to help 14 school districts with some of the greatest attendance challenges, several of which serve large Native student populations. This year, that includes an extra $50,000 for Bernalillo.

Several districts are using the money to reach out to families more often and hire a staffer who can connect families with resources to address attendance barriers. The state is offering more training on family engagement, too.

Social worker Mary Schmauss, left, and attendance clerk Katrice Grant discuss truancy cases they need to tackle at Algodones Elementary School.

“It’s going back to the basics,” said Candice Castillo, the deputy secretary for New Mexico’s education department who oversees attendance. “What a lot of the districts are realizing is that post-COVID, that engagement of the caring adult in the lives of our students, it’s even more crucial.”

The Pueblo communities around Bernalillo were hit hard by COVID, with devastating impacts on elders. Some children lost more than one family member, Deuel said, and are still grieving.

At Algodones Elementary School, excused absences for sick days are still piling up — in some cases, Principal Rosangela Montoya suspects, students may feel queasy with nerves or anxiety about falling behind academically. Last school year, two-thirds of the school’s students were chronically absent, meaning they’d missed 10% or more of the school year.

Staff and tribal liaisons have been analyzing every absence and emphasizing connections with parents. By 10 a.m., telephone calls go out to the homes of absent students. Next steps include in-person meetings with those students’ parents.

“There’s illness, there’s trauma,” Montoya said. “A lot of our grandparents are the ones raising the children so that the parents can be working.”

About 95% of Algodones’ students are Native American, and the school strives to affirm their identity. It doesn’t open on four days set aside for Native American ceremonial gatherings, and students are excused for absences on other cultural days as designated by the nearby pueblos.

The district sends out a survey so families can offer input on the school calendar — a strategy state education officials say is a model for engaging with Native families.

For Jennifer Tenorio, it makes a difference that the school offers classes in the family’s native language of Keres. Tenorio said her two oldest children, now in their 20s, were discouraged from speaking Keres in Head Start, a federal early education program, and they struggled academically.

“In Algodones, I saw a big difference to where the teachers were really there for the students,” Tenorio said. Her 8-year-old son, Cameron, feels inspired at school and likes math. “He tells me every day what he learns.”

Algodones Elementary School Principal Rosangela Montoya waves goodbye to parents as students arrive at school.

Bernalillo’s attendance has improved. The school district’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped 18 percentage points to 60% last school year. For Native students, the rate fell 16 points to 66%. There’s more work to do, but district leaders are highlighting that progress at school events and thanking families for their hard work.

“Not always focusing on the negative” matters, said Deuel, the district administrator, who saw families cheer their elementary school’s attendance improvements at a recent harvest festival.

On-site health, trauma care helps bring students back

Still, in some states, absenteeism among Native students has continued to worsen, even while improving slightly for other students.

That’s the case in Arizona, where chronic absenteeism for Native students rose from 22% the year before the pandemic began to 45% in 2022-2023.

Nearly all students in the state’s San Carlos Unified School District, where 76% of students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, are Native. And more than half of families have incomes below the federal poverty level. Many students come from homes that deal with alcoholism and drug abuse, Superintendent Deborah Dennison said.

The district recently introduced care centers that partner with hospitals, dentists, and food banks to help students at multiple schools. The work is guided by cultural success coaches — school employees who help families address the kind of challenges that keep students from coming to school.

Last school year, the chronic absenteeism rate in the district fell from 76% to 59% — an improvement Dennison attributes partly to efforts to address their communities’ needs. Changing the perception of school and what it can offer, Dennison said, boosts both attendance and morale, especially for older students.

Velma Kitcheyan, a third grade teacher at Rice Intermediate School in San Carlos, Arizona, instructs her students.

“All these connections with the community and the tribe are what’s making a difference for us and making the school a system that fits them rather than something that has been forced upon them, like it has been for over a century of education in Indian Country,” said Dennison, a member of the Navajo Nation.

That’s been true for 10-year-old Tommy Betom, who missed 40 days of school last year, but is on track for better attendance this year.

A teacher and a truancy officer reached out to Tommy’s family to work on his attendance — he often came home from school saying the teacher was picking on him and other kids were making fun of his clothes — while his grandmother, Ethel Marie Betom, urged him to choose his friends carefully and stressed how important school was to his future.

Betom, an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache tribe who is one of Tommy’s caregivers, also tells him how he has advantages as a child that she lacked: “You have running water in the house, bathrooms, and a running car.”

Meanwhile, Lillian Curtis has been impressed by the student activities on family night at Rice Intermediate School. Her 10-year-old granddaughter, Brylee Lupe, missed 10 days of school by mid-October last year, but had missed just two days by the same time this year. Brylee seems “much more excited” for school, her grandmother noticed.

“The kids always want to go — they are anxious to go to school now,” said Curtis, an enrolled member of the San Carlos tribe who cares for her grandchildren. It also helped to emphasize to Brylee that school is a ticket to self-sufficiency. “You’ve got to do it on your own. You got to make something of yourself.”

In New Mexico, KatieAnn Juanico, the assistant secretary for Indian education, has seen how tribes have stepped in to help with attendance efforts, too. Some have used state grants to take kids on field trips as attendance incentives. Some tribal leaders are making home visits to check on students who miss school.

“We have high respect for our traditional tribal leaders,” said Juanico, who is an enrolled tribal member of the Pueblo of Acoma. So it would be a big motivator “if one showed up at my home wondering where I was, coming from a perspective of: ‘We want to make sure you’re safe and healthy because you’re supposed to be in school.’”

Alia Wong of The Associated Press and Felix Clary of ICT contributed to this report.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

1 in 8 NYC students experienced homelessness last year, a record high

2024-11-18T11:00:00+00:00

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The number of New York City students experiencing homelessness grew to more than 146,000 last school year, an increase of 26,000 students, according to a new analysis.

That meant roughly one in eight students in the nation’s largest public school system were living in temporary housing during the 2023-24 school year, a record high, according to a Monday report by Advocates for Children, which has been tracking the number for more than a decade.

New York City has long struggled to address its housing crisis, with the number of students in shelters, living “doubled up” with friends or relatives, or otherwise without permanent housing eclipsing 100,000 for each of the past nine years. The current high comes in part due to the thousands of asylum-seeking and other migrant families that have come to the city in recent years.

Students experiencing homelessness can face significant challenges at school. Just showing up can be a hurdle: Students in shelters are disproportionately impacted by transportation issues, with 40% of students attending school in a different borough from their shelter placement, according to Jennifer Pringle, director of the Learners in Temporary Housing Project at Advocates for Children.

In the 2022-23 school year, half of all students living in temporary housing — including 67% of students living in shelters — were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 18 days of school, according to the Advocates for Children analysis. For students in permanent housing, just 34% were chronically absent that year.

The share of students in temporary housing scoring proficient on state English and math exams was more than 20 percentage points lower than their peers. Students in temporary housing were also more likely to face suspensions or transfer schools. And students in shelters dropped out of high school at a rate three times higher than those in permanent housing.

The compounding obstacles can place additional strain on students and schools, Pringle said.

“Schools that have a large number of students in temporary housing have a lot of churn within their student population, and that means it takes that much more operational work and personnel to adjust,” she said. “You think about getting to know your students, getting to know what their needs are, and adapting your classroom practice to meet those needs — but what if your classroom composition is constantly changing? It takes time and effort to have a nimble response.”

Schools need additional staff and resources to adequately support students who are experiencing homelessness, from academic intervention and tutoring, to family outreach and engagement, to partnering with community organizations to provide wraparound support at school, Pringle said.

She suggested other ways the city can better support its students in temporary housing, including ending a requirement that families in some shelters exit the system every 60 days and either find alternative housing or re-apply for shelter, as well as hiring more staff to support students in shelters.

The city currently employs 107 school-based community coordinators who work with students in temporary housing, as well as 160 shelter-based community coordinators, according to Education Department officials.

Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said the city remained committed to supporting students in temporary housing through field and enrollment support, transportation services, counseling, immunization assistance, and academic support.

“Our students who are experiencing homelessness are among our most vulnerable,” she said in a statement. “We are also proud to provide attendance supports strategies that allow districts and schools to provide families with access to food, clothing, hygiene supplies, and health services.”

Tull added the city had updated its school funding formula last year to send additional funds to schools serving students in temporary housing.

Advocates call for more support for homeless students

Among the students living in temporary housing, 54% were doubled up, or temporarily sharing the housing of others, while 41% spent time in the city’s shelters. The number of students experiencing homelessness rose in every school district across the five boroughs.

Students experiencing homelessness were especially concentrated in upper Manhattan, southwest Bronx, and parts of northeast and central Brooklyn, a trend in line with prior school years, according to Advocate for Children’s analysis.

In the Bronx and Manhattan, nearly one in six students did not have a permanent home.

Advocates have called for further support for students living in temporary housing, particularly as the state reworks its nearly two-decades-old school funding formula.

That formula, known as Foundation Aid, was implemented in 2007, and sends roughly $24.9 billion to school districts — including more than $9.5 billion to New York City schools. As part of a state budget agreement earlier this year, the Rockefeller Institute is currently conducting a study on how to revise the formula and will issue recommendations by Dec. 1.

Many education experts, politicians, and advocates agree that the formula is no longer a sufficient measure of student need. In September, a coalition of more than 100 New York organizations, including Advocates for Children, urged the state to overhaul Foundation Aid.

“Student homelessness has skyrocketed over the past decade, but right now, districts receive no additional per-pupil funding from the State to help meet the educational needs of students in temporary housing,” said Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children, in a statement.

And as the number of New York City students experiencing homelessness could continue to grow, Pringle said it’s critical that education remains a focus.

“Education needs to be part of the conversation about solving family homelessness,” she said. “Young adults who don’t have a high school diploma are four and a half times more likely to experience homelessness.”

Tackling the education challenges students currently living in shelters face is crucial in breaking the cycle to help prevent them from experiencing homelessness as adults, Pringle said.

“We need to make sure that they are getting educational support and services now,” she said. “So that they can thrive in school, get their high school diploma and more, and be successful, independent adults.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan’s vulnerable students continue to miss school at higher rates than their peers

2024-09-27T17:32:20+00:00

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Michigan students are facing challenges rebounding from the COVID pandemic, and those hurdles are more pronounced among certain groups of vulnerable children who are missing more school than their peers.

Students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students were chronically absent at a rate notably higher than the statewide average.

For the 2023-24 school year, 29.5% of students were chronically absent — meaning they missed at least 10% of school days — according to data from the Michigan Department of Education. In comparison, the rate was 37.6% for students with disabilities, and it was 40.1% for economically disadvantaged students, more than double the rate for students who are not economically disadvantaged.

The release of these numbers comes amid a federal investigation that found during the pandemic, many Michigan students with disabilities did not receive the services and instruction required under federal law. The investigation found that these children still have not received those mandated services or the compensatory measures that their families are entitled to.

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, described the findings from the investigation as “an all too common scenario.”

She noted several lawsuits across the country where parents of disabled students and other groups facing discrimination have sued state governments or school districts alleging that their kids have been neglected or mistreated.

Lake worked on the new annual report “The State of the American Student,” which has been tracking pandemic recovery for the last three years.

“We talked to parents this year, and we’ve talked to experts in special education and multilingual education, and all of them pointed out that things were very bad before the pandemic,” she told Chalkbeat.

“So [test] scores were low already, they couldn’t get too much lower. Mental health needs were higher. All of that has been the case,” Lake said. “While this report really has been focused on pandemic impacts, the theme that we’re seeing coming through when we look at this student population in particular is a system that really wasn’t working before the pandemic.”

Jeremy Singer, assistant research professor at Wayne State University and associate director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research, agreed that the disparities are nothing new.

“We’ve known for a long time that these groups face barriers to attendance that are more significant than their less vulnerable, less disadvantaged peers,” Singer said.

He pointed out that despite some improvement in recent years, the overall chronic absenteeism rate last year ran nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2018-19, the last full school year before the pandemic. The increase from that year was 11.2 points for students who are economically disadvantaged, and 6.7 points higher for students who aren’t.

There are many factors at play that broadly apply to students who are chronically absent. For one, Singer said mental health issues have been exacerbated for young people whose formative years were colored by the pandemic.

“So we know that levels of stress and anxiety are a little higher, and it’s also possible that the way families are treating those issues might be a little bit different,” Singer said.

In other words, some families could be more inclined to keep kids at home when they are feeling unwell, either physically or mentally.

Still, the numbers are a reminder that certain kids continue to have a much tougher time getting to class regularly, Singer added. He said his research has unraveled many of the factors that contribute to chronic absenteeism and how they hit Detroit’s vulnerable and low-income families hardest.

Kids in these households, particularly in Detroit, are up against multiple barriers to attending class regularly, from unreliable transportation and a lack of public transit to the dearth of quality affordable housing options in the city.

Singer said some solutions to chronic absenteeism include strengthening neighborhood schools — so families have an easier time accessing the schools closest to them — and making them places where people want to spend time. That means nurturing “the quality of the school and the school’s capacity to maintain strong relationships, to maintain a strong, inviting culture.”

State policy appears to be supporting some of these efforts with lawmakers approving more investments to help schools and educators.

But looking at just education funding or what schools can do to reduce chronic absenteeism misses the bigger picture, Singer said.

Local leaders must acknowledge the many systemic factors contributing to chronic absenteeism: “transportation, housing, health, employment — these things play a really big role in students’ attendance,” Singer said.

Researchers have enough information on why students are chronically absent and now it is time to shift the focus to what schools and communities are doing about it — and whether those strategies are working, he said.

Robyn Vincent is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit, covering Detroit schools and Michigan education policy. You can reach her at rvincent@chalkbeat.org

Chronic absenteeism: With student absences still high, Indiana lawmakers seek new solutions

2024-09-26T20:08:12+00:00

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More counselors, attendance liaisons, and resources for schools.

More positive engagement for students, and greater accountability for parents.

Those are some of the suggestions to get more Indiana students to come to school every day heard by the Interim Study Committee on Education at its meeting Thursday. The panel is considering recommendations on chronic absenteeism and student discipline before the legislature reconvenes in January.

Though chronic absenteeism rates have declined since hitting a high in 2022, the rate of Indiana students who miss 18 days or more in a school year remains much higher than before the pandemic. And Indiana Department of Education data has linked chronic absenteeism to more suspensions and expulsions and worse academic performance.

Earlier this year, lawmakers passed a bill requiring schools to hold attendance conferences with the parents of truant elementary students, and refer those whose children’s attendance does not improve to local prosecutors. But the authors of the bill conceded that more work must be done to address absenteeism among older students. That led to legislative leaders assigning the topic to an interim study committee.

Recommendations made by interim committees often signal what kind of legislation lawmakers will bring forward at the next legislative session. The next meeting of the committee is not yet scheduled.

Leaders highlight counselors’ role in cutting chronic absenteeism

At the committee’s inaugural meeting, lawmakers heard testimony from advocates and school districts about the need for more school counselors and attendance liaisons — and funding for both types of positions — to help address the reasons that individual students are missing school.

Officials with New Castle schools, a district of around 2,900 students east of Indianapolis, said the district leveraged a $4.3 million Next Generation School Improvement Grant to add a secondary school attendance liaison to help improve absenteeism.

Indiana’s statewide counselor ratio is one for every 694 students. But New Castle maintains a 255:1 student-to-counselor ratio, according to Superintendent Matthew Shoemaker, who said the positions are critical to identifying the challenges students are facing and connecting them to resources.

The district’s attendance liaison Katie Smith told lawmakers that she makes between 30 to 40 phone calls per day to the families of absent students to find out why they’re not at school.

The reasons range from simple — like missing the bus — to complex socioeconomic issues, like a student’s need to work or watch younger siblings, Smith said. Meanwhile, positive engagement at school, like a connection to a teacher or a counselor, motivates students to attend.

Smith said the district has both reduced absenteeism and improved the share of students who have more than a 94% attendance rate. The district’s chronic absenteeism rate fell from around 25% in 2023 to 19.5% in 2024.

The district would not have been able to add the attendance liaison position without the Next Generation grant awarded in 2022, officials said in response to questions from lawmakers.

Funding could also support technological improvements, like for a platform that automatically highlights which students need a call or letter home about their attendance, said James Taylor, director of student and social services at Warren Township schools.

Some schools have contracted with outside organizations to provide similar support services. For example, representatives of City Connects said their program has placed coordinators at around 60 schools in Indiana who identify external factors that may help explain why students are missing school.

The program, which works with Marian University’s Center for Vibrant Schools, is funded through a combination of $20 million in federal funding, $3 million in state funding, and philanthropy.

Panel discusses parent, student roles in missing school

Lawmakers and public speakers also discussed whether COVID has led to a cultural shift in how families view school attendance, with more families taking vacation during school time.

Democratic Rep. Ed Delaney suggested that chronically absent students and their parents could be restricted from extracurricular activities like sports and performing arts. But GOP committee chair Rep. Bob Behning noted that such activities often help motivate students to attend school in the first place.

Some speakers told lawmakers that their first attempt to address absenteeism through the new law enacted through SEA 282 has had unintended consequences. In some school districts, students with disabilities who miss school for doctors’ appointments have been told they must provide documentation for every visit.

And frequent phone calls home sometimes anger parents, said Union Elementary School Principal Katie Smith.

“We need to set clear expectations and continue to partner with parents, or our attendance rates will never improve,” Smith said.

Amy Boone, principal of Southport High School in Perry Township, said the tight timeline in which schools must hold meetings with parents means that parents frequently can’t attend.

While the new law has drawn more attention to attendance and led some students to attend more frequently, some parents have reacted by withdrawing their children from district schools and enrolling them in virtual schools or home schools, Boone said. The school uses its federal Title I funding for the costs of holding parent meetings.

“The student will be the main stakeholder in ensuring attendance,” Boone said. “Giving them reasons not to miss out on school will ultimately be the deciding factor.”

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Confronting chronic absenteeism: NYC schools lean on data, tap peer-to-peer support

2024-09-23T20:11:24+00:00

Bronx Principal David Liu did not notice an abrupt change in attendance when students returned to in-person learning three years ago after pandemic campus closures. Instead, the problem became clearer to him as the year progressed.

Students and staff at Gotham Collaborative High School became fatigued by five-day school weeks. Child tax credits and supplemental unemployment benefits also began to wane, forcing parents back into the workplace and requiring students to take on more responsibilities at home.

“The grind of what school was started to hit students at different times of the school year,” he said. “That’s when chronic absenteeism became kind of more like this slowly growing thing in our school.”

Now, the school has begun to crack the code on chronic absenteeism, a problem challenging school districts across the country. Administrators implemented a data system to better track students’ attendance and leverage staff and community organizations to counsel those at risk of chronic absence. The school even offers incentives to get students to show up, such as early-morning breakfast raffles or day trips.

Schools across New York City have introduced new initiatives to address the longstanding issue. Some have started to use restorative justice as a guiding principle in group interventions that target chronically absent students, rather than resorting to more punitive measures. Increasingly, schools are enlisting other students to encourage their friends to attend school regularly.

Most districts, including New York City, consider a student chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, whether those days are considered excused, unexcused, or part of a suspension. With a 180-day academic calendar, that is 18 missed days of school.

The citywide chronic absenteeism rate stood at about 25% before the pandemic. Once students returned to in-person learning in 2021, the city’s share of chronically absent students jumped 15 percentage points. While schools have made progress to lower that rate over the years, citywide chronic absenteeism still hasn’t returned to what it once was. Nearly 35% of public school students were chronically absent last school year, according to data recently released in the Mayor’s Management Report.

Though higher-poverty schools began closing the gap on chronic absenteeism in 2022-23, that gap still hovered about 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts. As a result, more and more schools have found themselves addressing issues that exist beyond the school’s environment, such as students’ access to health care, child care, and transportation.

That is why some teachers and school administrators say tackling chronic absenteeism is so challenging – it often requires a deeper knowledge of the students and families that they serve. In its 2022-23 Comprehensive Education Plan, Gotham Collaborative cited “not knowing our students well” as the root cause of the school’s chronic absence problem.

And while data collection often serves as a first step to addressing chronic absenteeism, creating plans that lead to improvement requires people, said Kim Nauer, an education fellow at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who has looked at how poverty contributes to chronic absence.

“Every single one of those numbers needs to be a kid and a name and a parent and a person attached to them,” she said. “Otherwise you’re not going to make progress in any sustained way. Like robocalls [are] useless.”

Using data to target specific student groups

Gotham Collaborative High School, which served a little over 300 students last school year, had already viewed chronic absenteeism as an issue worthy of intervention before the pandemic. The school’s pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rate was already higher than the average, at about 56%, and it then grew to 61% in 2020 when the pandemic forced school closures across the city.

During the 2022-23 school year, however, the high school’s rate of chronically absent students dropped to roughly 29%, its lowest in years.

Tackling the issue has taken years of targeted work and has relied on a data system the school created, grouping students into four buckets according to their absences. Each group receives certain interventions depending on the severity of their record. Those are provided through several support teams that might include peer mediator ambassadors, school counselors, and a social worker.

Sometimes intervention looks like an in-depth, individualized assessment of a student and their needs, or a home visit with a student and their family. But other times it may look like a school social for students who feel that they don’t have a strong network of friends, or an early-morning breakfast raffle.

Addressing the needs of students whose attendance and academic performance didn’t raise warning flags was critical, Liu said. Before introducing the new system, he said, the school identified only a small selection of students – those who came in the least, or about half of the school year, and those who had near-perfect attendance. Changing their focus helped shift the school toward lower instances of chronic absence, he believes.

“This was a main ‘aha’ moment for us,” he said. “These are our students that are coming 80% of the time, four out of five times a week, they might be B-average students. It sparked a lot of conversations about how do we show them that what they’re doing is not meeting what they can be doing and their potential?”

Many schools with a high share of chronically absent students use some variation of Gotham Collaborative’s data tracking system.

New York City schools receive weekly automatic reports that list students who have missed five or 10 school days. Schools can also print additional reports that show all students who have missed school five or 10 times, or chronically absent students from the previous school year. The reports are most effective when schools create workflows to immediately address what they are seeing in the data, said a spokesperson for the education department.

Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to address the issue, also noted that early intervention is important. When she and other researchers began studying chronic absence using the current, widely adopted 10% rule, she said one of its main purposes was to serve as an early-warning metric. So if a student misses two days of school in a month, she said, that should alert teachers and staff that a student is in need of support.

“I don’t want you to wait til 17 days to notice that things are a challenge,” Chang said, in reference to annual absences. “Or even in the first month, if it’s 10 days, that’s a problem.”

Using peer-to-peer support to overcome chronic absenteeism

Researchers like Chang and Nauer often examine chronic absenteeism among younger students because it is more representative of families’ circumstances. A 5-year-old, for example, isn’t missing school on their own accord, Chang said.

But for teens, chronic absenteeism comes with its own set of complexities. Liu has noticed that some of his students may miss school due to working long hours or having to bring younger siblings to and from school. Some may choose not to show up to avoid conflict with friends, he said.

And because the conversations that staffers have with students inevitably look different than those that students might have with people closer to their age, Liu is now focusing on tapping students’ ability to deeply connect with their peers to curb chronic absence.

“Every year we get older, but the kids stay the same age,” he said. “So every year the staff gets one year removed from being generationally, culturally relevant.”

At The International High School for Health Sciences – where all students are newly arrived immigrants – students may also grapple with other hurdles that affect engagement, such as learning English for the first time, or preparing for standardized tests unfamiliar to them, according to administrators at the school. Yet the high school’s chronic absenteeism rate during the 2022-23 school year fell to 29.5%, nearly cutting its rates from the previous two years in half.

In 2018, the school began using restorative justice — a practice that the school has used in lieu of other disciplinary measures since it opened over 10 years ago – to address chronic absenteeism, administrators say. A chronically absent student – typically in their final year of high school – sits down with a group of their closest friends, a teacher that they have a strong relationship with, and the assistant principal. The group discusses the student’s strengths, reasons for why they don’t show up at school, and how others in the group can support them moving forward.

International High School also receives extra support from staff at Queens Community House, the school’s community-based partner. Now in its third year, the partnership is funded through NYC Community Schools, a grant-based program that extends to about a third of the city’s more than 1,500 schools.

Queens Community House provides services such as tutoring outside of regular school hours – particularly during Regents season – and events that range from self-care workshops to game nights. Communicating with families, however, is one of its primary functions, said the school’s Community Schools Director Lizbeth Mendoza.

“The framework for a lot of these conversations is building relationships,” she said. “So I’m actually the person that sends out the message letting a parent or guardian know that their student was absent at the end of the day.”

Principal Roberto Hernandez poses for a selfie with High School for Teaching and the Professions students.

At the High School for Teaching and the Professions in the Bronx, groups of older mentors and younger mentees start pairing together in October. The mentors, typically 11th or 12th graders, receive training in their own classes on how to support their mentees, whether that be through engaging in activities together or talking through the mentees’ experiences.

“They go in and they really create this bond,” said Principal Roberto Hernandez. “And what I found within the last two years was a sense of ownership that our mentors are having for their mentees.”

This sense of commitment has trickled into other areas of focus for the school, like attendance, Hernandez said. For some students, it has also created a sense of commitment to the school at large: Two of the high school’s guidance counselors are former students. Now that the school has a designated guidance counselor for every grade level, Hernandez said it is easier for the administration to connect with individual students.

“It’s not just teaching, it’s getting to know them and letting them get to know you, and they love it,” he said. “And I think that’s all contributing to where we are today.”

Mia Hollie is a data intern at Chalkbeat based in New York City. You can reach Mia at mhollie@civicnews.org .

14 states pledge to cut chronic absenteeism rates by half over 5 years

2024-09-09T09:00:00+00:00

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Fourteen states have taken up a challenge to significantly reduce the rate at which children miss a lot of school, responding to a recent call from a bipartisan coalition for states to prioritize school attendance.

Some of the states making the pledge have had among the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in recent years, such as Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. Others signing on include: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.

More states have expressed interest and may join later this school year.

Each of the states that signed on is committing to cut chronic absenteeism, which counts the share of kids who miss 10% or more of their school year, by half over a five-year period. States will be able to choose their starting point and set goals from there. Some may start from the 2021-2022 pandemic school year, when absenteeism peaked in many schools, while others may start with a more recent year.

In a sign of how far and wide the nation’s chronic absenteeism crisis spans, the states are located across the U.S. and are led by a mix of Republican and Democratic governors.

The need to boost school attendance has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement in education policy, and that formed the backdrop for why three groups — the nonprofit Attendance Works, the civil rights group EdTrust, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank — came together to launch this challenge in July.

“We did try to make sure we had a set of states who could bring a whole variety of conditions so that when we say it’s possible, it’s feasible, to reduce chronic absence by 50%, people see a state that looks kind of like theirs,” said Hedy Chang, the director of Attendance Works. “We think by demonstrating the possibilities that that will inspire others to join.”

A common theme among these “early adopter” states is that they won’t be starting from scratch, Chang said. Each had already committed to tackling absenteeism in their state and had some staff or initiatives in place. Some will be able to jump in quickly, while others will need some time to organize their teams.

Still, she said, the fact these states signed demonstrates there’s “a building consensus in the field that we need to address chronic absence, and that reducing chronic absence by 50% is a reasonable goal.”

Some states previously announced their intentions. Colorado, for example, has set a goal of having just 17.8% of students be chronically absent by the 2026-27 school year. Colorado’s goal would have more students attending school regularly than before the pandemic.

During the 2021-22 school year, more than 35% of Colorado students missed so much school they were considered chronically absent. While that rate has been improving, a recent Associated Press analysis found that Colorado had the fifth-worst rate of chronic absenteeism in the nation in the 2022-23 school year.

During a home visit in 2022, Julia Madera, an attendance advocate in Greeley, Colorado, talks by phone with the mother of a student who hasn’t shown up to school, as another advocate, Domanic Castillo, looks on.

Arkansas plans to use last school year’s chronic absenteeism rate as a baseline, but has yet to release those figures. Around 26% of students were chronically absent in the state during the pandemic, and schools lowered that to around 22% in the 2022-23 school year.

“If students are not in class, they are not learning content they need to know,” Jacob Oliva, Arkansas’ education secretary, said in a statement. “That is why we are committed to participating in this program. We not only want to raise awareness about the importance of students being in school, but also to show our commitment to improving outcomes in this critical area.”

For some states, the goal won’t be too difficult to achieve.

In Connecticut, for example, 23.7% of students were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year, and by last school year that rate had fallen to 17.7%. The state would need to lower absenteeism by another 6 percentage points over the next two years if it sets its starting point at the pandemic peak.

In Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched a statewide task force focused on raising attendance, schools lowered the rate at which kids missed a lot of school from a pandemic high of 20.1% to 16.1% last school year, and would need to reduce it another 6 points to hit the campaign’s mark.

Similarly, in Rhode Island, where Democratic Gov. Dan McKee has attracted national attention for combating absenteeism with a comprehensive strategy, schools reduced their chronic absenteeism rate from 34.1% during the pandemic peak to 24.7% last school year. The state is now around 7.7 percentage points shy of the campaign’s goal.

Others have further to go. New Mexico, for example, cut chronic absenteeism from a pandemic high of 40.7% to 32.8% last school year, making it still 12.4 percentage points above the target.

And several other states have yet to release chronic absenteeism data for last school year.

A few states that signed the pledge are among a wave of states that have passed new laws aimed at getting more kids to regularly attend school. West Virginia passed a law requiring schools to get in touch with families after just one absence. Iowa has a new law that requires the families of kids who are on track to be chronically absent to meet with school staff — a step put in place before they get referred to the county attorney.

Carl Felton III, a policy analyst at EdTrust, says his organization is hoping to use this campaign to nudge states to use strategies to boost attendance such as building relationships with families, providing mental health support to kids, and creating a welcoming school environment. On the flip side, they want to discourage punitive policies like referring families to truancy court, fining parents, or calling in police officers.

“It can make folks feel attacked or blamed,” he said, “when really what people need is support.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Estudiantes necesitan apoyo en salud mental y un sentido de pertenencia para seguir en la escuela

2024-08-28T16:00:48+00:00

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Kevin Able luego de haber estado saltando entre escuelas de Pensilvania y Nueva Jersey, no esperaba graduarse de la escuela secundaria.

Los problemas de salud mental y las dificultades en su vida familiar le hicieron que fuera más difícil mantenerse al día con sus clases y, como sabía que no permanecería en una escuela por mucho tiempo, Able se alejaba gradualmente del aprendizaje.

Al igual que Able, miles de jóvenes en todo el país se desvinculan de la escuela debido a la violencia, el trauma, la vida familiar inestable y otras razones. Sin el apoyo adecuado, esos estudiantes pueden abandonar la escuela por completo.

Cuando Able asistía a clases, una vez fue suspendido de una escuela en Pensilvania y enfrentó medidas disciplinarias en otras escuelas por faltar a clase. Tampoco sintió que a sus directores o maestros les importara si iba a la escuela o no, afirmó Able. En otra escuela, el joven de 18 años relata que vio a su consejero solo una vez durante todo el año.

“Faltaba a muchas clases y nadie me decía, ‘Ah, ve a clase, sé productivo’. Era como si te vieran en el pasillo y pasaran de largo”, agregó Able.

Eventualmente, asistió a la LEAD Charter School en Newark, donde pasó de ver a su consejero una vez al año a todos los días. Able dice que la atención a sus sentimientos, la motivación para asistir a clases y los controles diarios cambiaron su perspectiva sobre la escuela.

El otoño pasado, compartió su trayectoria educativa con cientos de estudiantes a través del proyecto “Youth Speak for Themselves” (“Los Jóvenes Hablan por Sí Mismos”) de Newark Opportunity Youth Network. Able y otros nueve líderes juveniles organizaron debates en grupos pequeños sobre el ausentismo crónico, que fueron grabados por una herramienta de escucha con inteligencia artificial. Los líderes juveniles fueron capacitados para usar la herramienta con inteligencia artificial y analizaron horas de grabaciones para encontrar temas y citas clave que luego publicaron en una plataforma de escucha interactiva en línea.

“Fue realmente impactante que muchos jóvenes con los que hablé pasaran por los mismos problemas que yo pasé en mis otras escuelas”, indicó Able.

A través del proyecto “Youth Speak for Themselves”, los líderes juveniles hablaron con más de 170 estudiantes de las escuelas de la ciudad y exalumnos para determinar los desafíos y las barreras que enfrentan los adolescentes de Newark en la educación. El proyecto, una asociación con Cortico, una organización sin fines de lucro que utiliza tecnología de inteligencia artificial para fomentar el diálogo público, se lanzó para encontrar las causas fundamentales del ausentismo crónico y llevar las voces de los jóvenes a la discusión, explicó Emilie Stewart, gerente de promoción de políticas y participación comunitaria de Newark Opportunity Youth Network.

La herramienta de escucha, creada por Cortico, un socio del Center for Constructive Communication (Centro de Comunicación Constructiva) del Massachusetts Institute of Technology, le permitió a Able aprender nuevas habilidades que ayudaron a crear la plataforma de escucha interactiva y fue la primera vez que utilizó un programa de inteligencia artificial.

Para abordar las preocupaciones sobre la privacidad, los jóvenes de entre 14 y 24 años que participaron en las conversaciones solo se publicaron sus nombres de pila en el portal junto con sus comentarios. No se les pidió a los participantes que identificaran a qué escuelas de Newark asisten o han asistido.

“Queríamos escuchar las voces de los jóvenes y sus experiencias”, dijo Stewart. “No solo yo hablo de lo que creo que están pasando, sino que ellos comparten lo que podrían estar experimentando”.

El ausentismo crónico, definido por Nueva Jersey como faltar al 10% o más del año escolar, aumentó al 16.6% en el año escolar 2022-23 según los datos estatales. Eso significa que los estudiantes faltan más a la escuela que antes de la pandemia de COVID-19. En las escuelas públicas de Newark, 4,458 estudiantes, o el 12.7%, estuvieron crónicamente ausentes durante el año escolar 2022-23, cuando estaban inscritos 42,248 estudiantes desde preescolar al grado 12, según los datos de rendimiento escolar del estado. En todas las escuelas secundarias de la ciudad, más del 30% de los estudiantes de secundaria se ausentan regularmente, según Newark Opportunity Youth Network. Algunas escuelas de la ciudad han utilizado campañas de asistencia para motivar a los estudiantes a asistir a clase todos los días, mientras que otras han lanzado programas de incentivos que ofrecen tarjetas de regalo y entradas de hockey a los estudiantes de secundaria para ayudar a reducir las tasas de ausentismo.

Los estudiantes faltan a la escuela cuando no se sienten apoyados

Pero los estudiantes que participaron en las conversaciones en grupos pequeños de Newark Opportunity Youth Network dijeron que experimentar un sentido de pertenencia en sus comunidades escolares y tener acceso a apoyo personalizado de salud mental es importante para atraer y mantener a los adolescentes en clase.

“Para mí, diría que un entorno propicio que sea inclusivo, sin racismo, sin juicios, sin estigma y reglas estrictas sobre estas regulaciones. Tal vez personas que estén alrededor para chequear que esto se cumpla. Y las necesidades de las personas, las necesidades de los estudiantes, deben ser escuchadas”, afirmó Lola, una participante del proyecto cuyo comentario se publicó en el portal en línea.

Zah, otro participante, dijo que su padre falleció durante la pandemia, una época en la que las escuelas se vieron obligadas a cerrar y cambiar al aprendizaje remoto, lo que exacerbó aún más sus problemas de salud mental y emocionales.

Zah relató que se comunicó con sus maestros para hacerles saber que no tenía ganas de hablar durante la clase virtual, pero que no se sentía apoyado.

“Cuando envié un correo electrónico a todos los maestros, les dije que no estaba en el estado mental adecuado para hablar de lo que fuera, pero me dijeron que necesitaba superarlo. Recibí un correo electrónico de uno de los maestros que me respondió que lo sentía mucho, pero que aún tenía que participar en esto, aquello y lo en lo otro”, dijo Zah, un participante del proyecto.

Cayla, otra estudiante participante, afirmó que no le gustaba la escuela porque “no siempre se centraba en el aprendizaje, sino que se centraba más en que te dijeran qué hacer”. Abe, que también participó en las conversaciones, dijo que necesitaba “otro hombre negro, como alguien mayor que yo, que haya pasado por todo lo que yo he pasado” para hablar de sus problemas personales y escolares.

Able, el moderador líder juvenil, narró que tuvo un momento de sorpresa cuando se dio cuenta de que otros adolescentes habían lidiado con experiencias similares a las suyas. Saber que otros estudiantes comparten los mismos problemas significa que las escuelas podrían aprender a abordar los problemas de asistencia de múltiples maneras, agregó Able.

Algunos participantes del proyecto dijeron que los maestros necesitan capacitación de desarrollo profesional para intervenir en situaciones en las que los estudiantes están siendo intimidados. Able estuvo de acuerdo y dijo que los educadores deberían aprender a abordar situaciones de una manera que no conduzca a medidas punitivas como suspensiones o expulsiones. Al, otro participante del proyecto, señaló que se enfrentó a duras medidas disciplinarias en su antigua escuela por no participar y siempre “se sentía como una amenaza”.

“Cualquier cosa que hacía, podía hablar de cierta manera, era como, ve a la oficina, ve a hacer esto”, dijo Al, cuyo comentario fue publicado en línea.

Stewart, miembro del personal de Newark Opportunity Youth Network que dirigió el proyecto, señaló que espera que el portal interactivo en línea sirva como una herramienta para que las organizaciones de la ciudad y las escuelas aprendan y encuentren formas de abordar la baja asistencia escolar y volver a involucrar a los estudiantes. La organización también planea presentar la herramienta a los legisladores para ayudar a crear una legislación que aborde el ausentismo crónico y otros problemas en las escuelas de Nueva Jersey.

“Creo que esto es realmente interesante y pone de relieve el hecho de que cada joven es diferente y, aunque existen estos temas clave similares, los jóvenes tienen necesidades diferentes y necesitan recursos y apoyos diferentes”, dijo Stewart.

Able, que se graduó de LEAD este año, comentó que se irá a la Guardia Nacional el mes que viene, pero sigue abogando por los estudiantes de Newark. Espera que los adultos utilicen el portal en línea para ayudar a los adolescentes como él a tener éxito.

“Los adultos deben prestar atención y, literalmente, escuchar y estar ahí para el joven”, dijo Able, “porque nunca se sabe lo que está pasando en casa”.

Traducido por Kleibeel Marcano.

Esta traducción fue proporcionada por Reporte Hispano, en asociación con el Centro de Medios Cooperativos de la Universidad Estatal de Montclair, y cuenta con el apoyo financiero del Consorcio de Información Cívica de NJ. La historia fue escrita originalmente en inglés por Chalkbeat Newark y se vuelve a publicar en virtud de un acuerdo especial para compartir contenido a través del Servicio de noticias de traducción al español de NJ News Commons.

This translation was provided by Reporte Hispano, in association with the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University and is financially supported by the NJ Civic Information Consortium. The story was originally written in English by Chalkbeat Newark and is republished under a special content sharing agreement through the NJ News Commons Spanish Translation News Service.

Jessie Gómez es una reportera por Chalkbeat Newark y cubre las escuelas públicas de Newark. Puede ponerse en contacto con ella: jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

How do you boost school attendance? In Rhode Island, with public rankings and Oprah-style giveaways

2024-08-27T22:03:20+00:00

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When crossing a busy street kept a child from catching the bus, George J. West Elementary School Principal Lisa Vargas-Sinapi had a practical solution: Let’s move the bus stop.

When kids are sick, they’re offered appointments at the school’s health clinic.

And if families share plans to take children on an extended vacation, Vargas-Sinapi explains why that could hurt their education and helps identify child care so they can stay in school.

“We do walk a fine line,” Vargas-Sinapi said. “We keep the expectation, but we’re offering the support — whatever that may be.”

There’s no lone cause of the absenteeism crisis, and no catchall solution either. But one factor for improving school’s attendance is constant — effort.

In Rhode Island, attendance expectations are front and center, reactions to potential problems are swift, and everyone from mayors to doctors stresses the issue. When students miss school, it shows up right away on a dashboard for anyone to see. The governor checks the dashboard several times a day, and schools get a call if he spots a problem. Meanwhile, school staff like Vargas-Sinapi are solving problems big and small that keep kids from coming to school.

Experts say this kind of comprehensive approach is what it takes to move the needle on chronic absenteeism. Rhode Island’s work has earned praise from the White House and was spotlighted by a bipartisan coalition urging schools to prioritize better attendance. And other states like Nevada and Hawaii have reached out to Rhode Island to learn about its strategies.

But state and school leaders say they still have a lot of work to do to get more kids in school — and to keep them there. Sustaining the momentum is hard, especially as schools get closer to pre-pandemic rates of absenteeism, leaving the most challenging attendance issues to solve.

“We are not taking our foot off the gas,” said Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s education commissioner. “We don’t want people to think: ‘OK, we’re good enough.’ It’s not good enough.”

Why Rhode Island’s attendance model stands out

Before the pandemic, 19% of Rhode Island students were chronically absent, meaning they’d missed 18 or more days of school. That rate shot up to 34% during the 2021-22 school year — when absenteeism peaked across the nation — then dropped to 29% the following year. It was the fourth-largest decline among states that year, according to data compiled by The Associated Press and Stanford University Professor Thomas Dee.

Last school year, Rhode Island’s rate dipped again to 25%.

Asa Messer Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island hosted a dance marathon to celebrate improvements in school attendance.

Education policy experts who’ve examined Rhode Island’s attendance strategy say there are two key components that make it stand out.

The first is the Rhode Island Department of Education’s public “leaderboard” that displays attendance metrics for every school. It updates daily and is connected to how students are performing academically. Everyone from parents to mayors can see how kids who are absent a lot tend to score worse in reading and math.

“It has been shocking for people,” Infante-Green said. “When we say ‘every day counts,’ now they see the difference.”

The second is a push to get people outside of schools working to reduce chronic absenteeism. Governor Dan McKee, a Democrat who has made improving attendance a statewide priority, asked mayors and town managers to sign an agreement listing concrete steps they’d take to boost attendance, such as offering kids leadership opportunities in their hometowns. In return, they’d be eligible for a new state grant that can be used to build and expand community centers that offer services like tutoring. All but one signed on.

Other state departments got involved, too. Rhode Island’s secretary of commerce asked local businesses not to schedule high schoolers to work during school hours, and the health department tasked pediatricians with asking families about how often their kids miss school when they come in for a check-up.

That’s a real shift from the past, when educators tackled absenteeism mostly on their own, said Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank.

“One of the oddly silver linings of the pandemic is that it has helped policymakers, both within education and without, understand that the education of students is a community responsibility,” said Toch, whose think tank published a report this month about Rhode Island’s attendance work. “There are many other student- and family-serving public entities and the private sector, as well, in the form of employers, who have an important role to play in getting kids to school.”

Prior to the pandemic, 37% of students in Providence Public Schools were chronically absent. That spiked to 57% during the 2021-22 school year, then dropped over the next two years, eventually hitting 36% last school year.

George J. West was among the most improved. After peaking at 58% three years ago, the school brought chronic absenteeism down to 29% last school year.

District and school leaders credit that drop to a few strategies. Officials formed a district-level attendance team to support teams already working in schools, and started using a new data platform that made it easier to flag students as they racked up absences. Staff used data to pinpoint which kids would benefit most from a home visit before knocking on doors.

Schools paid attention to younger children, in particular. Nationally, absenteeism in kindergarten has been especially high.

Principal Cassandra Henderson attended a dance marathon with students at Asa Messer Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island to celebrate attendance improvements.

At Providence’s Asa Messer Elementary, the school social worker called the parents of kindergartners who weren’t showing up regularly to see if there was any support the school could provide, while emphasizing that kids who miss lots of kindergarten tended to be absent a lot in the school’s later grades too.

“Once parents realize that, then it’s like: ‘Whoa, let me get my child to school,’” said Cassandra Henderson, Asa Messer’s principal.

Providence uses incentives and inclusion to boost attendance

One of the most difficult things about the absenteeism crisis is the number of factors driving it.

A parent may be struggling to get their child to school on time between jobs, or a teen may be missing class to care for a younger sibling. Pressure to work, mental health issues, and fears about falling behind at school can all keep kids from attending.

No one intervention solves all of those issues, and it’s not uncommon for schools to find that none of their attendance strategies are particularly effective, according to research released Tuesday by the RAND Corporation.

In Providence, working with a parent’s schedule is crucial, said Carina Pinto de Chacon, the district’s chief of family and community engagement.

A parent might need an early dropoff or a late pickup time. Finding a child an after-school slot or transferring siblings so they’re in the same building could be a big boost. Asa Messer Elementary helped one anxious second grader who missed a lot of school ease in with a shortened schedule and check-ins with the social worker.

Some Providence schools even deployed parents or school staff to pick up kids at their homes and walk them to school — dubbed a “walking school bus.” Some student advisory council members also started calling classmates to see if they needed a ride, Pinto de Chacon said.

Rewards for improved attendance, like pizza parties and gift cards, have also been helpful.

George J. West Elementary School in Providence rewarded students for good attendance with incentives like ice cream socials and extra recess time.

Still, school staff say many of the incentives kids like best don’t cost anything.

At George J. West Elementary, Vargas-Sinapi spun a wheel to award prizes like extra recess or computer time. At Asa Messer, kids got shoutouts for improved attendance over the loudspeaker or a chance to play freeze dance with their principal. Sometimes, the attendance team would “bum rush a classroom” to give kids high-fives and little gifts in an “Oprah-type of thing.”

“Students would then be a positive influence on their peers,” Henderson said.

Henderson also created a student council and invited kids to participate who wouldn’t normally be selected. Knowing they had to show up to make a meeting helped boost attendance.

And providing tutoring to English learners helped them bond with classmates, feel less anxious about language barriers, and enjoy coming to school more.

The Providence district’s goal is to lower chronic absenteeism to 20% over the next two years — nearly as low as the pre-pandemic rate in Rhode Island.

George J. West identified 56 students who improved their attendance a lot last school year, but still missed more than 18 days. The school’s counselor called their families this summer to see how the school could help them get out of that chronically absent category this year.

“We encouraged them: ‘You did a great job getting those kids here,’” said Assistant Principal Mary Bergeron. But then came the second part of the school’s message: “They are not where they need to be yet.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado students have improved attendance, but the rate of chronic absenteeism remains high

2024-08-22T15:30:10+00:00

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The percentage of Colorado students who are chronically absent dropped for a second year, a promising sign that schools may be getting more kids engaged in classes.

State data for the 2023-24 school year, released by the Colorado Department of Education Thursday, showed that 27.7% of students were chronically absent, down 3.4 percentage points from a year before. In raw numbers, 241,119 Colorado students — more than 1 in 4 — were chronically absent last school year, meaning they missed more than 10% of school days.

The rate of chronic absenteeism is still higher than it was in the 2019-20 school year, before the pandemic, when 22.6% of students were chronically absent. According to a news release from the state, the 2023-24 rate is the third-highest rate since data collection began in 2016.

And now the state has set a goal to decrease the percentage of chronically absent students to 17.8% by the 2026-27 school year.

“We know that our educators and school leaders are working urgently to keep students engaged and feeling connected to their school communities, and we see that effort reflected in attendance and chronic absentee rates,” Susana Cordova, state education commissioner, said in a news release. “If students aren’t in school, we know they won’t have access to the opportunities designed to help them continue learning.”

How many missed days of school are too many? Here’s what you need to know about attendance.

Students who are chronically absent are less likely to learn to read on grade level by third grade, and more likely to eventually drop out of school. Even excused absences count toward chronic absenteeism, and just a few absences a month can add up to 10% of school days.

Schools across the country are dealing with the same struggle to improve attendance. A recent survey of states by the independent think tank FutureEd showed Colorado in the middle of the pack, with lower rates than some, but higher rates than others.

And while all groups of students made improvement, gaps remain because some groups of students are chronically absent more than others. Students who are experiencing homelessness, those who come from low income families, and Hispanic students have some of the highest rates.

Pacific Islander students had the highest rate of chronic absenteeism at 50.1% in the most recent school year. Pacific Islander students also had some of the smallest decreases in chronic absenteeism year over year.

Students who are experiencing homelessness had a 56% chronic absenteeism rate, down from 59.5% in 2022-23.

Hispanic students had a 37.1% chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24, down from 41.4% in 2022-23.

A majority of school districts saw improvement in reducing chronic absenteeism rates. Colorado Springs District 11, District 49, Roaring Fork, and Englewood had some of the bigger decreases.

The state highlighted the districts of Durango and Alamosa as two places that had big improvements. In Alamosa, state officials said that the district had the support of the community in its campaign and had coffee shops putting stickers on cups to remind families that every day in school mattered.

Making significant improvements to attendance does require everyone to be involved, officials said.

Thirty percent of districts had a higher chronic absenteeism than a year before, including the Sheridan, Adams 14, Elizabeth, and Eagle school districts.

In Denver, the state’s largest district, chronic absenteeism was 37.1% in 2023-24, down from 41.1% the prior year.

State officials say that based on what they’ve heard anecdotally, challenges related to reliable transportation, illness, and feeling unsafe in school have worsened in some places over time, contributing to attendance problems.

The Colorado Department of Education announced a new initiative to help school districts get more students attending school. The work would include a guidebook for school and district leaders, a virtual resource hub, and training for educators.

Decreasing the amount of missed school is thought to be important in improving student achievement. State test results released earlier this week show progress in getting students to pre-pandemic achievement levels or better, but officials acknowledged more work remains to keep student results improving.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

New Indiana law designed to reduce chronic absenteeism could lead to more parent prosecutions

2024-08-21T11:00:00+00:00

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This story was written by journalists at the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism at Indiana University in partnership with Chalkbeat Indiana.

After the death of her parents, an Indianapolis student’s attendance began to lapse — her guardians were busy, and school became a lower priority.

Monarca Academy administrators talked to her guardians, and they promised she’d make it to school. But absences continued to stack up and Francisco Valdiosera, executive director of Monarca Academy, referred the case to the Department of Child and Family Services for educational neglect.

The student, whom school officials did not identify, ultimately received counseling and her attendance improved. But a new state law could have had that student and her guardians spending more time in the courtroom than the classroom.

As of July 1, Indiana school districts must meet with parents about their student’s absences and offer services to help improve their attendance. For elementary students who are habitually truant — defined as having 10 or more unexcused absences in a school year — districts must take a more punitive approach by referring those cases to the county prosecutor under Senate Enrolled Act 282.

While school officials have always had the ability to seek prosecution for parents of truant students, the General Assembly took the step of mandating this course of action in order to combat rising absenteeism.

“Hearing from numerous schools, there is a problem with attendance. Our great educators are saying we want to teach these kids, but if they’re not there, it’s really hard,” said Sen. Linda Rogers, R-Granger, who co-authored SEA 282. “It’s become exacerbated after COVID.”

The new law also requires schools and prosecutors to inform parents that their students’ absenteeism could have legal consequences, including misdemeanor charges that may carry a fine or jail time. And lawmakers may take further steps as they consider solutions this summer for older students who are absent.

However, criminal prosecution for absenteeism has been rare.

Reporting by the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism and Chalkbeat Indiana found that, before the law went into effect, prosecutors and school districts rarely turned to the criminal justice system to tackle chronic absenteeism. In Marion County, which educates over 165,000 students, only 15 referrals were made to the prosecutor’s office in 2023, and in LaGrange County, with over 7,300 students, only 23 were made.

A clear statewide picture of how often absentee cases are referred to prosecutors is difficult to piece together. Calls to 92 prosecutor’s offices, 398 public and charter school officials, the state Department of Education, and the Department of Child and Family Services found no centralized data on criminal referrals or the effectiveness of prosecuting absenteeism cases.

Critics of the new law say more prosecution won’t solve the wide array of reasons that students are absent, like a lack of access to transportation or adequate food and clothing. They argue that families instead need more engagement and wraparound services — though schools and counties did not receive additional funding to put these in place under SEA 282.

“Jail for non-complying adults is not the answer,” Marshall County Prosecutor Nelson Chipman said in an email. “[The] criminal justice system has limited effectiveness for correcting this behavior.”

Indiana is not the only state to attempt to address absenteeism through legal means, with similar bills passed in Iowa and West Virginia.

During the 2020-2021 school year, the number of chronically absent students increased by 64%, according to IDOE. Since then, that figure has declined but not to pre-pandemic levels.

Rogers said she didn’t hear from state prosecutors during legislative hearings. A review of committee testimony for the bill did not find any comments by prosecutors.

“I’m not sure how well prosecutors like [SEA 282],” Rogers said.

Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, said a child services referral or criminal prosecution does have its place in handling chronic absenteeism. He said school officials can communicate that these are real consequences for parents if they don’t send their children to school.

“People need to understand that the school system takes this seriously. All we’re doing here is saying the legislature took this seriously.” DeLaney said. “That’s really our message, and a very well-thought-out mechanism for the schools to point that message from us and send it on to the parents.”

Chronic absenteeism law is often tough to enforce

Indiana prosecutors have long complained that increasing caseloads and small staffs can bog down the wheels of justice and adding a glut of chronic absenteeism cases will only make that problem worse.

Pike County, just north of Evansville, has a population of approximately 13,000 people and only two prosecutors, who primarily handle violent crime cases.

The small county lacks the resources and funding to be able to hire more staff or offer diversion programs to students, Pike County Prosecutor Darrin McDonald said. An alternative to prosecution is detention or probation, McDonald said, but there is a lack of staffing, shortage of bedspace, and minimal resources and support for the juvenile court system.

“There’s a lot of wind coming from the legislature, but no substance to do anything practical that would make it better,” McDonald said.

The Indiana Capitol in Indianapolis. Earlier this year, state lawmakers passed a bill that says schools must refer cases of habitually truant elementary students — defined as having 10 or more unexcused absences in a school year — to the county prosecutor.

Sen. Andrea Hunley, D-Indianapolis, said SEA 282 is underfunded and the General Assembly gave no additional money to schools or prosecutors to provide them with additional social workers or staff.

For truancy rates to decrease across the state, Hunley said it is about reorganizing priorities.

“It’s really about shifting [prosecutors] mindsets to prevention,” Hunley said.

And some counties do have prevention efforts in place. The nearly 30-year-old Truancy Intervention Program in Allen County offers incentives such as phone calls, school visits and letters, and Pizza Hut coupons to help encourage students to attend school, said Tamyra Kelly, public information officer for East Allen County Schools. If that doesn’t work, students are sent to a truancy program.

In Marion County, students and parents are sent to a diversion program where staff can get an understanding of why students cannot attend school, said Jake Brosius, director of youth programming for Marion County. Marion County has not prosecuted a truancy case since 2019, Brosius said, because the program has been successful at connecting parents and students with the resources they need.

“I would say we are definitely successful in getting contact and communication kind of restored with the school,” Brosius said.

In some cases, school districts already inform parents and students of legal consequences of chronic absenteeism.

The Anderson Community Schools’ “2024-2025 Student Rights and Responsibilities” handbook lays it out plainly: “A person who knowingly violates the compulsory attendance law commits a Class B misdemeanor. punishable by up to 6 months in jail and up to a $1.000.00 fine for each separate offense.”

Lawmakers are hoping the threat of prosecution is enough for parents to take their child’s school attendance seriously.

“I would hope that when it comes to parents and children, that this is enough as a tactic to force parents to make sure that their kids are in school,” said Sen. Jeff Raatz, R-Richmond, who was one of the law’s co-authors.

‘Common sense’ solutions preferred to prosecuting parents

Indiana school districts already rely on intervention programs to address chronic absenteeism and prefer those methods over the General Assembly’s solution of referring elementary students and their parents or guardians to prosecutors.

The solution for a Scott County student’s absenteeism was simply a phone call away.

The student’s parent worked early morning shifts, and he routinely slept through his alarm or missed the bus, Scott County Prosecutor Chris Owens said. The county’s attendance review board looked at his case and gave him a dedicated contact person at the school to call if he was late and needed a ride.

“That’s just one scenario,” Owens said. “There’s all kinds of cases like that where they try to use common sense and real-world solutions to fix the problem.”

Many school districts focus on student-parent-school communication to resolve truancy issues. For Kankakee Valley School Corporation, the process starts with a phone call, then parents will receive a letter at four, eight and 10 unexcused absences.

At Greenfield-Central Community Schools, administrators organize conferences to discuss attendance contracts, possible consequences, and solutions such as future phone calls or school-provided alarm clocks.

At West Washington County School Corporation, an attendance committee meets with students to explain what Indiana Code says about state attendance policies and students can share reasons for chronic absences as well as possible solutions.

Kids miss school for a variety of reasons: medical issues, passing of a loved one, lack of transportation, struggling academically, bullying, and work, according to school officials.

Hanover Central High School has found banning chronically absent students from participating in extracurricular activities, school dances or sports events to be more effective. Hanover Central Principal Tami Kepshire said the school may also revoke a student’s driver’s license and parking privileges if they are chronically absent.

“We’re constantly in contact with parents of kids that are missing frequently,” Kepshire said. “We’re on the phone with them, and I think it’s probably because we’re a smaller school, but we know the families, so we feel very comfortable giving them a phone call and saying this is what’s going on.”

Educators and prosecutors who work with students and families daily say each case requires a unique approach.

“We attempt to develop positive relationships with students and create conditions for them to be successful in hopes that these relationships will encourage and motivate a student to attend school regularly,” Wendel McCollum, associate superintendent of Michigan City Area Schools said.

Lawmakers mull absenteeism bills for older students

As the 2024-2025 school year begins, and the new law remains in its infancy, the General Assembly may soon expand chronic absenteeism enforcement measures to include junior high and high school students.

The Interim Study Committee on Education plans to meet in September to discuss legislation for chronically absent students in grades 7-12 as the new law only dealt with K-6 grade students. However, lawmakers are unsure what holding students in grades 7-12 responsible will look like.

“When it comes to seventh through twelfth graders, we’re saying, at what point does it become the student’s responsibility?” Hunley, a member of the interim committee, said. “How do you legislate in a way that doesn’t contribute to the school to prison pipeline? It’s really more supportive and preventative than it is punitive.”

Lawmakers are also considering methods to track absenteeism data for all grades, Hunley said. Legislators want to ensure that the 2024 law is effective at curbing rates of chronic absenteeism across the state, but methods for ensuring schools and prosecutors are reporting truancy data are still up for debate.

“We don’t have a streamlined way to collect that information. I think that’s going to be really key to know, did we prevent people from getting all the way to that point because then those kids won’t show up as being chronically absent, if we’re doing our job,” Hunley said.

Annika Harshbarger, Brookelyn Lambright, Brenna Polovina, Karl Templeton and Emma Walls are reporters from the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism at Indiana University.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org .

Millions of kids still skip school frequently. Could recess — and a little cash — help a lot?

2024-08-15T04:02:00+00:00

This story was produced by the Associated Press’ Education Reporting Network and is republished with permission.

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MEDFORD, Mass. — Flerentin “Flex” Jean-Baptiste missed so much school he had to repeat his freshman year at Medford High outside Boston. At school, “you do the same thing every day,” said Jean-Baptiste, who was absent 30 days his first year. “That gets very frustrating.”

Then his principal did something nearly unheard of: She let students play organized sports during lunch — if they attended all their classes. In other words, she offered high schoolers recess.

“It gave me something to look forward to,” said Jean-Baptiste, 16. The following year, he cut his absences in half. Schoolwide, the share of students who were chronically absent declined from 35% in March 2023 to 23% in March 2024 — one of the steepest declines among Massachusetts high schools.

Years after COVID-19 upended American schooling, nearly every state is still struggling with attendance, according to data collected by The Associated Press and Stanford University economist Thomas Dee.

Roughly 1 in 4 students in the 2022-23 school year remained chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year. That represents about 12 million children in the 42 states and Washington, D.C., where data is available.

Before the pandemic, only 15% of students missed that much school.

Society may have largely moved on from COVID, but schools say they are still battling the effects of pandemic school closures. After as much as a year at home, school for many kids has felt overwhelming, boring, or socially stressful. More than ever, kids and parents are deciding it’s OK to stay home, which makes catching up even harder.

In all but one state, Arkansas, absence rates remain higher than they were pre-pandemic. Still, the problem appears to have passed its peak; almost every state saw absenteeism improve at least slightly from 2021-22 to 2022-23.

Schools are working to identify students with slipping attendance, then providing help. They’re working to close communication gaps with parents, who often aren’t aware their child is missing so much school or why it’s problematic.

So far, the solutions that appear to be helping are simple — like postcards to parents that compare a child’s attendance with peers. But to make more progress, experts say, schools must get creative to address their students’ needs.

Caring adults and incentives help student attendance

Across district and charter schools in Oakland, California, chronic absenteeism skyrocketed from 29% pre-pandemic to 53% in 2022-23. The district asked students what would convince them to come to class.

Money, the students replied, and a mentor.

A grant-funded program launched in spring 2023 paid 45 students $50 weekly for perfect attendance. Students also checked in daily with an assigned adult and completed weekly mental health assessments.

Paying students isn’t a permanent or sustainable fix, said Zaia Vera, the district’s head of social-emotional learning.

But many absent students lacked stable housing or were helping to support their families. “The money is the hook that got them in the door,” Vera said.

More than 60% improved their attendance after taking part, Vera said. The program is expected to continue, along with district-wide efforts aimed at creating a sense of belonging. Oakland’s African American Male Achievement project, for example, pairs Black students with Black teachers who offer support.

Kids who identify with their educators are more likely to attend school, said Michael Gottfried, a University of Pennsylvania professor. According to one study led by Gottfried, California students felt “it’s important for me to see someone who’s like me early on, first thing in the day,” he said.

A caring teacher made a difference for Golden Tachiquin, 18, who graduated from Oakland’s Skyline High School this spring. When she started 10th grade after a remote freshman year, she felt lost and anxious. She realized only later these feelings caused the nausea and dizziness that kept her home sick. She was absent at least 25 days that year.

But she bonded with an Afro-Latina teacher who understood her culturally and made Tachiquin, a straight-A student, feel her poor attendance didn’t define her.

“I didn’t dread going to her class,” Tachiquin said.

History teacher Matt Brophy works with Flerentin Jean-Baptiste on making up late assignments during summer school.

Another teacher had the opposite effect. “She would say, ‘Wow, guess who decided to come today?’” Tachiquin recalled. “I started skipping her class even more.”

In Massachusetts, Medford High School requires administrators to greet and talk with students each morning, especially those with a history of missing school.

But the lunchtime gym sessions have been the biggest driver of improved attendance, Principal Marta Cabral said. High schoolers need freedom and an opportunity to move their bodies, she said. “They’re here for seven hours a day. They should have a little fun.”

Financial and mental health issues keep absenteeism high

Chronically absent students are at higher risk of illiteracy and eventually dropping out. They also miss the meals, counseling and socialization provided at school.

Many of the reasons kids missed school early in the pandemic are still firmly in place: financial hardship, transportation problems, mild illness, and mental health struggles.

In Alaska, 45% of students missed a significant amount of school last year. In Amy Lloyd’s high school English classes in Juneau, some families now treat attendance as optional. Last term, several students missed school for extended vacations.

“I don’t really know how to reset the expectation that was crushed when we sat in front of the computer for that year,” Lloyd said. Emotional and behavioral problems also have kept kids home from school. University of Southern California research shared exclusively with AP found strong relationships between absenteeism and poor mental health.

Having access to the gym during the day gave Flerentin Jean-Baptiste something to look forward to at school. Many schools are looking deeper at the factors that get students to come to school — or that keep them away.

For example, in the USC study, almost a quarter of chronically absent kids had high levels of emotional or behavioral problems, according to a parent questionnaire, compared with just 7% of kids with good attendance. Emotional symptoms among teen girls were especially linked with missing lots of school.

“These different things that we’re all concerned about are all interconnected,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC education professor and one of the lead researchers.

Schools try to change mindsets about student absences

When chronic absence surged to almost 50% in Fresno, California, officials realized they had to remedy pandemic-era mindsets about keeping kids home sick.

“Unless your student has a fever or threw up in the last 24 hours, you are coming to school. That’s what we want,” said Abigail Arii, director of student support services.

Often, said Noreida Perez, who oversees attendance, parents aren’t aware physical symptoms can point to mental health struggles — such as when a child doesn’t feel up to leaving their bedroom.

More than a dozen states now let students take mental health days as excused absences. But staying home can become a vicious cycle, said Hedy Chang, of Attendance Works, which works with schools on absenteeism.

“If you continue to stay home from school, you feel more disengaged,” she said. “You get farther behind.”

Melinda Gonzalez, 14, has benefitted from a program to improve attendance at Fort Miller Middle School in Fresno.

Changing the culture around sick days is only part of the problem.

At Fresno’s Fort Miller Middle School, where half the students were chronically absent, two reasons kept coming up: dirty laundry and no transportation. The school bought a washer and dryer for families’ use, along with a Chevy Suburban to pick up students who missed the school bus. Overall, Fresno’s chronic absenteeism declined to 35% in 2022-23.

Melinda Gonzalez, 14, missed the school bus about once a week and would call for rides in the Suburban.

“I don’t have a car; my parents couldn’t drive me to school,” Gonzalez said. “Getting that ride made a big difference.”

Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Students need mental health support, a sense of belonging to stay in school, Newark teens say

2024-08-01T17:52:18+00:00

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After Kevin Able found himself bouncing between schools in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, he didn’t expect to graduate high school.

Mental health challenges and home-life struggles made it harder to keep up with his classes and, since he knew he wouldn’t stay at a school for too long, Able gradually disengaged from learning.

Like Able, thousands of young people across the country disengage from school due to violence, trauma, unstable home life, and other reasons. Without the proper support, those students may drop out of school entirely.

When Able did go to class, he was once suspended from a school in Pennsylvania and faced disciplinary measures at other schools for skipping class. He also didn’t feel that his principals or teachers cared if he went to school at all, Able said. At another school, the now 18-year-old said he saw his counselor once during his entire year there.

“I skipped class a lot, and no one would, like, tell me, oh, go to class, like, go be productive. It was like, they’ll see you in the hallway and they’ll just walk right past me,” Able added.

Eventually, he attended LEAD Charter School in Newark where he went from seeing his counselor once a year to every day. Able says the attention to his feelings, motivation to attend classes, and daily check-ins changed his perspective on school.

Last fall, he shared his educational journey with hundreds of students through the Newark Opportunity Youth Network’s “Youth Speak for Themselves” project. Able and nine other youth leaders hosted small group discussions around chronic absenteeism, which were captured by an AI listening tool. The youth leaders were trained to use the AI tool and analyzed hours of recordings to find key themes and quotes they then posted on an interactive listening platform online.

“It was, like, really shocking that a lot of young people I talked to went through, like, the same problems that I went through at my other schools,” Able said.

Through the “Youth Speak for Themselves” project, the youth leaders spoke with more than 170 students across city schools and alumni to determine the challenges and barriers Newark teens face in education. The project, a partnership with Cortico, a nonprofit organization using AI technology to foster public dialogue, was launched to find the root causes of chronic absenteeism and bring young voices to the discussion, said Emilie Stewart, Newark Opportunity Youth Network’s manager of policy advocacy and community engagement.

The listening tool — created by Cortico, a partner with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Constructive Communication — allowed Able to learn new skills that helped create the interactive listening platform and was the first time he used an AI program.

To address privacy concerns, young people ages 14-24 participated in the conversations with only their first names posted in the portal along with their comments. Participants were not asked to identify what Newark schools they attend or have attended.

“We wanted to hear young people’s voices and their experiences,” Stewart said. “Not just me talking about what I think they’re going through, but them sharing what they might be experiencing.”

Chronic absenteeism, defined by New Jersey as missing 10% or more of the school year, rose to 16.6% in the 2022-23 school year according to state data. That means students are missing more school than before the COVID-19 pandemic. In Newark Public Schools, 4,458 students, or 12.7%, were chronically absent, during the 2022-23 school year when 42,248 pre-K-12 grade students were enrolled, according to state school performance data. Across all city high schools over 30% of high school students are regularly absent, according to the Newark Opportunity Youth Network.Some city schools have used attendance campaigns to motivate students to get to class every day, while others have launched incentive programs offering gift cards and hockey tickets to high school students to help reduce absenteeism rates.

Students skip school when they don’t feel supported

But students who participated in the Newark Opportunity Youth Network’s small group conversations said feeling a sense of belonging in their school communities and having access to personalized mental health support is important to draw and keep teens in class.

“For me, I’ll say an enabling environment that is so inclusive, no racism, no judgments, no stigma, and strict rules on these regulations. Maybe bodies that will be around to actually see through this. And people’s needs, students’ needs, should be heard,” said Lola, a participant in the project whose comment was posted on the online portal.

Zah, another participant, said his father passed away during the pandemic – a time when schools were forced to lock down and switch to remote learning, further exacerbating mental health and emotional problems. He reached out to his teachers to let them know he didn’t feel like speaking during virtual class but didn’t feel supported, Zah said.

“When I emailed all the teachers, I said I wasn’t in the right headspace to talk whatever, but they said I needed to get over that. I got an email back from one of the teachers, they was like, oh, I’m sorry for the loss but you still need to participate this, that, and the third,” said Zah, a participant in the project.

Cayla, another student participant, said she didn’t like school because “of how it wasn’t always focused on learning, it was more focused on being told what to do.” Abe, who also participated in the conversations, said he needed “another Black man, like somebody older than me, that’s been through everything I’ve been through” to talk through his personal and school problems.

Able, the youth leader moderator, said he had a “wow” moment when he realized other teens had dealt with similar experiences as his. Knowing that other students shared the same problems means schools could learn to address attendance issues in multiple ways, Able added.

Some project participants said teachers need professional development training to intervene in situations where students are being bullied. Able agreed and said educators should learn to address situations in a way that doesn’t lead to punitive measures such as suspensions or expulsion. Al, another project participant, said he faced harsh disciplinary measures at his old school for not being engaged and always “felt like a menace.”

“Anything I did, I could speak a certain way, it was like, go to the office, go do this,” said Al, whose comment was posted online.

Stewart, Newark Opportunity Youth Network staff member who led the project, said she hopes the interactive online portal will serve as a tool for city organizations and schools to learn and find ways to tackle low attendance and reengage students. The organization also plans to bring the tool to lawmakers to help create legislation to tackle chronic absenteeism and other issues in New Jersey schools.

“I think this is really interesting and underscores the fact that every young person is different, and even though there are these similar, key themes, youth have different needs and they need different resources and supports,” Stewart said.

Able, who graduated from LEAD this year, says he’s headed to the National Guard next month but continues to advocate for students in Newark. He hopes adults use the online portal to help teens like him succeed.

“The adults need to pay attention and literally just listen and, like, be there for the young person,” Able said, “because you never know what’s going on at home.”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Cell phones, reading, state testing: See what’s new as Indiana students head back to school

2024-07-24T10:00:00+00:00

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Across the state, students are heading back to school soon. Students in Beech Grove and Warren Township start classes this week, followed by the rest of Marion County’s districts next week.

With a new school year comes new rules about cell phones in classrooms, a new pilot program for shorter but more frequent state testing, and a new policy on holding back students who can’t read based on third grade reading exams.

Read more about these changes and others you’ll notice this school year:

Check for school bans on cell phones

A new Indiana law requires school districts to ban cell phones and “any portable wireless device” from class time.

The ban covers phones, tablets, laptops, and gaming systems, as well as any other devices that can provide communication between two parties. But it’s up to each school district to decide on the exact policy.

There are some exceptions for educational purposes (including Individualized Education Programs), emergencies, and health care.

Some students will take more, shorter state tests

The Indiana Department of Education is piloting a checkpoint-based ILEARN this school year as an alternative to one high-stakes exam at the end of the year. More than 70% of schools opted into the pilot program, the department said.

The aim is to make the data more actionable throughout the school year for students, families, and teachers, instead of having to wait for results at the end of the year.

The pilot program will have three checkpoints throughout the year and a shortened summative assessment at the end of the year, per the department. The change is expected to be made for all students in the 2025-26 school year.

Schools and parents must meet about chronic absenteeism

Parents of chronically absent students in kindergarten through sixth grade will be required to meet with schools to create a plan and receive wraparound services to improve attendance, under a new law on truancy prevention.

The law also requires school officials to report truant students to the prosecutor’s office, and requires prosecutors to tell parents that they could be held legally accountable for their children missing school.

More students could be held back

More students could have to repeat the third grade, due to a new law that tightens the state’s policy for remediation. The policy doesn’t start until the 2025-2026 school year, but will be based on test results from the coming school year.

Retention has long been part of Indiana policy. It’s become less common in recent years, with thousands of students “socially promoted” over the years. But now, students have to pass the IREAD-3 to move to fourth grade.

There are some exemptions including for some students with an IEP and some English learners as well as students who pass the math portion of the statewide exam.

Additionally, parents have an opportunity to appeal a remediation recommendation if they believe their student meets one of the exemptions.

COVID relief funding ends for schools

Schools have until September to commit the third and final round of federal COVID funding — known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER. This means districts may already be looking for new ways to fund programs and positions supported by these dollars.

The state spending tracker shows the state has reimbursed schools for about 87% of available federal relief funds as of July 19. However, the tracker doesn’t capture schools’ expenditures in real time.

Chalkbeat Indiana Reporter Aleksandra Appleton contributed to this article.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief. She also covers access to higher education and Warren Township Schools. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

Bipartisan coalition issues call to cut chronic absenteeism in half as kids continue to miss school

2024-07-18T22:26:36+00:00

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From poor reading skills to chaotic classrooms, the stubbornly high rate at which kids are absent from school makes it harder to solve every other problem in education. That’s made improving attendance a rare point of bipartisan agreement.

A new coalition announced a campaign on Wednesday calling on schools to cut their chronic absenteeism rates in half from the 2021-22 school year, when rates peaked across the country, by the 2026-27 school year.

The goal is to reverse what happened during the pandemic, when the share of kids who miss a lot of school nearly doubled.

As part of the new campaign, the coalition plans to highlight examples of states and school districts that have successfully tackled absenteeism challenges.

While many schools have worked to curb chronic absenteeism — typically defined as when kids miss 10% or more of their school year, or around 18 days — the problem has persisted and is pervasive. Setting aggressive goals and making concrete plans to achieve them is the only way to turn that around, the coalition said.

It could also be the key to addressing pandemic learning loss.

Kids of different achievement levels, of every race, in every state, in every kind of community, have had higher rates of absenteeism in recent years — whether their schools closed for a long time or not.

“That kind of churn just makes everything more difficult,” said Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, referring to everything from establishing classroom routines to keeping lesson plans on track. “For me, that actually fuels the urgency of this issue.”

The trio leading the coalition — which held a Washington, D.C. event where Chang and others kicked off the campaign — is an unlikely one. It’s made up of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank; The Education Trust, a leading civil rights group; and Attendance Works, a nonprofit with a long history of working on absenteeism issues.

“This is the real threat that we’re looking at now: That chronic absenteeism doesn’t go back down, that it becomes a new normal,” said Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. “It is a big deal, and we’re going to need concerted effort to counter it.”

Denise Forte, who heads The Education Trust, said the idea to join forces came to her after she and Malkus voiced similar concerns about student absenteeism to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in January.

“I thought to myself: This is a unique opportunity with two organizations and two people that don’t always think alike on many things, but on this one we could come together,” Forte said.

Virginia and Rhode Island education officials who joined the event said their states had seen close links between who was chronically absent and who was struggling in school.

Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, said when her staff combed through state test score data last year to understand why they weren’t seeing more learning loss recovery, one consistent factor stood out. In grades 3-8, if a student was chronically absent, they scored 18% lower in reading on average, and 25% lower in mathematics.

“Kiddos don’t know the work, they don’t want to come to school, they feel like they’re behind, so they get further behind,” Coons said. “We have to break that cycle.”

Schools across the country have tried launching new attendance-tracking systems, hiring people to knock on family’s doors, and giving away prizes to help re-engage students. And while many states have reduced their chronic absenteeism rates recently, they generally remain higher than before the pandemic.

Ongoing work to reduce chronic absenteeism will look different across the country, Chang said, especially as the COVID relief dollars that many school districts had relied on to pay for their attendance campaigns dry up at the start of the new school year.

“The challenge of chronic absence is there are multiple issues and reasons that cause kids to be chronically absent,” she said. “You have to use your local understanding from kids, families, and your data to really figure out what’s going to make the biggest difference in your community.”

The coalition highlighted the work happening in Rhode Island, which brought down its chronic absenteeism rate by 5 percentage points during the 2022-23 school year. There, state officials put up “We miss you” billboards to catch students’ attention, and assembled a public dashboard that tracks the daily attendance rate for schools across the state.

Officials use it to monitor how attendance is going in middle schools, in high schools, for kids who’ve been chronically absent for three years, and for kids who started to be absent a lot when they were young, said Angélica Infante-Green, the state’s education commissioner.

A parent working group helps inform the state’s attendance initiatives, whether that’s figuring out which bodegas and laundromats should hang information flyers, or recommending trusted community members who can knock on families’ doors.

“This is everyone’s responsibility,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Chronic absenteeism remains high for certain student groups in New Jersey — even post-pandemic

2024-04-04T21:14:01+00:00

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New Jersey students are missing more school than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to statewide data released Wednesday.

The rate of chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more of the school year, rose to 16.6% in the 2022-23 school year. That’s up from 10.6% before the pandemic. Rates are higher for students belonging to marginalized groups, such as students who are Black, Hispanic, nonbinary, economically disadvantaged, English learners, and students with disabilities. Homeless students have the highest rate of chronic absenteeism at 41.3%, followed by students in foster care at 27.3%.

The previous school year’s rate is a slight improvement from 2021-22 when 18.1% of students were chronically absent.

“Even though it’s an improvement, I say the house is on fire here when you have that percentage of students missing 18 days or more,” said State Board of Education member Nedd Johnson. “If they’re not there, you can’t teach them. They can’t learn.”

New Jersey and national trends

The increase in chronic absenteeism in New Jersey is part of a national trend. Nationwide, chronic absenteeism climbed from 15% in 2018-19 to 26% in 2022-23, according to data compiled by the American Enterprise Institute. Based on states that have reported data for the previous school year, New Jersey has the lowest rate in the country.

Members of the state Board of Education and Education Department staff said there is still work to be done despite New Jersey’s high performance compared to other states. More than one-fifth of New Jersey students missed more than 15 days of school in the 2022-23 school year.

The increase in absenteeism in New Jersey could be a result of more students staying home in the event of sickness or exposure to COVID-19, according to the state Department of Education. Root causes of chronic absenteeism can vary by district, school, and student, Assistant Commissioner of Education Kathleen Ehling said.

Getting to root causes

Those root causes for absenteeism typically fall into four categories: barriers to attendance, aversion to school, disengagement from school, and misconceptions about the impact of absences, according to the nonprofit initiative Attendance Works. Specific causes could include family responsibilities, anxiety, lack of academic support, and assuming attendance only matters in older grades.

Every district with a chronic absenteeism rate of 10% or higher is required to develop a corrective action plan to improve attendance. In 2023, over 70% of schools met this threshold, compared with 32% in 2019.

Developing the plan involves identifying barriers to school attendance and developing recommendations to address them, according to department officials. School leaders are instructed to study the root causes of absenteeism in their community and proactively address them. Districts with corrective action plans receive ongoing support from the executive county superintendent and county education specialist.

At the state level, the Education Department said it’s working to ensure schools are safe and supportive, officials said. Ehling pointed to mental health as a potential contributing factor to chronic absenteeism, noting that anxiety and depression are “alarmingly high” among students.

In Newark, the state’s largest district, 12.7% of students were chronically absent last school year. In Millburn, one of the state’s wealthiest districts, only 8.8% of students were chronically absent. The rate climbed to 14.3% for economically disadvantaged students. In Toms River, 21.7% of students were chronically absent.

Some school districts saw rates greater than 40%, such as Camden at 40.7% and Trenton at 42.2%.

COVID-related trauma

Board member Mary Bennett said many students experienced trauma during the pandemic, which has made them disaffected with school.

“We have to look and try to urge the districts to be very holistic and extremely diligent because the young people are not well, in some instances the families are not well,” Bennett said.

The department has launched a web page with resources districts can use to address chronic absenteeism in their communities, including information on data-based decision making to deal with absenteeism and sample corrective action plans. An attendance toolkit and awareness campaign resources will be released soon, according to the website.

Hannah Gross covers education and child welfare for NJ Spotlight News via a partnership with Report for America. She covers the full spectrum of education and children’s services in New Jersey and looks especially through the lens of equity and opportunity. This story was first published on NJ Spotlight News, a content partner of Chalkbeat Newark.

School staffers in shelters are a lifeline to NYC’s homeless families. Now their jobs are at risk.

2024-04-04T10:00:00+00:00

Dollie and her daughter were living in a Queens homeless shelter in January when the first grader came down with a severe bout of mononucleosis.

Dollie, who asked to use only her first name, was overwhelmed by the task of managing her daughter’s medical care and mounting school absences on top of her own work and housing search.

Fortunately, there was a staffer from the city Education Department working in her shelter to help with exactly this kind of situation.

The staffer, called a community coordinator, helped connect Dollie with medical care for her daughter, showed her what records she needed to provide the school to excuse the absences, and calmed her down when it all became too much.

“I would’ve been lost,” without her, Dollie said. She credits the community coordinator with getting her daughter better treatment, ensuring she returned to school quicker, and helping Dollie avert an investigation from the Administration of Children’s Services.

But the roughly $12 million in funding that pays the salaries of 100 community coordinators working across the city’s network of homeless shelters is set to run dry this summer, leaving the fate of the staffers up in the air even as the city confronts record numbers of homeless kids.

Seventy-five of the community coordinators are funded with one-time federal pandemic aid that expires in June, and the remaining 25 are supported with city funds that have not yet been renewed.

The position of shelter-based community coordinator was created in 2022 at the urging of advocates. Prior to the pandemic, community coordinators were only based in schools. The Education Department also employs other staffers called “family assistants” who work in shelters and are not funded with federal aid. But advocates say those staffers, who make less than community coordinators and work only 10 months a year, often can’t meet all the complex needs of families in shelters.

The community coordinators are among a long list of critical staff members and programs whose funding is tied to expiring federal aid – a list that includes 450 school social workers, free preschool for 3-year-olds, and community schools that partner with community organizations to provide extra services to families.

As budget deadlines approach, families and advocates are urging the city to preserve the community coordinators, arguing they play a critical role on the frontlines of two colliding crises: the exploding number of students – many of them newly arrived migrants – living in homeless shelters, and elevated rates of chronic absenteeism in the wake of the pandemic.

“It is unthinkable that funding for shelter-based community coordinators is in jeopardy at a time of such tremendous need,” said Jennifer Pringle, the director of the Learners in Temporary Housing project at the nonprofit Advocates for Children, which works to support the education of homeless youth.

Education Department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said the coordinators “provide critical resources and supports to our young people in temporary housing.

“We are extremely grateful for the stimulus funding that we used to support a range of programs and roles that support student wellbeing, especially as we continue to respond to the ongoing migrant crisis,” she added. “We will review these priorities as we go through the budget process.”

NYC sees a record number of homeless students

The number of city children living in a shelter or doubled up last year hit a record high of roughly 120,000 – a 14% increase over the previous years – thanks in large part to an influx of tens of thousands of migrant families.

Many of those families need immediate support enrolling their kids in school, getting evaluations for special education services, and coordinating transportation – particularly if they have to move to a shelter in another part of the city under Mayor Eric Adams’s 60-day shelter limit rule.

That’s where the community coordinators come in. They work directly from the shelters, though they often have to bounce between multiple locations.

Having staffers knowledgeable about the school system physically in the shelters, rather than having to rely on phone calls or visits to the school, makes a huge difference for parents like Dollie.

“You have eye communication. You have more understanding, you don’t have to go to two to three people to get a direct answer,” she said. Knowing that her community coordinator had seen firsthand the conditions she was living in at the shelter also made Dollie more willing to open up to her, she said.

The community coordinator ended up helping not just with school issues for Dollie’s daughter, but also with Dollie’s own work, education, and housing needs.

“I had lost hope, I had lost a lot,” Dollie recalled. “She went above and beyond with helping me. She brought my self confidence back in me where it was able to help me with my child.”

Coordinators combat chronic absenteeism

Job one for community coordinators is helping families regularly get their kids to school.

Citywide, rates of chronic absenteeism remain far higher than before the pandemic, with students in shelters logging among the highest rates of absenteeism in the city. In the 2021-22 school year, 72% of students living in shelters were classified as chronically absent.

But figuring out how to support individual families means earning the trust of families and unraveling multiple, overlapping challenges keeping kids from school.

In one case, according to advocates, a community coordinator learned that a child was embarrassed to attend school because he’d outgrown his wheelchair, and helped fit him for a new one. In another, a coordinator helped connect a student who’d just had a baby to a public school with a day care on site.

When Dollie’s daughter fell ill with mononucleosis, she dealt with high fevers and lethargy that made it impossible to concentrate on schoolwork. The school called to warn Dollie about the mounting absences, which stretched to almost a month. But Dollie was most concerned about getting her daughter the care she needed and ensuring she wouldn’t infect other kids.

The community coordinator, meanwhile, checked in regularly, asking about the girl’s fever and helping connect Dollie with doctors. She didn’t pressure Dollie about the absences, but made sure she had everything she needed to feel ready to send her daughter back to school, Dollie said. Without that support, the absences would have likely extended even longer, and could have triggered additional consequences like a child welfare investigation, Dollie added.

The family left the shelter recently and moved out of the city, but Dollie worries what will happen to other families in similar positions if the community coordinators aren’t funded next year.

“I really hope they do keep her there,” she said. “Without them, these shelters are nothing.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Intensive tutoring is great for academics. Now there’s evidence it can boost attendance.

2024-03-22T10:00:00+00:00

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Twelve-year-old Ethen likes spending time with his math tutors — and not always for reasons related to math.

They crack jokes and play chess with him when he finishes his work early. He likes meeting with them in the library, where it’s easier to ask questions without being talked over. And when he’s had a rough day, he can count on his tutors to cheer him up.

“That’s something good for me because I get to finally see someone that’s happy to see me,” said Ethen, a sixth grader at Cardozo Education Campus in Washington, D.C. “Their smile makes me smile.”

Lots of research has shown that intensive tutoring is one of the best ways to help students improve academically. And it’s become a go-to strategy to help kids who missed a lot of instruction during the pandemic. But a new study suggests high-dosage tutoring can boost something else, too: attendance.

Preliminary research recently released by Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, which is conducting various tutoring studies, found that D.C. students who participated in an intensive tutoring program were more likely to show up to school on days they had a scheduled session. Overall, the likelihood they’d miss school on tutoring days fell by 7%, researchers found.

That finding is especially significant because many schools are still working to re-engage students and curb higher-than-usual absenteeism rates in the wake of the pandemic.

The study doesn’t answer why tutoring boosted attendance. One reason could be that many students, like Ethen, really like their tutors, who often serve as informal mentors and sometimes bond with students outside the classroom, too.

“The kids do feel really cared for,” said Christine Maffuccio, who oversees the high-impact tutoring program at Cardozo. She said that’s because tutors are at students’ side asking: “What do you need? What’s your first step?”

Another reason could be that, after the isolation of remote learning, tutoring reinforces the idea that “learning happens in the classroom, together.”

“As we’re kind of re-teaching kids how to be in school and why they should be engaged in class,” Maffuccio said, “I think the tutor’s presence in the class helps with that.”

The link between tutoring and attendance

Tutors are everywhere at Cardozo. On any given day, 25 tutors are working with students at the combined middle and high school. Many are college students or AmeriCorps members.

Now, many students don’t think twice about getting extra help because it’s become so common. Earlier this school year, 330 students were getting tutored at Cardozo — almost half of all students.

Shweta Raman, a tutor with Math Matters at The George Washington University, works with Debela, a sixth grader at Cardozo.

The work happening at Cardozo is part of a three-year, $33 million initiative run by D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education with the help of federal COVID relief funding. To receive grant funding, schools agreed to follow certain tutoring best practices, such as keeping tutoring groups small, regularly pairing students with the same tutor, and offering at least 90 minutes a week of intensive help. (A rigorous study of the program’s academic effects is ongoing, but officials say there’s been promising early evidence that the high-dosage tutoring has helped struggling students improve in math and reading.)

As part of that initiative, Stanford researchers looked at attendance records for nearly 4,500 students who received intensive math or reading tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. That included students from Cardozo and 141 other D.C. schools.

The better attendance on tutoring days added up to students getting, on average, an extra two days of instruction over the course of the school year — and as much as five days if the student had been absent a lot.

The effect was most pronounced for middle schoolers, whose likelihood of attending school rose by 11% on days they had a scheduled tutoring session.

The research didn’t look at what exactly made students want to come to school more. But researchers and school staff have some ideas, based on feedback they’ve collected from students and what they’ve observed.

They think the consistency and frequency with which students met with their tutors was likely important. Many students liked the more-personalized attention and wanted to spend time with their tutors. Others wanted to come to school more when they did better academically.

“That individual relationship that they’re building in that tutoring session seems like it could be one of those things” boosting engagement, said Nancy Waymack, who directs research partnerships for the National Student Support Accelerator. “If tutoring is having a positive academic effect on that student, they’re also more likely to be able to be successful in their day-to-day schoolwork, which would also make it more attractive to be at school.”

At Cardozo, Maffuccio has seen that students who may feel intimidated by the idea of asking their teacher for help will feel comfortable turning to a tutor, who may seem more like a big brother or an auntie.

“Students’ personalities come out a lot because not every sentence that they speak with their tutor has to be on task,” Maffuccio said. “I see joking and just kind of talking about their lives. That’s really an important part of the relationship-building — that’s how the space becomes safe for students to try and potentially fail.”

Some tutors end up connecting with students outside of class, too. One tutor who works with ninth graders in their English language arts class, for example, now coaches Cardozo’s middle school soccer team and has close relationships with lots of the players.

Tutors start from ‘a really upbeat, positive place’

Isabelle Jennings Pickering started tutoring at Cardozo in October. Jennings Pickering, known to students as Miss J, works mostly with ninth and 12th graders in their history classes, and she also helps students with their English and reading fluency.

As she gets to know a student, she starts by asking them personal questions — Do they play sports? What music are they listening to? — before diving into the academic material.

Lucia Vallejo, a tutor with Math Matters at The George Washington University, works with Cristian, a sixth grader at Cardozo.

Last semester, for example, when she started working with 17-year-old Miguel several times a week in his D.C. history class, she noticed that he loved talking about music and culture, but it was harder to talk about what was tripping him up in class.

So they “started from a really upbeat, positive place,” by chatting in Spanish and trading notes about their favorite Salvadoran foods. After that, it was easier to talk about academic “concerns and fears and sticky places,” Jennings Pickering said.

Speaking English can be scary for Miguel and many other students whose first language isn’t English, Jennings Pickering said. So she tries to make the tutoring session a safe place where students won’t shut down if she gently corrects their pronunciation.

“It’s often the thought that school isn’t for me, and reading isn’t for me, or English isn’t for me,” she said. “And fighting through that can be the biggest hurdle.”

When she’s able to help students see that learning just one new word or sentence is a success, “that’s huge,” she said.

Since he started working with a tutor, Miguel says he feels more comfortable in class and he’s getting his assignments done faster, too. And he’s proud he can now use the transitional words that Miss J taught him in his essays.

Among his go-tos?

“Therefore” and “however.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden education budget proposal includes $8 billion to extend pandemic recovery work like tutoring

2024-03-11T21:56:58+00:00

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With a deadline looming to spend pandemic education dollars, the Biden administration has proposed making another $8 billion available to states and school districts to encourage better attendance and support academic recovery through tutoring and summer school.

The idea is a key component of President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for the U.S. Department of Education for fiscal year 2025, and represents an acknowledgment that schools still have a lot of work to do to recover from pandemic learning disruptions. The proposal comes a few months after the Biden administration called on schools to prioritize spending remaining COVID relief funding in these same areas.

The president’s budget proposal, announced Monday, also calls for modest increases to federal programs supporting high-poverty schools, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities. The administration also wants more money to support the Office for Civil Rights, and a $750 increase in the maximum Pell Grant award to help make college more affordable.

The White House budget plan will almost certainly not be adopted as written. It heads to a dysfunctional Congress that has careened between threats of government shutdown and short-term spending resolutions. The Republicans who control the House have been particularly hostile to Biden’s efforts to increase spending in several areas , including the Title I program that supports high-poverty schools.

Overall the budget proposal calls for more than $82 billion in discretionary spending for the education department, a 4% increase from this year.

Officials emphasized that this budget proposal complies with spending caps agreed to in last year’s bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act, while still investing in initiatives they hope will improve student success.

“When it comes to education, this budget is about raising the bar,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “There are historic investments promised on top of historic investments delivered.”

Budget offers way to continue tutoring, attendance outreach

American schools received a combined $190 billion in assistance across three pandemic aid packages and have until September to spend any remaining money. Many schools have come to rely on their tutoring programs and want to keep them going after the pandemic aid expires.

But how they’ll fund them has been a big question. Some states have pledged added tutoring funds, but many districts would likely struggle to keep providing intensive help to students without making cuts elsewhere in their budget.

Similarly, the rate at which students are missing lots of school remains well above pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the country. Many schools launched home visit programs or hired staff specifically to work with kids who aren’t attending regularly, but school leaders say it will take additional time and investment to re-engage students and continue to boost attendance rates.

Expanded summer school programs were a popular investment during the pandemic, though they’ve been only moderately successful in helping students catch up. They’ve also been a common place school leaders have scaled back as COVID relief funding has wound down.

The proposed $8 billion in new money isn’t intended to replace pandemic assistance but would supplement current efforts. Officials envision a competitive grant program that would prioritize high-poverty schools, schools in communities especially hard-hit by COVID, and schools identified as needing academic improvement under federal accountability rules.

More money for English learners, civil rights investigations

Biden’s budget proposal calls for a 1.1% increase, or $200 million, to local grants in the Title I program, which provides money to low-income schools. Earlier in his administration, Biden called on Congress to double spending on Title I, but that hasn’t come to fruition. Congressional Republicans have questioned whether schools need more money after the pandemic stimulus, and last year, they sought to significantly cut Title I spending.

Cardona characterized this budget as defending public education from a “slash-and-burn” approach that would endanger the futures of American students.

Similarly, the White House is proposing a 1.4% increase in spending to support K-12 special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as additional money for infants, toddlers, and preschool students with disabilities and grants to recruit special education teachers. Advocates have long called for the federal government to increase special education funding. Federal law lays out disabled students’ educational rights but leaves most of the costs to states and school districts.

The budget proposal calls for a roughly 5% increase or $50 million in new spending for Title III, which supports English learners.

Biden’s budget proposal also includes an extra $22 million, a 16% increase, for the Office for Civil Rights, which conducts investigations into allegations of discrimination in schools. Recently, the department announced it is looking into several incidents involving antisemitism or anti-Muslim discrimination at colleges and K-12 schools since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October.

The budget also calls for increased funding for preschool, student mental health, and community schools, which provide a wide range of services to support students and their families, as well as programs to encourage diverse candidates to enter the teaching profession.

The budget proposal includes a few cuts as well, including a 9% or $40 million reduction in a program that supports new charter schools and the replication of high-quality charter models.

Budget seeks to mitigate college costs

Biden’s budget blueprint would also increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $8,145, a 10% increase from current levels. Pell grants are available to college students from low-income families, and unlike loans, do not need to be repaid.

Budget analysts have warned of a looming shortfall in the Pell program after Congress expanded eligibility at the same time more students are heading back to college. The most recent continuing resolution to keep the federal government open walks back some of that recent expansion.

Advocates have argued that the maximum Pell award should be closer to $13,000 to keep pace with tuition increases and keep the door open to college for students of modest means.

The budget would increase funding for programs that allow high school students to earn college credit before graduating and for grants that help colleges support first-generation students and increase graduation rates.

The budget also calls for partnerships with states and tribes to make two years of community college free for students going to college for the first time and workers looking to change careers. Free community college was one of several education proposals that Biden ran on in 2020 that hasn’t gotten traction.

And the budget calls for more investment in the Office of Federal Student Aid amid a rocky rollout of a new federal financial aid form.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

White House calls for focus on tutoring, summer school, absenteeism as pandemic aid winds down

2024-01-18T00:26:36+00:00

Top White House officials are urging schools to double down on tutoring, extra learning time, and efforts to boost attendance as the spending deadline for pandemic aid nears.

To help, federal officials say states can now seek permission for schools to spend the last and largest pot of COVID relief money on these kinds of efforts over the next two school years. Previously, schools had to spend down their money by January 2025.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced what the Biden administration is calling its Improving Student Achievement Agenda at a White House event Wednesday with governors and state education commissioners. The new push comes at a time when many states have yet to see math and reading scores rebound to pre-pandemic levels and many students are struggling to fill in gaps in their learning.

Federal officials said they had chosen to focus on these strategies because they are proven ways to raise student achievement.

“These three strategies have one central goal: Giving students more time and more support to succeed,” Cardona said. “We must get back to pre-pandemic levels quickly. But also let’s be clear: The bare minimum that we aspire to is to get back to what it was in 2019. 2019 data wasn’t anything to write home about.”

Though the federal government doesn’t have many tools at its disposal to encourage schools to adopt certain attendance or academic strategies, Cardona said the education department would do what it could.

That includes monitoring states to make sure they are spending federal money on evidence-based approaches to improve school performance, a job they have under federal education law. For example, federal officials could look at how states are running their tutoring programs and step in to provide guidance if the model they’re using isn’t as effective as others.

Education officials also plan to prioritize these strategies for competitive grant funding.

Why the White House wants schools to focus on tutoring and chronic absenteeism

As they did throughout the pandemic, federal officials pointed to high-dosage tutoring as a worthy investment for schools. To do that, programs should tutor students one-on-one or in groups of no more than four, for 30 minutes at least three times a week. Sessions should be scheduled during the school day and take place with a trained tutor, White House officials wrote.

Last year, some states and school districts said they had abandoned efforts to tutor kids after school, finding students often missed sessions because they lacked transportation or had schedule conflicts.

The Biden administration lifted up examples of states and districts that have invested heavily in tutoring, including Maryland, which launched a tutoring corps to focus on middle and high school math this past fall, and Washington, D.C, which is tutoring students in math and English language arts.

During the White House event, Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent of education, said a key part of that investment is staffing tutoring managers in the district’s highest-need schools — a finding that’s been echoed by other tutoring programs. Those managers work like an assistant principal who can set up schedules, examine student data, and group students by ability.

“They are the ones saying, ‘No, no, you can’t go to lunch, you have to come sit here,’” Grant said. “We’re making sure that we didn’t just tell teachers and principals: ‘Hey, do this extra thing.”

Absenteeism soared during the pandemic and remains well above 2018-19 levels in most communities. When children miss school, they fall behind academically and are at greater risk of dropping out. When many students in a school frequently miss class, teachers have to decide whether to repeat material for those who missed, boring their classmates, or leave some students behind.

“We simply cannot accept chronic absenteeism as the new normal,” White House Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden said. “Fortunately, we know what works: engaging parents and families as partners in their children’s education.”

She cited the example of Gompers Elementary-Middle School in northwest Detroit. Chalkbeat chronicled the school’s efforts to keep students in school, including pairing students who were starting to miss too many days with adult mentors and working closely with families.

Family and work obligations, mental health challenges, lack of transportation, and many other factors contribute to children missing too much school.

Federal officials urged schools to make specific commitments to reduce absenteeism, such as increasing calls and texts to parents, doing more home visits, and developing early warning systems. Schools should make sure communication is available in multiple languages.

States also should adopt consistent definitions of chronic absenteeism and incorporate it as a measure in their school accountability system if they haven’t done so already, officials said.

Connecticut Education Commissioner Charlene Tucker-Russell described how the state used data to identify students struggling the most — homeless students, English learners, students with disabilities — and target support. The program trained teachers and community members to do outreach and connect families with shelter, transportation, and mental health resources. An evaluation of the program found a 16% increase in attendance after home visits, Tucker-Russell said.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisholm said she was “embarrassed” about her state’s sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism, including among elementary students. Working with parents is part of the solution, but schools also have to make sure students feel supported and successful so they want to be in school, she said.

“If you aren’t reading at grade level, and you can’t do math at grade level, [school] is not a place you want to be,” she said.

Federal and state officials also emphasized the importance of giving students “more time on task” — both by making sure they are attending school regularly and adding learning time.

That could mean adding time to the school day or year — a strategy many districts have struggled to pull off — or running substantial summer school programs that offer multiple hours of academic instruction per day.

Nearly half of school districts used the largest bucket of COVID relief funds to expand summer school, federal officials said, though already some have made cuts or made plans to do so.

Alabama’s state superintendent, Eric Mackey, said education officials in his state are working with lawmakers and the governor’s office to keep funding summer math and reading camps that have run for the last three years with pandemic aid. The state has provided meals, transportation, and connections to afternoon youth programming to help make it work.

“We’ve built enough momentum that our legislature said: ‘We know we can’t drop this,’” Mackey said. “We have to find a way to continue to fund it and sustain it going forward.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Nine education stories that defined 2023

2023-12-22T13:00:00+00:00

Three years after the COVID pandemic began, schools across America are still finding their new normal.

School communities are desperately trying to reduce chronically absent students, struggling with how to spend waning federal COVID relief dollars, implementing new “science of reading” laws, and waffling on how ChatGPT should (or should not) be a part of classrooms.

Below are nine storylines from Chalkbeat reporters across the country that dove into those topics. What education stories mattered most to you this year? We would love to hear from you at community@chalkbeat.org.

Jan. 3: NYC education department blocks ChatGPT, but later reverses course

AI is here to stay, so how will America’s schools respond? At the beginning of 2023, New York City opted to run far away, blocking access to the program and citing “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.” But a few months later, the city reversed course, with schools Chancellor David Banks proclaiming the city’s schools were “determined to embrace its potential.”

Now, just over a year after the tech group OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public, some students at New York City high schools report widespread use of AI-powered chatbots among their peers. The same patterns appear elsewhere. In one national survey from July, 44% of teenagers said they were likely to use AI-powered tools to complete their schoolwork, even though a majority considered it cheating.

March 10: Tutoring help reaches few students despite nationwide push

As America’s schools confront dramatic learning setbacks caused by the pandemic, experts have held up intensive tutoring as the single best antidote. Yet even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.

In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall. The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.

Library at Southport Elementary School in Perry Township in Southport, In. Indiana has joined a growing number of states that require schools to use curriculum materials that emphasize phonetic instruction when teaching children how to read.

May 25: Indiana’s new ‘science of reading’ law requires districts to adopt research-backed curriculum

Indiana joined a growing number of states that require schools to use curriculum materials that emphasize phonetic instruction when teaching children how to read. The new law came amid concern from lawmakers and education officials in Indiana and nationwide about elementary school students’ reading ability — an issue exacerbated by the pandemic.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to another critical component of reading: background knowledge, or the idea that students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement.

June 16: The ‘Tennessee 3′ created a historic teachable moment. Will schools be allowed to teach it?

Tennessee is at the front of a conservative-driven wave of censorship about what can and cannot be taught in K-12 schools. A 2021 state law restricts classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and slavery’s ongoing legacy.

This had real effects in Tennessee classrooms, students and teachers said, when two young Black Democrats were ousted by the House’s all-white GOP supermajority for staging a protest on the House floor urging gun reforms after a mass school shooting in Nashville. Rep. Justin Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones were later reinstated.

“We definitely have noticed that a silencing is happening in our schools,” said Ava Buxton, also a senior at Hume-Fogg, when asked whether the expulsions of Jones and Pearson had been discussed in her classes.

Emerging state data compiled by Chalkbeat suggests rises in students missing school did not come close to returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year.

August 31: One Detroit school’s multilayered effort to get absent students back to school

At one elementary-middle school in Detroit, a staggering 82% of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days. So, school leadership started a mentorship program, dispatched staff to students’ homes to help families solve problems contributing to absenteeism, and used data to track attendance patterns.

This school isn’t alone in battling poor student attendance. Emerging state data compiled by Chalkbeat suggests that the stunning rise in students missing school did not come close to returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year.

September 20: The pandemic is over. But American schools still aren’t the same.

Many students and educators say school is feeling more normal than it has in over three years. COVID health precautions have all but vanished. There’s less social awkwardness. Students say they’re over the novelty of seeing their classmates in person.

But beneath the surface, profound pandemic-era consequences persist. More students are missing school, and educators are scrambling to keep kids engaged in class. Nationally, many students remain far behind in math and reading where they would have been if not for the pandemic. There have been especially steep learning drops at schools that taught virtually for most of the 2020-21 school year. Learning loss is even more pressing for older students, who have less time to fill in those holes.

September 27: Roxborough High remembers Nicolas Elizalde, killed one year ago

One Philadelphia high school planted crocuses on the first anniversary of one of the most devastating events in the history of Roxborough High: a brutal shooting mere steps from the school that took the life of 14-year-old Nicolas Elizalde as he walked home from a football scrimmage at the field nearby.

During the last school year, 199 Philadelphia students were shot, and 33 of those died, district officials said. Nationwide, data confirms that school gun violence is pervasive — and spreading. The number of guns seized in schools and fired on school property has skyrocketed since before the pandemic, according to gun violence databases.

Nov. 21: Students want to talk about Israel and Gaza. Schools are struggling to keep up.

Both Muslim and Jewish students told Chalkbeat they’ve noticed an uptick in hurtful and derogatory comments from classmates at school or over social media, echoing a recent New York state review that found Islamophobic and antisemitic rhetoric have each jumped by more than 400% on social media since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliation.

Classrooms can feel like one of the few safe places to make sense of the Israel-Hamas war, learn about the historical underpinnings of the crisis, and try in some small way to take action, teens said. But schools are taking divergent approaches to navigating conversations about the war and in some cases largely avoiding it, according to interviews with educators and students at six high schools.

Graduates line up to receive their degrees during the graduation from Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Dec. 15: Is college worth it? A Colorado report aims to answer that question.

Is college worth it? It can be, but students need to have better information about what a college education can lead to. According to a recent Colorado report, residents who complete college fare much better than their counterparts. In fact, those who finish a bachelor’s degree greatly outearn residents with only a high school diploma by several hundred dollars a week.

The information in the report is crucial to help students make a decision about whether they should go to college, advocates said. They also say the state can go a step further by displaying more information that students can use, including which college programs benefit them the most.

Caroline Bauman is the deputy managing editor for engagement at Chalkbeat.

For some kids, returning to school post-pandemic means a daunting wall of administrative obstacles

2023-12-19T05:01:00+00:00

ATLANTA – It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.

After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.

Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could consistently wear masks.

After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.

Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule.

Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.

Obstacles on the road back to school

Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty — a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car — is in many cases preventing those children from going back.

“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,” says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. “I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”

In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children — twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents — a complicated certificate evaluating a child’s dental health, vision, hearing, and nutrition — is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta’s doing, including students’ Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.

The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.

“They make it so damned hard,” says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.

During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children’s school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.

The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. “When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,” Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.

Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)

Illustration depicting Tameka. A corrosive combination of re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty is keeping children out of schools.

Echoes of a partner’s death

Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.

His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says.

Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.

Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.

Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)

When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in Spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.

The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.”

When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.

The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.

After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.

When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.

“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.”

She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.

She shakes her head. “It’s a lot.”

Calls from the school — to a disconnected phone

Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.

Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.

The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren’t enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: “Discussed students’ attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.”

The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. “Mom given enrollment paperwork,” the entry ends.

The school’s logs don’t record any further attempts to contact Tameka.

“Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,” wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson.

Inconsistent cell phone access isn’t uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka’s family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with them becomes impossible.

So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers, and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.

Tameka says she’s unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she’s spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.

The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in Spring 2021. A staff member went to the family’s home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don’t mention further attempts.

The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka’s children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate, and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.

Tameka and her 8-year-old daughter talk on their porch in Atlanta on Dec. 5, 2023, about when she might start school. The little girl should be in second grade but has never attended school.

One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.

The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn’t see the point.

The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for “educational neglect.”

A complex history works against parents

To many observers, Tameka’s troubles stem from Atlanta’s rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country’s largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.

“It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside, you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia — and no one wants to talk about it,” says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.

Atlanta’s school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of “overcrowding,” while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn’t fill all of their seats.

The board cracked down on “residency fraud” to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.

“This was about balancing the number of students in schools,” says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. “But it was also about race and class.”

Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett, and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones.

But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies’ disruption of children’s educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.

The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools — especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress.

Other Atlanta parents face similar battles

The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.

Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn’t get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in Spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn’t have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.

“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared,” said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate.

Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don’t own their homes, Atlanta’s policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters.

Shawndrea Gay was told by her children’s school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. “They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,” she says. “It was no joke.”

Then, in Summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes’ help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started.

Tameka's 8-year-old daughter ties her shoe before running out to play. (AP Photo/Bianca Vázquez Toness)

Tameka hasn’t reached out for help getting her kids back in school. She doesn’t feel comfortable asking and doesn’t trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she says. “I’m a private person.”

On a typical school day, Tameka’s four children — now 14, 12, 9, and 8 — sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest — the girl who’s never been to school — has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.

The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m.

The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for “playing school” with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.

But even at 8, she understands that it’s not the real thing.

“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.”

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

How much school are Illinois students in foster care missing? The state doesn’t track.

2023-12-18T11:00:00+00:00

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Hundreds of Illinois’ most vulnerable students are falling behind in school through no fault of their own: The state simply doesn’t have enough homes for them.

Each year, hundreds of children in the state’s foster care system get stuck in limbo — in psychiatric facilities, juvenile detention centers, or even social workers’ offices — as caseworkers try to find suitable placements. The problem has become so intractable that people in legal circles refer to it as “placement crisis docket.”

Child welfare advocates have called this problem an egregious civil rights violation. Apart from issues of unlawful detainment, under federal law, all U.S. children are entitled to equal opportunities in education regardless of the status of their parents or guardians.

But the problem of kids stuck without a placement has only gotten marginally better since 2018, according to Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert and attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union. That’s when a ProPublica investigation found that nearly 30% of all Illinois children in foster care who were hospitalized for psychiatric conditions were kept in hospitals longer than was medically necessary.

In those situations, the most difficult-to-care-for kids — many of whom have faced severe emotional trauma due to abuse or neglect — receive about an hour of instruction a day, as a Department of Children and Family Services scrambles to find appropriate foster care placements in an overwhelmed system. Golbert called education in these psychiatric facilities “a joke.”

But keeping kids in psych wards months after they should have been released is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Illinois’ foster placement problems and the issues that cause youth in foster care to fall behind academically. For thousands of children who are supposed to be attending a school, simply being moved from one home to another can lead to missed school days, in part because school records are not always quickly transferred.

However, the state doesn’t compile and report data on absences and truancy for youth in foster care.

Both the Illinois State Board of Education and the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) responded to open records requests from Chalkbeat seeking that information by saying they had no applicable records. In follow-up emails, department officials said that data exists for individual school districts.

That makes it hard to know how much issues like inappropriate placements, placement transfers, or other problems contribute to foster youth falling behind in school.

But the numbers are clear in one respect: Foster care youth are trailing their peers on every academic measure that the state does track.

The main federal K-12 education law, reauthorized in 2015, requires states to track graduation rates and math and reading proficiency for foster care youth. According to the most recent state report card data for the 2022-23 school year:

56% of foster youth statewide graduated high school in four years, compared to 87.6% of Illinois students overall.
6.7% of foster youth statewide were proficient in math, compared to 26.9% of students statewide.
12.6% of foster youth statewide were proficient in reading and language arts, compared to 34.6% of students statewide.

Foster students’ outcomes are even lower in Chicago Public Schools, the largest district in the state. According to state data, 53.2% of foster students in CPS graduated in four years, 9.2% were proficient in reading, and 3.9% were proficient in math.

Chicago Public Schools did not respond to multiple inquiries from Chalkbeat seeking comment and interviews for this story.

Foster kids can miss a month or more of school

The number of foster children kept in hospitals beyond medical necessity over behavioral issues climbed steadily from 75 kids in 2014 to an all-time-high of 356 in 2021 before tapering off to 284 in fiscal year 2023, which ended June 30, state records show.

It’s a small percentage of the roughly 20,000 foster kids in Illinois — but the lack of suitable placements for kids like this has drawn intense scrutiny from advocates, lawmakers and others.

The state refers to these children as “BMN youth,” meaning they stay in hospitals “beyond medical necessity.” But this sanitized description fails to capture the suffering those youth experience.

In his role as Cook County public guardian, Golbert said he’s worked with children who have missed an entire semester or even a full year of school while they’ve waited for a placement.

“Even under the best of circumstances, as a practical matter, a month or more of missed school starts to become very difficult to make up by the start of the next semester,” Golbert said.

For example, Golbert recounted the story of a 15-year-old transgender boy who was psychiatrically hospitalized from Dec. 25, 2022, until Oct. 26, 2023 — close to a year — after his parents, who don’t respect his gender identity, refused to pick him up. During that time, he read every book available to him, but is currently a year behind in school because of his hospitalization.

Another 15-year-old student was only supposed to spend one month in the hospital. But he’s been there since January and is not receiving special education services to which he’s legally entitled. Instead, he gets an hour of school each day on the computer, where “he struggles to engage and has made little to no academic progress,” Golbert said.

DCFS Chief of Staff Jassen Strokosch said youth in foster care in psychiatric settings “need intensive treatment” and are a threat to themselves or others. That means the priority is getting them emotionally and mentally stable, and then finding a proper placement for them. Schooling comes later.

“It would be inappropriate to attempt to have a normal educational experience taking place within that setting. They’re just not ready for it,” Strokosch added. “Simply being [in a hospital beyond medical necessity] does not mean that they are also in a place where they’re capable of returning to a full-time educational curriculum.”

During the time youth stay in hospitals, they’re kept indoors for most of the day, receive minimal schooling, have limited ability to see friends and family, can’t have phones, and can’t participate in sports or other extracurricular activities, Golbert said.

In addition, they see other children going through acute psychiatric episodes and face the pain of seeing other kids their age picked up by family as they languish long past the date they were supposed to be released.

“It’s hard to think of a better way to tell a child, ‘You don’t matter,’ than keeping the child locked up in a psychiatric ward for months on end because [the state] has nowhere to place you,” Golbert wrote in a 2021 court filing about the issue.

DCFS attributes the dip to increasing placement capacity in a foster system that’s still roughly 500 beds short of the number Illinois had prior to a budget impasse between 2015 and 2017, when partisan political disputes led to state funding cuts that resulted in dozens of group home closures.

After that, the agency vowed to create new specialty foster homes for youth with severe emotional and behavioral problems. But few ever materialized, experts say.

“The reason we are seeing this problem is they don’t have sufficient community-based resources to keep kids in the most integrated [least restrictive] setting possible,” said attorney Heidi Dalenberg, who heads an institutional reform project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “It is a resource problem that has not yet been fixed, and it doesn’t work just to clear the pipeline every six months. That’s not a solution.”

Dalenberg argued that the real solution is offering more supports and services to families before there are cases of neglect — and offering more help to foster parents before they relinquish custody of children who are difficult to care for to the state.

That’s a key part of a new task force created by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in 2022 to deal with problems in the foster care system, and something that DCFS has been dedicating more resources toward.

But many advocates say the agency still has a long way to go.

Foster placement moves can prompt school transfers, missed days

When it comes to education, many foster children — not just those who are locked up in hospitals or jails — struggle to stay afloat, said Nora Collins-Mandeville, a colleague of Dalenberg’s who is a lead attorney in ongoing litigation about problems in the foster care system.

Kids may not show up to school because they’re struggling with emotional difficulties stemming from serious, unresolved trauma, she said. Or they might easily miss school days after being moved from one placement to another.

“Every time you move a kid, you are, by definition, knocking them back a ways,” Collins-Mandeville said.

To streamline the process and minimize class disruption as much as possible, state youth-in-care liaison Emma Bandy, who works for the Illinois State Board of Education, advises school districts and sometimes social workers and parents on best practices. The state guideline is that transferring foster youth to a new school shouldn’t take longer than three days, and there are special rules in place to expedite records transfers.

“We know when a child comes into care, they’re already experiencing such a disruption,” Bandy said. “It’s the instability and disruption when it comes to their school, family, social supports. This complex trauma can significantly affect them in a lot of ways.”

Three days for changing schools is already too long, Bandy said. But she said didn’t know how often the process might result in more than three missed school days.

From where he sits, Glenn Wood could tell her it’s not uncommon. The superintendent for the Plainfield Community Consolidated School District, Wood said foster placement transfers can often result in a week or two of missed school days. So not only are new students grappling with being in a new place, a new school and whatever trauma they may still be dealing with — but they’re already starting off behind.

“It rarely happens the next day,” said Wood, whose roughly 25,000-student school district is home to many foster youth.

Then there’s the challenge of helping them feel welcomed in a new school while teachers and guidance counselors work hard at establishing trust: “You can’t really do as much academically until kids feel safe and welcome at their school.”

On average, Illinois youth in foster care move to a new placement about every eight-and-a-half months, said Golbert. For a child that enters care as a baby and ages out of the system at 21, that’s almost 30 different placements.

The number of transfers is in line with the national average, according to state data, but some advocates say it’s still too many. Moving a student to a new school is often par for the course if social workers determine that the transfer is in the youth’s best interest, such as moving to a new part of the state to live with family rather than being in a large residential facility with many foster youth where they might have stayed at the same school.

“It’s really important that we look at whether the school district of origin where that child came from, or the new school district is the appropriate setting for them to be in,” said Strokosch, chief of staff for DCFS. “There’s a lot that goes into those decisions. It takes some time to figure out sometimes what’s in the best interest of that child, especially at the beginning of them coming into care where we don’t necessarily know that child and what their needs are.”

Strokosch stressed that caseworkers are actively engaged in every foster youth’s life, with more than 20 meetings over the course of a year and frequent communication.

A spokeswoman for ISBE said she didn’t immediately offer data showing how often foster placement changes might result in more than three days of missed school. In a follow-up email, DCFS spokeswoman Heather Tarczan said they have “educational advisors” and legal aides who provide oversight on schools sticking to best practices.

New collaboration on Illinois foster care spurs hope

Illinois’ foster care system has fallen under intense scrutiny in recent years for its failure to promptly find appropriate homes for youth. The problem fueled criticism, legislative hearings, and even lawsuits.

Earlier this year, DCFS Director Marc Smith announced he would resign at the end of the year. He was the 11th official to lead the troubled system in fewer than eight years.

But some child welfare advocates — Golbert included — say they have reason for hope.

Under Pritzker, the DCFS budget has nearly doubled climbing from a low of $1.07 billion after years of austerity to more than $1.88 billion planned for next fiscal year despite the rest of Illinois’ human services budget being cut 5%, by $544 million, in the latest budget signed in June.

“For the first time they can’t say it’s money,” Golbert said. “It’s a matter of having those resources translate into improved outcomes.”

Earlier this year, Pritzker’s office also announced plans to overhaul the state’s mental health and foster systems for youth. The blueprint calls for changes to foster care system capacity and cutting bureaucratic red tape to make it easier for youth and families to receive state services.

In August, Pritzker signed into law legislation — which cleared the legislature unanimously — creating a new position in state government to oversee Illinois’ effort to overhaul behavioral health services for foster youth.

The new law also streamlines cooperation between different state agencies meant to get help to foster youth and families quicker. Some experts consider this provision to be a key piece of Pritzker’s efforts.

It also broadens the support and placements community-based providers can offer to youth in crisis, increases transparency around staffing practices at residential and institutional facilities, and sets a goal of making a plan to offer annual mental health screenings to all K-12 students in the state.

Dana Weiner, a senior policy fellow for Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago who leads Pritzker’s task force on foster care issues, said the amount of cooperation she sees now between different agencies involved in foster care, including ISBE — along with the legislation signed into law in August and the funding DCFS now has at its disposal — give her hope.

“On both sides of the aisle there was so much support for help for families,” Weiner said. “I think people can really get behind this plan because it lays out a methodical data-driven approach to solving a set of problems.”

Schools may lose access to emergency hotel stays, a critical strategy to help homeless students

2023-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

This story was co-published with USA Today.

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SAN DIEGO — Each request in Linda Lee Garibay’s inbox offers a tiny glimpse into San Diego County’s housing crisis and its profound effect on kids.

On a Thursday in early November, a family with four children in the San Diego Unified School District had just been evicted. Another San Diego family with a 6-year-old needed to leave the trailer park where they’d been staying. In the Poway Unified district, a family of four needed a respite after sleeping in their car for over a month.

Lee Garibay, a project specialist for the San Diego County education office, reviewed each family’s situation, then helped to reserve them a free room at a Motel 6 close to their child’s school. She’s the engine behind what is likely the country’s largest emergency hotel stay program supporting students experiencing homelessness.

“You spend so much time dealing with families that need help and not having anything to give them,” said Susie Terry, who coordinates homeless education services for San Diego County. “I had homeless liaisons who were just like, ‘This is the first time I feel like I actually have some real help to offer.’”

San Diego’s Project Rest and other programs like it exemplify the way schools are increasingly expanding their work beyond teaching and learning to meet the basic needs of students and their families. Hotel stays have become a crucial strategy for schools seeking to address rising student homelessness and chronic absenteeism. They are also unprecedented: Never before have schools had the money and permission to offer this kind of material aid at such a scale.

School staff and advocates for homeless youth say these programs have been transformative: The stability they provide boosts school attendance and allows kids to focus on their schoolwork. But despite their impact, programs like Project Rest are at risk of disappearing.

That’s because many are funded with federal pandemic aid for homeless students that goes away next school year, and along with it, special spending rules that allow for hotel stays. Federal officials have said schools cannot use the federal funds they typically receive to help homeless students on short-term housing, such as hotel stays.

Terry is searching for funding alternatives, but isn’t hopeful.

“I think it’s a shame,” she said, “because it’s desperately needed.”

Linda Lee Garibay at a park in Chula Vista, California. Lee Garibay is a project specialist for the San Diego County education office who books free short-term hotel stays for families.

Why schools are turning to hotels to help homeless kids

Before the pandemic, Terry got the occasional call from a school liaison asking if the county education office could do anything to help a family that needed a place to stay. All she could do was refer them to other agencies, where families often had to wait for housing. The federal McKinney-Vento program that provides funds for homeless students has a miniscule budget and doesn’t allow for short-term hotel stays.

So when the federal government gave states and schools $800 million in COVID aid to help homeless students — eight times what they’d usually get in a year — plus instructions that they could use that money for short-term housing assistance, Terry decided to hire a staffer and launch the hotel program.

She knew there would be high demand. More than 20,000 homeless students lived in San Diego County during the 2021-22 school year, state data show. That meant 4.3% of students did not have a fixed and adequate place to stay at night, compared with the national average of 2.4%.

But even Terry sorely underestimated the need. Initially, her team expected one or two requests a week. They typically get 10 a day.

“It was shocking,” she said.

Since the program launched 20 months ago, it has housed more than 1,200 families. Together, San Diego County’s education office and a dozen local school districts have spent around $640,000 to run it. On a single day in November, 64 students and their families were staying at hotels through the program.

In the past, schools typically advised families in need of housing to call the county’s social services helpline. But they were unlikely to get into a shelter within a day, or even a week. So parents and kids often slept in their cars or on the street while they waited. Now, through Project Rest, families can check into a hotel room within 24 hours.

Students have needed a hotel stay for all kinds of reasons, Lee Garibay says. Many were staying with family or friends and were asked to leave with little warning.

Some need a break from sleeping in their cars. San Diego’s safe parking program offers security, but no showers, and even those lots have waitlists.

Others are fleeing domestic violence. Some stay with family during the week, but need lodging on weekends. Some saw their homes destroyed by a fire or landslide.

And this fall, Lee Garibay helped a 17-year-old with a 2-week-old baby after they ran out of days at a local shelter and had nowhere else to go.

Many shelters and housing resources cater to single adults, so it can be “transformative” when schools can find housing for families, said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of homeless youth.

“It’s a critical intervention at this moment,” she said.

Related: As families struggle to find housing, more schools are hiring staff to help. The clock is ticking.

How hotel stays can help homeless students

A key feature of the program is that families are offered all kinds of support while they stay at the hotel. Families often enroll in CalFresh, which helps low-income families pay for food, and get connected with a housing case manager.

Some families have cried when they found out a person would help them look for housing, Terry said. The county education office doesn’t keep data on how many families find stable housing, but case workers are sometimes successful. In early November, a social worker in the South Bay Union School District wrote to Lee Garibay that a family could check out of their motel room because an agency had found them permanent housing. “That’s what we like to hear!” Lee Garibay exclaimed.

The program can also lead to kids getting more support at school.

Some families who’ve stayed in hotels weren’t identified as homeless by their school before — often because they were afraid to let the staff know — and didn’t realize their child is legally entitled to stay at their school and receive transportation, even if they move.

Julia Sutton, a social worker for the Chula Vista Elementary School District in California, looks over homes and an industrial area near Finney Elementary in late November.

Social workers in the Chula Vista Elementary School District, for example, make sure families staying at a hotel know about other services the district can offer, whether that’s priority access to before- and after-school programs, trauma-informed counseling for their child, or reimbursement for driving to school.

Lee Garibay logs the information of every family who uses the program — how many kids they have, what schools they attend, what help they need — in a giant blue spreadsheet. If a family uses the program for a second time, Lee Garibay looks at which resources they were connected with and tries to figure out what helped — and what didn’t.

“We work in education, we don’t work in housing,” she said. “But at the same time, from my perspective, if we don’t help assist them with housing, how are we going to make sure that they are stable in their education?”

The Chula Vista Elementary School District has become one of the county’s top referrers to the program. They’ve housed 55 families in hotels since the start of the school year.

Located just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the district of 29,000 serves families who live in million-dollar homes and families who sleep in store parking lots. The community has no family shelter or official safe parking program. Depending on traffic, the nearest shelter that accepts children can be over an hour away by car — a trip many families can’t afford in San Diego County, where gas prices are much higher than the national average.

Additionally, the rising cost of food and rent since the pandemic and an increase in asylum-seeking families crossing the border have intensified housing needs, school staff say.

On left, backpacks that social worker Julia Sutton keeps for children who need them at Finney Elementary.

Julia Sutton is one of eight social workers who works with students experiencing homelessness in the district. Academics improve when kids have lights to do their homework, Sutton said, and they’re sleeping on a bed, not crunched up in the car.

Knowing they have a place to stay can put children at ease. Sutton recalls one student who came up to her in early November to excitedly report: “I heard we have more nights at the hotel!” Mothers have told the social workers that when their kids see the Motel 6 has a pool, it helps them feel like they’re not in crisis, if only for a little while.

“It’s only 15 days, but it’s more stable than jumping from place to place each night,” Sutton said. “They’re still in crisis, but at least they’re getting to school every day and there is a deeper sense of community with your school. They feel supported.”

Making sure kids and families feel safe

In San Diego, Project Rest is a partnership between the county education office and San Diego Youth Services, a nonprofit that supports youth experiencing homelessness and has a corporate contract with Motel 6. The streamlined process is easier for service providers to navigate than working with individual hotels, said Gillian Leal, a program manager for the organization.

A family needs a government-issued ID to check in, but doesn’t have to put down a credit card for damages. That arrangement is crucial. For one, many families don’t have a credit card. And there’s no chance that a paperwork glitch will result in a canceled room.

The San Diego program allows families to stay at a hotel for five nights at a time. If their school district is contributing funds, they can stay for up to 15. But elsewhere, school districts have been hesitant to allow hotel stays for that long.

Gillian Leal, program manager for San Diego Youth Services' TAY Academy, sorts through clothing donations meant to support youth experiencing homelessness on Monday, Nov. 27.

When U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona first issued guidance for the $800 million in COVID aid in early 2021, he wrote that the funds could be used for short-term, temporary housing, such as “a few days in a motel.” Many school officials interpreted that to mean two or three days, although Terry said that short time frame can make it hard to get families help in a compassionate way.

This fall, after nearly two dozen education organizations, including SchoolHouse Connection, urged the U.S. Department of Education to explicitly permit longer motel stays, a top official issued a clarification that the length of short-term housing provided could vary based on families’ circumstances and other factors.

Similar programs exist elsewhere. In Ohio, Cincinnati Public Schools partners with a local nonprofit that serves homeless youth to house families at a Quality Inn along a public bus route. They’ve housed more than 220 families at the hotel over the last year and a half.

In central Florida, Gigi Salce, a wraparound services specialist for the School District of Osceola County, has worked with Stayable Suites and Rodeway Inn. The partnership has helped families get off housing wait lists and kept kids from sleeping in Walmart parking lots.

And on California’s Central Coast, the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District has housed 63 families through its partnership with Motel 6 over the last year and a half. Donnie Everett, an assistant superintendent who oversees support services for the district, said the program has boosted attendance and kept students on track for graduation.

But there are some challenges beyond schools’ control.

If the area is a tourism destination, rooms can fill up quickly. In San Diego, for example, the program is harder and more expensive to run during the annual Pride Festival and Comic-Con. Rural areas, like San Diego’s mountainous East County, are less likely to have hotels near schools. And some hotels are deterred by the possibility of damages or last-minute cancellations.

“It was a bit of a struggle to find the right hotel that would accept families,” said Katie Jensen of UpSpring, the nonprofit that books rooms for Cincinnati students. “People don’t necessarily want homeless families on their properties.”

School districts may not be able to afford their hotel stay programs once they exhaust federal COVID relief funds. In an email, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said those relief dollars could be used for short-term housing because social distancing rules meant shelters weren’t available to many families. That’s no longer the case — and if McKinney-Vento program funds were spent on housing, they would quickly be exhausted, leaving little to provide for students’ educational needs, the spokesperson said.

The McKinney-Vento program, which focuses on making sure homeless students have access to the same educational opportunities as their peers, is around $100 million a year for the whole country, compared with $800 million in pandemic assistance for homeless students.

Everett in Monterey is working to secure private funding for his district’s program. Terry is looking to see if she can tap into county or state funds to keep a smaller version of their program alive.

Some states have decided to step in. Maine started a pilot program this year that gives schools emergency money to prevent student homelessness, and one allowable use is a short-term hotel stay. Since 2016, Washington state has offered grants to provide stability to homeless students that can be used on hotel stays of up to three months.

A school bus outside Finney Elementary on Friday, Nov. 3. The school is part of the Chula Vista Elementary School District, which has housed dozens of families in hotels this year.

Mary Jane Palacios, the assistant manager of a Motel 6 that works with Project Rest, says hotels and motels that partner with schools need to make sure their properties are welcoming, and treat families with empathy and dignity.

At her location in Chula Vista, for example, if a family leaves behind their belongings, the staff will hold items for up to 30 days.

“We know you have a whole life inside of that room,” she said.

Palacios experienced homelessness as a child, and remembers what it felt like to walk out of a hotel with her mother and to be bullied at school.

“I totally get where a lot of the struggling moms are coming from, I totally get where the kids are coming from,” said Palacios, who watches each morning as families fan out in different directions from the Motel 6 parking lot, some running to catch the trolley to go to school.

So while she tells families to remember that their circumstances are temporary, she also stocks the pool chest with floaties for kids to play with. She makes sure the hotel is decked out with spider webs and candy for Halloween. And in December, her staff hands out hot cocoa and decorates a real Christmas tree.

“I like to put that out for the kids,” Palacios said, “because I wish those programs were there for us when we were little.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

How Detroit community groups are helping schools chip away at chronic absenteeism

2023-11-29T00:44:26+00:00

Sixth grader Ke’Von Thomas and a group of classmates at Detroit’s Durfee Elementary-Middle School sat around a cafeteria table one day last month, running through a list of 10 back-to-school tips and vying to see who had completed the most.

“Early to bed, early to rise,” was the first tip. Others included “establish a routine,” “organize your backpack,” and “limit screen time.”

Ke’Von, 11, said he had accomplished three tips since the school year started, and surveyed the others. “I did No. 1. You did No. 2,” he told one of the other boys. “Who else did No. 2?”

Across from him, seventh grader Miguel Perkins said he had followed five of the tips.

The list and the exercise came from The Konnection, a community group that’s working with Detroit schools to help motivate students to show up for school and “move the needle” on chronic absenteeism. Founder Sharnese Marshall uses the lesson early in the school year to reinforce positive attendance and academic habits with 20 middle school students who participate in a biweekly after-school program at Durfee.

In a city with sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism — meaning students who miss 18 school days a year or more — community groups like The Konnection have taken on some of the work of trying to improve student attendance. Churches, after-school programs, health centers, and other groups have provided services such as driving students to and from school, conducting home visits and phone calls, and building connections with families.

These groups don’t necessarily have the resources to attack what experts agree is the root cause of chronic absenteeism: Detroit’s widespread poverty, whose ripple effects include health problems, housing instability, and job barriers. So it’s hard to determine what impact they’re having on the broader problem.

Nonetheless, they have become an essential complement to the efforts by school officials and education advocates to improve attendance. With initiatives targeted at specific schools, neighborhoods, or family needs, they’re chipping away at a problem that has long undermined efforts to improve student achievement. And school leaders and district officials are embracing some of their efforts and strategies as part of their approach to reducing chronic absenteeism citywide.

Sarah Lenhoff, a Wayne State University education professor whose research includes studies of student attendance, says there’s room for still more community groups and local agencies to get involved at the root-cause level.

“Poverty alleviation, employment, job training, housing stability — these are major factors in whether kids can get to school,” Lenhoff said. “Outside organizations that are working on those issues, even if it’s not connected to the school system, could also make a difference.”

Ke’Von Thomas, 11, center, raises his hand during a wrap-up session during Konnection Klub at Detroit's Durfee Elementary-Middle School on Oct. 19.

DPSCD attendance plan evolves

Community groups have been working with Detroit school communities on absenteeism for more than a decade. But the Detroit Public Schools Community District formalized and standardized their role in attendance interventions beginning in 2018-19, a couple of years after the district emerged from state control.

Related: Detroit community groups have a long record of attendance work

That year, DPSCD outlined a plan that called for a holistic approach to improving attendance through wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnerships with community organizations. The plan fell in line with growing consensus among advocates and national experts that districts should collaborate with local partners to support school-based attendance interventions.

Partly as a result of that plan, DPSCD reduced its chronic absenteeism rate to 62% at the end of 2018-19, from 70% the previous year.

The pandemic not only erased that progress, but raised the urgency of improving attendance: If students didn’t show up for class, they would struggle to recover what they lost academically during a year or more of online schooling.

And the effects of excessive absenteeism linger for years, research shows. Students who miss a lot of school are likely to struggle to stay on top of classwork, perform worse on standardized tests, and are more likely to drop out. Chronically absent students are also likely to miss out on high-dosage tutoring and other interventions school systems have prioritized in recent years to counter learning loss.

A 2022 study by the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research found that the district’s 2018-19 attendance plan, while showing early success, “only partially addressed chronic absenteeism as an ecological issue, implicitly downplaying structural and material barriers that families faced.”

It’s those systemic issues, Lenhoff said, that require better coordination between the district and city agencies and social services organizations, such as welfare and employment programs, and housing organizations.

She points to FosterEd Arizona, a child welfare program that coordinated with schools to improve attendance among foster youth, as well as a multiyear attendance effort in New York City that collaborated with city social service agencies. In both cases, school attendance data guided the implementation of interventions.

“There’s potential to really make a difference if we got more groups involved in the community development space who are working on housing, poverty, and unemployment, to be thinking about how might we track the attendance of the families that we’re working with and demonstrate that work like this could be beneficial,” Lenhoff said.

DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said that because of federal education privacy laws, the district has to work within some limits on how much information it can share with outside social service groups. It does share attendance data with some community groups that provide programming for students, such as City Year and Communities in Schools, he said.

But that’s not possible for all groups without getting permission from individual families or through clearance. It is unclear how the Arizona and New York programs have been able to share attendance data with social service agencies.

“We could envision our district portal system providing access to partners so they can respond to negative attendance trends,” Vitti said. “However, this would take signoff from families and significant upgrades to the system we are building now. This would be impossible without a robust technology system. You cannot rely on spreadsheets to make this work.”

Middle school students make bracelets after completing their homework during Konnection Klub at Detroit's Durfee Elementary-Middle School.

Since the start of the pandemic, DPSCD officials have rapidly expanded their wraparound services for some of the most marginalized families, embracing the kinds of projects that community groups have been tackling in specific communities.

With the help of $4.5 million in philanthropic donations, DPSCD is launching 12 school-based health hubs across the city over the next several years to address the lack of student access to health care, a major barrier to consistent attendance.

At the health hubs, students, families, and community members can get physical, mental, and dental health services through current partnerships with Henry Ford Health and Ascension. They also have access to food pantry items and legal support.

One of the first few health hubs opening this year is at Durfee and Central High School, which share a building in the city’s Dexter-Linwood neighborhood. At the sites that are already open, families have been making health appointments and picking up health essentials like toilet paper, soap, and toothbrushes.

“We believe in whole child commitment,” Alycia Meriweather, DPSCD deputy superintendent of external partnerships and innovation, said at a recent community meeting on the new initiative.

The Konnection responds to lack of basic supplies

Durfee and Central have among the highest absenteeism rates within DPSCD: 82% at Durfee last year, and 91% at Central. It’s why Marshall and The Konnection began working there as far back as 2020.

Some students told Marshall they were not showing up to school because they didn’t have personal hygiene products or clean clothes. Others said school is boring, or they’re behind on work and don’t have the support to catch up.

On top of those challenges, in-school factors such as student-teacher relationships, bullying and safety concerns also create barriers to attendance.

Marshall responded to those needs by throwing quarterly attendance celebrations at Durfee, and setting up a school-based resource closet at Central, stocked with supplies students need to feel comfortable coming to school.

In the past year, the program’s closet served 275 high school students.

“Bullying is a real thing,” Marshall said. “Kids are bullied every single day because they don’t have the nicest clothes, or because they don’t smell the freshest.”

Enrichment programs help students stay motivated

They also launched the after-school Konnection Klub at Durfee, with enrichment programs that make coming to school more engaging. Several studies find that student participation in out-of-school programs can improve regular school attendance, encouraging students to show up to class.

This year, The Konnection is collaborating with local entrepreneurs and colleges to help students explore career opportunities in culinary arts, podcasting, fashion design, and transit services. Students in the after-school program also receive mentoring from community volunteers, practice social-emotional learning activities, and attend field trips to city sports and holiday events.

Mikaela Pugh, left, and The Konnection founder and CEO Sharnese Marshall work through a budget activity put on by Laurie Rivetto of Michigan State University Extension at Durfee.

“Schools may be supporting (students) academically,” Marshall said, “but enrichment programs can help you mentally and emotionally. They can help you in other ways that other partners can’t.”

Marshall worked with Durfee’s attendance agent and teachers to select participants who could most benefit from the program’s offering. They sought a mix of students who are chronically absent and those who are not.

“We want the students who are not there to feel supported by the leaders of the school who are showing up and who do understand the assignments,” she said. “We try to find a couple in each grade who are great students and do have support at home so that they’re able to pull the other kids up.”

Ke’Von (pronounced “kay-vaughn”), one of the students with strong grades and near-perfect attendance, had been eager to join the program since last year, when he was in fifth grade.

Leona Wright, an eighth grader at Durfee, was one of the students who needed the added support. She has routinely missed school on Mondays and Fridays this year, days her mother, Shavonne Jones, has to work late.

Jones works as a cook in a nursing home in Bloomfield Hills, about a 30-minute drive from Durfee. She says that between her and her fiancé's work schedules, it has been difficult to consistently get Leona to school on days they are both working.

“On Mondays, I have to be at work at 6 in the morning,” she said. “Then on Fridays, I go to work at 10:30, so I can take her to school but I won’t be able to pick her back up from school.”

Jones added: “There’s just a lot of difficulties with that. My job is understanding sometimes, but most jobs don’t want you to leave like that during the day.”

The family lives outside of the school’s boundary for yellow bus transportation as well, and Jones isn’t comfortable with her daughter riding the city bus.

One week in November, Leona was sick with the flu, prompting Jones to stay home from work to take care of her.

Marshall has sought out different solutions to some students’ transportation barriers, offering families Uber gift cards, asking volunteers to offer rides, or directing families to resources already available via the district, such as free bus passes.

Running the after-school program until 5:30, she added, provides some flexibility to families who can’t make the regular afternoon pickup time.

Eight grader Leona Wright, 13, works on a computer program during Konnection Klub at Durfee.

“It definitely helps the parents who are working, because a lot of times the kids are going home by themselves or they’re just hanging out in school,” Marshall said.

Leona says she’d rather be at school than at home. Prior to this year, she was homeschooled for four years and missed connecting with other students in person. Back at Durfee, she’s excited about trying out for the school’s cheer team and studying math, science, and social studies.

And she was eager to join The Konnection. “I wanted to make friends and experience my life and go on field trips,” she said.

The Konnection hopes to extend its reach

With a small team, Marshall has leaned on the support of roughly 150 volunteers in the past year to operate the resource closet, mentor students, and host attendance celebrations. She’s hoping The Konnection’s efforts can make more of a difference at Durfee. Last year’s chronic absenteeism rate was down 12 percentage points from the previous year, mirroring a decline across the district as quarantine restrictions eased.

“It’s still very high, but we’re making strides to be able to get that down,” she said.

She wants to see the program reengage younger students who may already feel disenchanted with school, or who might have lacked access to the resources, instruction, and extracurriculars the program provides.

In addition to attendance rates, The Konnection also tracks grade improvements, personal confidence, and “students’ desire to want to come to school.”

In a survey at the end of 2022-23, she added, 95% of club participants said they felt more motivated to attend school after being in the program.

This year, Marshall’s team is looking to reach at least 1,000 students across all its programs. They’re in the process of setting up a second resource closet at Durfee, and strengthening their relationships with community members outside the school.

The ultimate goal is still the same, she said: that “100% of our students will be on track in terms of attendance.”

“We’re trying to just bridge the gap where we can,” she said. “Until the policies are changed in order to ensure that our kids and our families are really taken care of and they’re not left out, the same issues will continue to perpetuate.”

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit community groups have a long record of attendance work

2023-11-28T23:30:00+00:00

Community groups have been working with Detroit school communities on absenteeism for more than a decade. Despite their limited staff and budgets, they help fill gaps in the strategies schools and the district use to improve student attendance, focusing on specific barriers, such as inconsistent transportation, food insecurity, and lack of clean clothes.

Every School Day Counts, a coalition of community organizations and schools across the city, has been at it since 2012. Early on, Rev. Larry Simmons and other church leaders involved in the group volunteered to drive students to and from school.

Lawrence Hood partnered with the group on transportation services when he was principal at Detroit Innovation Academy, a charter school on the city’s west side.

“We had scholars that were missing 10 days before the second quarter even began,” Hood recalled. Later on, he added, the school recruited workers from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to provide medical and dental services to families who regularly missed school for appointments.

From 2012 to 2014, when Hood ran Detroit Innovation Academy, the chronic absenteeism rate declined by about five percentage points, to 51.5%.

Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, a nonprofit based in Southwest Detroit, partnered with area schools to offer a range of after-school programs, including gymnastics, cooking, gardening, and art classes, said Alejandra Gomez, an education director at UNI. The group is now part of Every School Day Counts.

UNI spent years tracking attendance data across its after-school and youth employment programs and now has a team of 10 AmeriCorps members mentoring chronically absent students and assisting families in finding resources.

“Many of the parents have shared that it’s really difficult for them to pick up their kids right after school since they’re working, and so being able to have the opportunity to be able to pick them up a little bit later has been good for them,” Gomez said.

John Broad, founder of Helping Kids Go To School, sought out volunteers from Detroit-area churches to work as “attendance coaches,” mentoring families struggling to get their kids to school. The strategy, he said, drew inspiration from a similar concept in Hawaii.

From 2019 to 2021, the mentoring program helped Mackenzie Elementary-Middle School reduce its chronic absenteeism rate from 70% to 47.7%.

The following year, though, the rate surged to 84%, amid strict quarantine requirements. Broad said the group is eager to dig deeper into its work at Mackenzie and other schools, but has struggled recently to scale its volunteer staff.

“We may end up having to pay coaches a small stipend to help and maybe shorten hours to eight hours a week,” he said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

How many missed days of school are too many? Here’s what you need to know about attendance.

2023-11-21T17:02:00+00:00

Leer en español.

You might have seen recent headlines about the growing number of kids missing school.

In Colorado, just this fall, state officials said almost a third of students are chronically absent. The number has gone up significantly since the pandemic and schools are struggling to figure out how to get kids to return to classes.

Kids might miss school for a number of reasons, including for work, an illness, a lack of transportation, or to care for younger siblings. Absences also go up near the holidays as families go on vacation and figure a few missed school days can’t hurt.

But, regardless of the reason, research shows consistently missing school can affect a child’s learning. Missed days can add up more quickly than you think. Here’s what you should know:

What’s the big deal? Why is missing school such a problem?

When kids miss school, they miss out on learning opportunities. Just a couple of missed days might mean a child can fall behind on several topics or lessons, and sometimes, there isn’t a good way for them to easily catch up.

Research shows that students who miss a lot of school are more likely to not be able to read on grade level by third grade, and later on are more likely to fail classes and drop out of school.

“Attendance matters and being engaged in learning matters,” said Johann Liljengren, director of dropout prevention and student reengagement at the Colorado Department of Education.

Schools also stress attendance when Count Day comes up in October. Students must be enrolled and present in school during the window, so they can be counted and so the school receives state money for that student.

So, how many missed school days are too many?

The research that links bad outcomes to missing school usually looks at students missing just 10% of school time.

In Colorado, that would mean about two days a month, or about one day every other week. Over the course of the school year, that would add up to missing a whole month of school.

And in schools where classes are only four days per week, it’s even easier to reach that 10% of missed time.

What is chronic absenteeism?

A student who is missing 10% of school time is considered chronically absent.

The state tracks percentages of how many students are chronically absent in a school or district. It’s a measure that can signal inequities among different groups of students and can be a red flag that shows students need more support.

But what if the absences are excused?

In short, it doesn’t matter. When research looks at school absences, both excused and unexcused missed days still have the same results because students are missing new lessons either way.

When the state counts who is chronically absent, it also doesn’t matter if those absences are excused or unexcused.

Can children or parents end up in court over missed school?

It can happen. In this case, whether an absence is excused or not does matter.

State law says that a school district can identify a student as “truant” when they have more than 10 unexcused absences in the year, or four in a month. The law doesn’t say that students have to be sent to truancy court, and many school districts will try sending parents warnings and will try to help find other solutions first.

If you get a letter from your school saying that your child is at risk of being designated as truant, the best thing to do is to talk to your school. Not communicating could lead schools to think the issue isn’t being taken seriously and to involve the courts.

I need help or I want to talk about my case with someone. Who can help?

Your first stop should be your child’s school. It will be important to talk through the barriers for your child to attend school every day. The school can then point to services within or outside of the school that might help.

For example, schools might connect a student to tutoring if they aren’t in school because they feel like they’re struggling, or might connect a family to services if the problem is related to issues with housing or health care.

Some schools have had creative solutions including pairing students so they can walk to school with a buddy who can hold them accountable, and make them feel safer than being alone.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Estudiantes en Colorado están faltando mucho a la escuela. ¿Cuánto es demasiado?

2023-11-21T17:02:00+00:00

Read in English.

Quizás hayas visto titulares recientes sobre el creciente número de estudiantes que faltan a la escuela.

En Colorado, solo este otoño, representantes estatales dijeron que casi un tercio de los estudiantes ha estado crónicamente ausentes. La cantidad ha aumentado significativamente desde la pandemia, y las escuelas están enfrentando desafíos para hacer que los estudiantes regresen a la escuela.

Los niños faltan a la escuela por varias razones, incluido por trabajo, enfermedad, falta de transporte o para cuidar a hermanos menores. Las ausencias también aumentan cerca de las temporadas festivas cuando las familias se van de vacaciones y piensan que un par de días sin ir a la escuela no daña a nadie.

Sin embargo, sin importar la razón, estudios demuestran que faltar a la escuela continuamente puede afectar el aprendizaje de un niño. Las faltas escolares pueden acumularse más rápido de lo pensado. Esto es lo que debes saber:

¿Cuál es el problema? ¿Por qué es malo faltar a la escuela?

Cuando los niños faltan a la escuela, pierden la oportunidad de aprovechar oportunidades para aprender. Solo un par de ausencias pueden resultar en que un estudiante se retrase en varios temas o lecciones y, a veces, no hay una buena manera de ponerse al día.

Estudios demuestran que los estudiantes que faltan mucho a la escuela tienen mayor probabilidad de no poder leer a nivel de grado en tercer grado, y más tarde tienen mayor probabilidad de reprobar sus clases y abandonar los estudios.

“La asistencia importa y participar [activamente] en el aprendizaje importa”, dijo Johann Liljengren, director de prevención del abandono escolar y reincorporación estudiantil con el Departamento de Educación de Colorado.

Las escuelas también remarcan la asistencia cuando el Día del conteo se realiza en octubre. Los estudiantes deben estar inscritos y presentes en la escuela durante ese período para que se los pueda contar, y así la escuela recibe dinero del estado por cada uno de esos estudiantes.

Entonces, ¿cuántas ausencias escolares son demasiadas?

Los estudios que conectan resultados negativos con las ausencias escolares usualmente examinan a estudiantes que faltan a la escuela solo el 10 por ciento del tiempo.

En Colorado, eso quiere decir como dos días al mes, o alrededor de un día cada dos semanas. A lo largo del año escolar, eso significa faltar a la escuela durante todo un mes.

Y en escuelas donde las clases son solo cuatro días por semana, es aún más fácil faltar el 10 por ciento del tiempo.

¿Qué significa estar crónicamente ausente?

A un estudiante que falta a la escuela el 10 por ciento del tiempo se lo considera como crónicamente ausente.

El estado monitorea los porcentajes de cuántos estudiantes están crónicamente ausentes en una escuela o en un distrito escolar. Es un dato que puede indicar desigualdades entre los diversos grupos de estudiantes y ser una señal de alarma que muestra que los estudiantes necesitan más apoyo.

¿Pero qué pasa si las ausencias son permitidas?

En pocas palabras, no importa. Cuando los estudios examinan las ausencias escolares, las faltas permitidas y no permitidas llevan a los mismos resultados porque los estudiantes pierden la oportunidad de aprender lecciones nuevas de una u otra forma.

Cuando el estado cuenta quién está crónicamente ausente, tampoco importa si esas ausencias son permitidas o no permitidas.

¿Pueden niños o padres terminar en la corte por faltar a la escuela?

Puede suceder. En este caso, sí importa que la ausencia sea permitida o no permitida.

Las leyes del estado dicen que un distrito escolar puede identificar a un estudiante como “ausente habitual” (en inglés: truant) cuando tiene más de 10 ausencias no permitidas al año, o cuatro en un mes. La ley no dice que se tenga que enviar al estudiante a un tribunal por absentismo habitual, y muchos distritos escolares tratan de enviar advertencias a los padres y ayudarlos primero a encontrar otras soluciones.

Si recibes una carta de tu escuela que dice que tu hijo está en riesgo de ser designado como un estudiante habitualmente ausente, lo mejor que puedes hacer es hablar con la escuela. La falta de comunicación puede causar que las escuelas piensen que el problema no se está tomando en serio y que involucren a los tribunales.

Necesito ayuda o quiero hablar sobre mi caso con alguien. ¿Quién me puede ayudar?

Tu primera parada debe ser la escuela de tu hijo. Es importante hablar sobre los obstáculos que tu hijo enfrenta para asistir a la escuela todos los días. La escuela puede recomendar servicios dentro o fuera de la escuela que pueden ayudarte.

Por ejemplo, las escuelas pueden conectar a un estudiante con servicios de tutoría si no va a la escuela porque siente que tiene dificultades para aprender, o conectar a la familia con servicios si el problema está relacionado con desafíos de vivienda o servicios de salud.

Algunas escuelas han desarrollado soluciones creativas, como conectar a un estudiante con otro, para que caminen juntos a la escuela y lo ayude a cumplir con sus responsabilidades, y también para que el estudiante se sienta más seguro que estando solo.

Yesenia Robles es una reportera para Chalkbeat Colorado, cubriendo distritos escolares de kindergarten a 12º grado y la educación multilingüe. Comunícate con Yesenia por correo electrónico a yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Traducido por Alejandra X. Castañeda

Influx of asylum seekers pushes NYC’s homeless student population to record high

2023-11-01T10:00:00+00:00

The number of homeless students attending New York City schools reached a record high last year after thousands of asylum-seeking families entered the city’s shelter system, a new analysis shows.

Roughly 1 in 9 students were living in shelters, “doubled up” with relatives or friends, or otherwise without permanent housing at some point in the school year, according to state data compiled by Advocates for Children, a group that supports the city’s most vulnerable students.

The city’s population of homeless students was astronomical even before the recent influx, with the number of kids lacking permanent housing exceeding 100,000 for each of the past eight years – a stark indication of the city’s ongoing housing crisis.

But the sudden arrival of thousands of families fleeing dire conditions in Latin America and other parts of the world pushed the figure to nearly 120,000 last school year — a 14% increase over the previous school year. It’s an all-time high, even as the city’s overall student enrollment has plummeted, according to Advocates for Children, which has been crunching this number annually for more than a decade.

The number is likely to be even higher by the end of this school year. Roughly 12,500 new students in temporary housing have enrolled in city schools since July, according to an Education Department spokesperson.

“Our young people experiencing homelessness are some of our most vulnerable students, and it is our on-going priority to provide them with every support and resource at our disposal,” spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement.

The increase has profound implications for city schools.

Homeless students face significant educational roadblocks, from the added logistical challenges of getting to school from distant shelters to the trauma that comes with losing permanent housing.

An astounding 72% of students living in homeless shelters were marked chronically absent last year — meaning they missed at least 18 days of school, according to data compiled by Advocates for Children. For all students in temporary housing, including those living doubled up, the rate was 54%, and for kids in permanent housing, it was 39%.

Students living in shelters were also more than four times as likely as kids with permanent housing to transfer schools last year, and less than half as likely to score proficient on state reading exams, according to the data.

Advocates fear the number of school transfers will spike even higher this year due to a new city rule that requires families in some shelters to exit the system every 60 days and either find alternative housing or re-apply for shelter. Families that re-apply would have no guarantee of ending up in the same shelter or even the same borough.

Mayor Eric Adams said the new policy is necessary to relieve severe overcrowding in shelters and free up space for new arrivals. He promised the city would work to ensure that students don’t have to transfer schools whenever possible.

Students who end up in homeless shelters far from their schools are entitled under federal law to transportation so they don’t have to transfer, but given the difficulty of coordinating the rides and the stress of the long commutes on families, that often amounts to “a right in name only,” said Jennifer Pringle, the director of Advocates for Children’s Learners in Temporary Housing project.

An Education Department spokesperson said district superintendents will ensure that transportation requests from homeless students are prioritized.

Schools go all out to help homeless students

Schools often devote considerable resources to supporting families in temporary housing with everything from transportation to basic needs like laundry.

At VOICE charter school in Long Island City, Queens, a sudden explosion of enrollment of students in shelters transformed educators’ approach to working with families.

Historically, the K-8 school enrolled no more than 20 homeless students in a year, said Principal Franklin Headley. But last year, given the school’s proximity to a cluster of recently converted shelters housing asylum-seeking families and an effective outreach strategy, the school enrolled hundreds of newly arrived families. It now serves roughly 270 students in temporary housing, Headley said.

The school’s 15-person operations team pivoted to focus almost exclusively on supporting the newly arrived families, fanning out to shelters to survey families’ needs and establish relationships with shelter staff, said Director of Operations Karina Chalas.

That work yielded several new school initiatives, including an after-school program to help parents who needed child care (because of shelter rules prohibiting them from leaving kids alone) and a laundry room for families without washers and dryers in their shelters.

Staff worked hard to keep attendance tabs on the new arrivals, even as families moved to new cities and states or transferred to shelters in other parts of the city. The school helped arrange bus or train transportation when possible for families who moved to different neighborhoods so kids didn’t have to transfer schools.

“They built a community here already,” Chalas said. “We try as hard as we can to give them any option of ‘here’s what we can do.’ After a while, if it becomes too much, we know as a school we tried everything we can do.”

Budget woes could unleash more instability for homeless students

All that support requires additional resources and expertise – and advocates say the city is still not providing enough help.

A city Education Department initiative last year that hired 100 new staffers, called community coordinators, to work directly in shelters to support families with educational needs is funded by one-time federal pandemic aid that expires at the end of this year.

Meanwhile, a plan to hire an additional 12 staffers this year to support homeless students is on hold because of a hiring freeze related to city budget cuts, advocates said.

“Losing the shelter-based Community Coordinators would almost certainly increase the already sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism and make it even more difficult for students in shelter to succeed in school,” said Kim Sweet, the executive director of Advocates for Children, said in a statement.

City officials have rolled out some new investments, including revamping the Education Department’s school funding formula to give extra dollars to schools for every student in temporary housing. The Education Department also employs 100 school-based social workers devoted to supporting homeless students.

Lyle, the Department spokesperson, said the agency plans to “work with our partners at the city and state levels to identify and establish supports for our students in temporary housing, while contending with the city’s financial reality.”

Staffers at schools serving large numbers of asylum-seekers remain worried about how the new 60-day shelter rules will affect their families. Chalas, the staffer at the Queens charter school, said she’s heard many families at her school talking about cramming into shared apartments together rather than re-enter the shelter system.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Vitti gives update on the state of DPSCD schools

2023-10-20T14:59:51+00:00

Detroit Public Schools Community District has come far since its days of emergency management, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in his State of the Schools address Tuesday evening.

In the wide-ranging speech, Vitti touched on ways DPSCD has improved since he took on the top job in 2017: The district has re-established Parent–Teacher Associations (PTAs) at every school in an effort to get more parents involved in their students’ education. Students have improved their M-STEP, PSAT, and SAT scores in literacy and math. And DPSCD created a newcomer program for immigrant students at Western International High School.

“Our work as a superintendent/board team was to rebuild the district and the way that it would function and how it would operate before emergency management, but also think to the future and be transformative to modernize the school district so that it can actually lead to change for children,” he said. “And we did that by starting with a plan.”

Vitti also noted that the district has increased teacher salaries, invested in art and music classes after they were cut under emergency management, and created a facility master plan to rebuild and reopen aging school buildings.

An invitation-only crowd of teachers, students, parents, and community members filled the auditorium at Renaissance High School. When promoting State of the Schools, the district sent out emails to the school community, asking recipients to RSVP on Eventbrite. An edited video of the event will be available at a later date, a district spokeswoman said.

Vitti touts improvements in attendance

In his speech, Vitti addressed the struggles DPSCD has faced over the years is chronic absenteeism. During the 2021-22 school year, 77% of students were chronically absent at a time when COVID-19 cases in Michigan reached their peak. But even before the pandemic caused a spike in absenteeism in school districts across the country, students in the Detroit district and charter schools were missing school at crisis numbers.

Vitti noted the many barriers students face to get to school, such as poverty, crime, and health problems such as asthma. However, he said the district is starting to improve its attendance rates.

During the 2022-23 school year, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate was 68%. While it is better than the previous year’s rate, the percentage is still above pre-pandemic levels. Vitti attributed that to school attendance agents, counselors, principals, and teachers engaging with students and getting parents involved with schools.

One school he highlighted was Pulaski Elementary-Middle School, which saw a 36.5 percentage point decrease in chronic absenteeism and 10 percentage point increase in daily attendance.

“Beyond Pulaski, there are multiple people in this room that have urged students to come to school when they’re tired. They have urged families to do their best to get kids to school,” Vitti said. “There are people in the audience that even in the snow, in negative 10 degree weather, still visited homes to get the kids to school.”

Students show improvement on standardized tests

Vitti also talked about student achievement and the efforts the district is making to get students to perform at grade level and ready for college.

For students in grades 3-7, 2023 English language arts and math M-STEP proficiency results improved at 13% and 9.1%, while the 2022 results were at 10.9% and 6.2%. PSAT and SAT scores also improved. For eighth graders, the percentage of students who were proficient in reading and writing on the PSAT increased to 24% in 2023, while those proficient in math rose to 8.6%. This is compared to 10.9% proficiency in reading and writing and 6.2% proficiency in math the previous year. For high schoolers taking the SAT ,reading and writing proficiency levels increased to 32.9% and math to 11.7%. In 2022, those percentages were 26.9% and 8%, respectively.

However, Vitti said the district’s goal is for students to rise above single-digit performances on the standardized tests.

“We still have work to do since the pandemic, but we’ve definitely improved,” Vitti said. “If we look at our literacy data, you can see that 75% of schools improved at or above grade level performance the year after the baseline year.”

District plans to renovate school facilities

Facilities were also on Vitti’s agenda. He brought up a 2018 review of school buildings, which found that 50% were considered deficient and only 7% were considered in good condition.

But DPSCD is planning to improve the state of its buildings with its $700 million facility master plan, which includes rebuilding, reopening, or demolishing certain schools. The plan calls for rebuilding the following schools: Cody High School, Paul Robeson/Malcolm X Academy, Pershing High School, Carstens Academy, and Phoenix, a building that closed in 2016. Meanwhile, a handful of school buildings, including Ann Arbor Trail, Sampson Webber, and Clark, would close, but not immediately. The district would phase out enrollment in those schools, eliminating a grade each year until the buildings are empty.

Vitti showed a rendering of Pershing to give the audience a sneak peek of what to expect from the plan.

A rendering of the plan to rebuild Pershing High School in the Detroit school district was shared with the audience at a state of the schools event Wednesday.

“We love our advanced schools, we love our application schools, but we have to invest in our neighborhood high schools,” he said. “In building a new Pershing and Cody, we believe it keeps people in the city, they keep people in the public school system and there’s a legacy that has continued from previous years.”

Tramena O’Neil, a parent outreach coordinator at Southeastern High School, said the points that stood out to her during the address were improvements in student achievement and how parents, students, and school staff are working together to improve the district.

“DPSCD is a good district and if we continue to work together, it can be a great district,” she said. “If we can have more parental involvement, we wouldn’t have too many incidents in certain schools. For me, he (Vitti) is doing a fair job so far.”

Micah Walker is a reporter for BridgeDetroit, where she covers arts, culture, and education. Contact Micah at mwalker@bridgedetroit.com.

Absenteeism remains high, with 31% of Colorado students missing too much school last year

2023-10-04T23:30:50+00:00

Nearly a third of Colorado students were chronically absent last year, missing 10% or more of the days they were supposed to be in school, according to new state data released Wednesday.

That’s slightly better than the 2021-22 school year — when COVID’s omicron variant ripped through schools — but far worse than any year before the pandemic.

Colorado education leaders are sounding the alarm about the missed days, as student academic performance still hasn’t recovered to prepandemic levels.

“Every day a student is in school is an opportunity for them to learn, build relationships and access support,” Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said in a press release. “We know districts are working hard to ensure students attend school regularly. But we need everyone, including educators, parents, students and community members, to make a renewed effort on this important matter.”

“The surest way to make improvements in our recovery from the disruptions of the pandemic is for kids to be in school,” Córdova added.

Colorado’s chronic absenteeism rate was 31% last year, representing 269,582 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Before COVID, rates ranged from 18% to 24%. Colorado is not alone, with most states reporting more students missing school.

Some groups had a greater share of students who were chronically absent. Kindergartners and 10th, 11th, and 12th graders all had chronic absenteeism rates above 35%. Roughly 40% of English learners missed too many days of school, as did 43% of low-income students and 60% of homeless students.

And the majority of absences — 62% — were excused.

Johann Liljengren, director of the dropout prevention and student re-engagement office in the Colorado Department of Education, said schools report a wide range of reasons students aren’t showing up to school. Expectations around health and wellness are different in the wake of COVID, and there’s more concern about not spreading illness to others. State education officials point to “how sick is too sick” guidance for when kids should stay home.

Some students report that they feel anxious or that they don’t feel safe at school. Others are disengaged or bored, and much of their schoolwork is now available online, even if instruction is supposed to happen in person.

School-based attendance workers and others who work with youth missing school describe teenagers sleeping in after working overnight shifts and elementary students who don’t make it to school because a parent is depressed or overwhelmed.

A few absences a month that don’t feel like much to a parent can add up over time.

And missing school can be a warning sign for future problems. Students who are chronically absent in middle school are more likely to drop out of high school, he said.

Liljengren said more schools are beginning to use attendance teams that go over data, reach out to families, and make home visits. The state, meanwhile, has some grants available to support that work and also points schools to organizations like Attendance Works, which provides free resources. The state has also convened a cohort of school district leaders to share information and learn from each other.

Liljengren stressed that schools need to give students a reason to show up.

“What are we really valuing about in-person or live lessons?” he said. “We are thinking about how we really draw students in.”

See district level attendance data here.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Indiana education officials: Poor attendance is hurting academics

2023-10-04T20:18:26+00:00

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If all the Indiana students who miss the most school showed up on one day, they would fill around 3,000 buses.

That’s how an Indiana State Board of Education presentation painted the stark picture of the state’s chronic absenteeism rate, the proportion of students who miss 18 or more days in a school year.

While chronic absenteeism in Indiana has improved this year after worsening during COVID, the rate remains 8 percentage points higher than before the pandemic. And citing the greater absenteeism rates for Black and Hispanic students, as well as those learning English or living in poverty, state board members sought to draw a link between absenteeism and lower test scores for those groups.

“It could absolutely be a root cause,” said Secretary of Education Katie Jenner.

Nationwide, schools have struggled to bring attendance rates back up to prepandemic levels, as families continue to deal with economic hardships, housing instability, and illness, along with students who refuse to attend school.

Indiana state board members acknowledged that after the pandemic, there are more reasons that students might miss school. Still, they focused attention on the correlation between absenteeism and academic performance: Student groups that have recorded the biggest declines in English language arts and math scores since the pandemic have also had higher rates of chronic absenteeism, according to the presentation.

“When you’re not there and present every day, you’re not going to get the same quality of education,” said board member Pat Mapes, who pointed to the same link for specific student groups during an August presentation of state reading test scores.

Absenteeism rates are highest in kindergarten and high school.

Nearly one-third of all Black students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, compared with 19% in 2018-19. The rate for Hispanic students surged to 24% in 2022-23, from around 13% in 2018-19.

The rate for Asian students doubled in that time frame, from 6% to 12%. For white students, it rose to 16% from 9%.

Absenteeism for English learners — whose academic performance has continued to decline even as other groups’ performance has stabilized — has also doubled since 2018-19.

Board members said parents must be held accountable for getting students to school every day. Board member Greg Gastineau suggested a campaign to spotlight the importance of attendance, adding that more families are taking vacations during the school year.

Meanwhile, the Indiana Department of Education plans to track attendance as one of the indicators in an “early warning system” it’s developing for students who are not on track to graduate.

While the board presentation focused on the absenteeism rate, members also discussed the daily attendance rate, which is calculated in two different ways in Indiana.

The “school focused” calculation divides the number of days that students attended by the total number of days in a year, according to the presentation. By that calculation, the bulk of all Indiana schools have a 90% or greater attendance rate.

With the launch of its new school accountability dashboard this year, the state also began to calculate the percentage of students in each school who have a 94% or better attendance rate. The presentation said that attending school less than that leads to negative academic impacts.

Only 3 in 5 Indiana students met the 94% target last year, meaning they missed fewer than 10 days. The other 40% — or over 400,000 students statewide — missed more.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Many schools went all in to fight chronic absenteeism. Why are kids still missing so much class?

2023-09-28T11:00:00+00:00

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Last year, Santa Fe schools put in a lot of work to try to get students to show up to school consistently. It was a priority after chronic absenteeism doubled during the 2021-22 school year, compared to before the pandemic.

The New Mexico district hired two additional attendance coaches, for a total of five, to help every school form a team focused on boosting attendance. Those staffers got extra pay and training. And schools used COVID relief funds to reward students who improved their attendance with incentives like a pop-up science exhibit hosted by a local children’s museum.

But despite those efforts, the share of students who missed 10% or more of their school year, the threshold New Mexico and most other states use to define chronic absenteeism, didn’t budge. Just over half were chronically absent — the same as the prior year.

“We know we still have work to do,” said Crystal Ybarra, the district’s chief equity, diversity, and engagement officer, who is overseeing the attendance initiative. “We’re still trying to figure out the steps post-pandemic. Everybody wants to see a quick fix, and that’s just not how initiatives work.”

What happened in Santa Fe highlights multiple challenges schools nationwide are encountering as they try to drive down stubbornly high absence rates. Students’ mindsets about attending school in person every day have shifted, staff say. Families are more likely to keep sick kids home. In some places, more families are experiencing economic hardships and housing instability.

Emerging state data, compiled by Chalkbeat, suggests that the stunning rise in students missing school did not come close to returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year.

Chronic absenteeism worsened in at least 40 states during the 2021-22 school year, according to data compiled by Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor, in partnership with the Associated Press. The needle hasn’t moved much in the handful of states that have released data for last school year so far.

In New Mexico, for example, chronic absenteeism shot up to 40% two school years ago and remained at 39% last year, compared to 18% the year before the pandemic. Similar trends have emerged in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia.

“The consequences of kids being sporadically in school and not fully engaging take a while to really shift,” said Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that focuses on raising school attendance. “It’s definitely not something that happens overnight, and may take longer than we would like.”

Illnesses other than COVID, such as RSV, as well as confusion over when to send sick children to school, likely played a role, school staff and attendance experts said. Many families got in the habit of keeping kids home if they had any symptom of illness. When Los Angeles Unified school officials talked with 9,000 families last year as part of an effort to reduce chronic absenteeism, non-COVID illness was one of the three major themes that came up.

“We went from this place of requiring students to be out for certain symptoms that they might have in the 2021-22 school year,” Ybarra said, “to trying to navigate what was appropriate and what wasn’t this past school year.”

Elevated mental health struggles also likely contributed. Some students feel a lingering disconnect from their school and peers. School refusal seems to have intensified following the pandemic, some parents and educators say. In Santa Fe, many students who missed class or asked to transfer to the GED program last year reported feeling anxious about coming to school, Ybarra said.

Now that more schools provide devices to every student and post assignments online, some students have also come to believe that they can take a few days off and still stay on top of their work.

Greg Moody, a school official in Florida’s Orange County district who oversees attendance, said the ability to do assignments remotely had contributed to a “shift in mindset” about the importance of showing up to class every day. In his district, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 21% the year before the pandemic to 40% in the 2021-22 school year.

Amana Levi, who helps Orange County schools address truancy issues, said parents report a variety of reasons their kids stay home. But last year she frequently heard: “Well, my child needed a day off.” Sometimes that stemmed from a mental health issue, she said, and sometimes it didn’t.

In response, Levi is hosting an online training for parents that will talk about why attendance matters — for academic and other reasons — and what parents can do if they get a letter saying their child has missed a lot of school.

“It’s important that we impress upon parents: We get it, we’re all here, we’re all experiencing similar types of things,” Levi said. But her message is: “You’ve got to come to school. We are here to help as much as we can.”

Schools seek more input on attendance struggles

Schools that started attendance initiatives last year that haven’t gotten the results they wanted should try to figure out why that may be, Chang of Attendance Works said. Staff can look at how many students were directly affected by such efforts, and talk with students and families about what worked and what didn’t.

In Santa Fe, Ybarra is hoping to build on some of the positive changes in school culture that she observed last year, while making adjustments to the district’s overall strategy.

Attendance coaches realized that they previously hadn’t taught many staff members to reach out to students about attendance. So this year, they trained entire schools to do it.

With the help of a $500,000 state grant, Santa Fe is sending home letters to recognize students for good attendance and remind families to return after longer school breaks. The district also hired an organization to train high school teams to watch ninth grade attendance — a challenging transition year for many teens — and will pay staff extra to make home visits to freshmen.

School staff are prioritizing chronically absent kids for evaluations to see if they need extra academic help, or support for a disability. The goal is to “try to make them more successful so they feel like they can return,” Ybarra said. In the past, those students were often overlooked.

And last month, school officials met with students from two schools struggling with attendance to listen to some of the barriers that keep them from going to school regularly and what has been helpful to get them back on track.

Students reported getting sick, lacking transportation to school, having family problems, facing mental health issues, and caring for siblings. One middle schooler pointed to the benefits of having a day to do catch-up work when they returned from a long period of absence.

“I didn’t feel so behind when I went back into the classroom,” the student told school staff.

Orange County schools tried something similar this summer by paying a dozen social workers to call the families of students who missed 20 or more days of school last year.

The goal was to figure out what had kept students from attending and offer support “so we could start with a fresh slate,” said Juliane Cross, a senior administrator in the district’s social services department.

Social workers heard many of those families were moving around a lot, struggling to afford stable housing — a common issue in the Orlando area that has intensified in recent years. Other parents worked nights and couldn’t wake their kids up in time for class.

Social workers connected families to housing resources and made sure they knew about the federal program that offers help to students experiencing homelessness. It’s an initiative Cross hopes to repeat.

“Several of the parents were just like ‘Wow, thank you for calling,’ as if they were really surprised that this effort was made to just check on them and try to address that attendance situation,” she said. “They appreciated having that interaction.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

How chronic absenteeism became part of this Detroit pastor’s mission

2023-09-22T19:17:32+00:00

Larry Simmons was troubled by what he saw outside the Detroit church where he was a pastor: School-age children were strolling the streets of the city’s Brightmoor neighborhood at times when they should have been in school.

That was over a decade ago, and it opened Simmons’ eyes to a problem that was already massive in Detroit: the epidemic of student absenteeism. In the 2012-13 school year, 68% of students in the Detroit school district were flagged as chronically absent, which at the time meant that they missed 10 or more days in a year.

The sight of youth skipping school was “heartbreaking” for the longtime pastor and community advocate, who saw the pattern of absences as a barrier to greater social and economic mobility for Black Detroiters.

Simmons had already been a familiar figure in Brightmoor and Detroit, having served as a political director for Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young, and a pastor of Baber Memorial A.M.E. Church.

But in the next decade, Simmons made encouraging school attendance one of his biggest priorities. He became a founding member of Every School Day Counts Detroit, a coalition of community organizations and schools across the city focused on chronic absenteeism. His work has allowed him to become heavily involved in the attendance efforts at Gompers Elementary-Middle School and other schools in the Brightmoor and Cody Rouge areas.

Larry Simmons has long been a familiar figure in Brightmoor and Detroit as a pastor and former political director for the city’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young.

He retired from Baber last fall but still leads Brightmoor Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses on revitalization efforts in the neighborhood.

Years after the initial encounter outside his church, student absenteeism remains at crisis levels, and not just in Detroit. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, chronic absenteeism — which is now nationally defined as missing 10% of school days or more — has skyrocketed in numerous states, with high-poverty school districts seeing higher rates.

In 2021-22, Michigan had one of the highest absenteeism rates in the nation: nearly 39%, compared with 19% in 2018-19, the last full school year before the pandemic struck.

The pandemic also derailed the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s progress in reducing absenteeism. After easing to 54% in 2019-20, chronic absenteeism rocketed to 77% in 2021-22. The rate was down to 68% last year, as the district stepped up its attendance efforts, but that still means more than two-thirds of DPSCD students missed 18 or more days of school.

“The schools alone cannot solve chronic absence,” Simmons said in an interview with Chalkbeat.

“It is measured in school. It is counted in school,” he said, but “it does not start and will not be solved alone in school.”

Simmons talked about the challenges and successes of his early grassroots efforts to address chronic absenteeism, the systemic issues that impede student attendance, and where he wants more help to solve the issue.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you first recognize student absenteeism as a problem in Detroit?

I didn’t become aware of attendance really as a challenge until I was a pastor at Baber, and we would see kids during the day who’d be out of school. They would just be walking around in the neighborhood. And I remember at community meetings, folks would talk about “Why are there kids all out on the street like this?” That’s what led us to pay attention to school attendance.

We eventually learned about chronic absenteeism through our research with (Detroit education advocacy group) 482Forward. We learned about this from Hedy Chang at Attendance Works and Robert Balfanz from Johns Hopkins University.

And we began to organize around this. And ultimately, Every School Days Counts emerged as a coalition out of that work with 482Forward. This would have been like 2012. And over the course of this time, we got a partnership with Wayne State University and we just began learning. We tried different things.

What was it about seeing kids skipping school that made you want to do something?

It was heartbreaking to me to see these children squandering an opportunity that later in life they’ll have to pay to get. I’ve basically spent my life working for the proper treatment of African Americans, and while it is absolutely essential that we get others to recognize our intrinsic value, it’s also true that we’ve got to do our part.

Why are young people standing in front of my church two blocks away in the middle of the afternoon? They’re passing up one of the biggest free investments available to help them achieve the life that I know they want for themselves. I know they want it, because when I talk to these young people, they have all these high aspirations. They want to live in these great houses, drive these great cars.

Well, if they happen to be 7 feet tall, and can play, and don’t get hurt, maybe they don’t need to go to school. If they can run as fast as Deion Sanders, maybe they don’t. But the truth of the matter is this landscape is littered with great talented people who didn’t get the training to manage their gifts.

The entrance to Baber Memorial A.M.E. Church in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood. Larry Simmons recalls standing outside the church and seeing school-age children walking around the neighborhood when they should have been in school.

From there, how did you get involved in grassroots efforts around chronic absenteeism? What were some of the early strategies you employed to address student absence?

We mounted this campaign called “‘Present’ in Brightmoor: Our School Attendance Movement” and began to organize around getting parents and churches engaged in this work. And we formed what we call the “Principal’s Table,” made up of principals of all the schools that were in Brightmoor at the time and in Cody Rouge.

When we first got started, we had about seven or eight churches that organized with us. And so we said, we’re going to each adopt a school. And we’re going to take the kids who are absent that the principals tell us about and we’re going to pick them up from home, and we’re going to take them to school, and pick them up and take them home in the afternoon.

We blew out two church buses and my car transmission carrying kids back and forth from school every day. So we realized it was just an unsustainable model. First of all, how many kids are going to fit in your car?

Then when we started to get the numbers back and realized just how many students were absent, it was clear between our burnt-out vans and my burnt-out transmission that we were not going to get anywhere.

So how did things evolve after that point?

Well one of the first things we realized is the data the Detroit Public Schools was passing out didn’t make sense. Back in those days, the statistic being used was average daily attendance.

“All of us were stunned when we first learned that just missing two days a month can make a child chronically absent.” — Larry Simmons

Average daily attendance tells me out of a group of students on any given day, what percentage of them are going to be present in the classroom or in the school. The problem with that is, different students may make up that percentage at any given time. So what you get is this patchwork of attendance. So in seeking to get accurate data, we got online and discovered Attendance Works.

We brought in Hedy Chang to Detroit for a conference of students, parents, and teachers. And over the course of about three weeks is when we learned about chronic absence.

All of us were stunned when we first learned that just missing two days a month can make a child chronically absent, and being chronically absent can lead to them not graduating on time, be more likely to get in trouble, and get excluded from school.

It changed our language and changed our way of thinking. And it turned out that nationally, the U.S. Department of Education had just issued a report on the problem of chronic absenteeism. And so we began to advocate and agitate to have this statistic used in Detroit and Michigan.

We evolved our strategies to try and focus on schools and messaging about chronic absence. We discovered that people didn’t even know what chronic absence was, and some would change their attendance behavior by learning that two times a month would be too often.

When the community first got started promoting this idea, the school system resisted. They didn’t like it, because the chronic absenteeism numbers were so appalling, they just wanted to count average daily attendance, and many of them still do.

It took probably about four or five years for us to win that fight, but ultimately, the state and the city began to use chronic absence as a statistic to evaluate student attendance.

What were some of the lessons you took away from that campaign?

We learned over time that this problem was way bigger than just having people pay attention to the statistics. People may not have known what chronic absence was, but they did know their children are supposed to be in school. There are other things that are operating in the ecosystem.

And we clearly understand that we have to have an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving this problem. The schools alone cannot solve chronic absence.

How do you feel about the recent rise in absenteeism rates?

The disappointing thing is before COVID, all of our work together had started bringing chronic absence rates down. Not transformatively, but significantly, and they were real drops. Not just blips.

COVID has blown all of that work up. We’re actually starting below where we started before. We’re worse off now than we were before. It’s not like we’re back to zero. We’re minus five.

How do you contrast the role of the school versus the role of community partners in addressing chronic absenteeism?

Schools have to be willing to acknowledge that the solution to this problem is beyond their scope of control, and therefore they need other partners to come to the table and bring resources and policy.

I would contend that a school-based challenge is to create the kind of school culture that makes school attractive. Part of our work at Every School Day Counts Detroit is to encourage schools to engage in these kinds of experiences. We had a big event with the Detroit Pistons this past school year where they brought Cade Cunningham and the other athletes to Gompers (Elementary-Middle School). Everybody got a new coat, everybody got a basketball, everybody got a backpack with the Detroit Pistons swag in it.

It creates a connectedness and creates a sense of belonging, and it creates an inviting atmosphere. It doesn’t substitute for rigorous academics, but it does help students want to put up with rigorous academics, because of all the other goodies, benefits, and joys of being present in school.

What sort of discussions or partnerships would you like to see with other organizations in the city?

We have a great partnership with the Detroit Pistons, who have devoted enormous resources and help to address this problem at several schools. DTE Energy also has been a great partner of late. They don’t have anything to do directly with education, but we certainly want somebody like that to be at the table.

We would want labor unions. We would want teachers. We would want the (United Auto Workers). We would want the companies that employ them at the table.

You often hear parents complain that their work schedules don’t permit them to be as attentive to their children’s attendance as they want to be. Changing work schedules or creating flexible work hours is beyond what the school can effect. But maybe the community could effect it.

Maybe labor unions could be brought to the table to say, ‘While you’re negotiating for everything, we need you to ask the companies, be they auto or other, how can we give parents more flexibility in their work schedules? And how can the school create more flexibility in its schedule so students can in fact get to school on time?’ I think it will take both.

We’ve got to come up with some serious structural, systemic solutions that really face the problem that we are confronting. It’s got to take all of us working together to do this — private sector, public sector, philanthropic, clergy sector. It is our responsibility and power to address some of the issues and challenges that cause chronic absence.

What role do you think the city of Detroit can and should play in addressing chronic absenteeism?

We’ve analytically gotten to a place where we really understand chronic absence in Detroit far, far better than we did. It comes from a lot of external drivers that result in children being chronically absent, and the clearest one is poverty.

“One of the things the city could do is to actually plan bus routes around school opening and closing. That’s completely within the city’s scope of power to be able to do now.” — Larry Simmons

Poverty creates certain life conditions. People who are very poor have less stable access to reliable transportation. They have less stable networks to compensate for things like sudden illness or any of the little disruptions that happen in everybody’s life every day when you don’t have as much as folks in higher income categories.

In the case of Detroit, most of its citizens are low-income. So the city should take that into account and either implement or advocate for policies that can address that poverty.

One of the things the city could do is to actually plan bus routes around school opening and closing. That’s completely within the city’s scope of power to be able to do now. That will cause some dislocation, it will cause some struggle, but there’s no solution we’re going to find that doesn’t do that.

Larry Simmons said his organization’s efforts made meaningful progress in reducing chronic absenteeism in Detroit, but “COVID has blown all of that work up.”

You’ve worn many hats over the years: from being a pastor over the past two decades to working under Mayor Coleman Young as a political director. How do you see all those roles intersecting into the work you do now?

We’re always talking about the same people. The person who comes to my church is the same person whose child should be in school down the street, is the same person who should go to vote for the leadership of our country.

We’re just pretending like we can deal with them separately, like I can abstract you as an object of education, and pretend that’s not connected to your spiritual life, your emotional well being, your political sense, or your economic aspirations. All these things are integrated, they’re interrelated, and so my focus most of my life has been on policy change, the policies that affect our community.

But as I grew older, I understood I couldn’t just talk about the policies that other people make. I’ve got to talk about the policies that we create inside our own houses. If my child gets up and tells me she’s not feeling good, the policy in our house may be that she doesn’t have to go to school. That’s a policy. It doesn’t affect anybody outside the four walls of our house, but nonetheless, it’s a policy.

What keeps you going in this movement?

Even though I now understand that the fight is more complex than I recognized when I first saw this, it’s still just as important.

And unfortunately, as a community, understanding where we are and what it is going to take to get to where we want to be is something we still don’t fully grasp. … We have to break that. And one of the essential ways to break it is to acquire the skill sets to compete in the 21st century economy. And you can get that for free down the street until you’re 18. After that, you have to pay.

So it’s just this fire in my belly that I have for the freedom of my people.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

36% of NYC public school students were chronically absent last school year

2023-09-06T22:32:05+00:00

Thirty-six percent of New York City public school students were chronically absent last school year, missing at least 10% of the school year, according to figures released by Education Department officials on Wednesday.

That represents a modest improvement compared with the 2021-2022 school year, which saw chronic absenteeism exceed 40%, the highest rate in decades.

Despite a year-over-year reduction, the figures are a stark reminder that absenteeism remains a stubborn challenge that will continue to complicate efforts to catch students up from years of pandemic-fueled disruptions.

Before the coronavirus forced school buildings to shutter, chronic absenteeism rates typically hovered closer to 25%. But absenteeism has surged in recent years, reaching 30% during the 2020-2021 school year, when students were allowed to learn virtually or in person.

Absenteeism exploded to roughly 4 in 10 students — or nearly 353,000 children — during the 2021-22 school year, the first time all children were required to attend school in person since March 2020. Coronavirus-related illnesses likely played a role, as hundreds of thousands of students and staff tested positive that year.

But even as there were fewer spikes in coronavirus cases last school year, the effects of the pandemic still reverberated. With student mental health concerns on the rise, some families struggled to coax their children to attend school. School staffers said caregivers were more likely to keep their children home at any sign of illness. And schools may also have struggled to re-engage students who grew accustomed to long stretches of remote learning and relaxed attendance expectations.

Whatever the cause, chronic absenteeism is often seen as a key metric of school performance, as missed school typically means missed learning. Absences can also hurt student achievement in the long run.

One Manhattan middle school principal said he was surprised to see persistent chronic absenteeism at his school last year, even as staff made an effort to reach out to families and offer prizes for high attendance.

“I was thinking [attendance] would come back, and it didn’t,” said the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There’s a much more pervasive sense that if my kid doesn’t go to school they can still do the work at home.”

The principal wished he had more resources available to hire additional social workers, conduct more home visits, or even fund for outside-of-the-box ideas like financial incentives for student attendance.

During a press briefing on Wednesday, city officials said they’ve made a few district-level tweaks to address chronic absenteeism, including giving superintendents authority over a cadre of attendance teachers deployed to schools with more acute absenteeism problems. They credited those efforts with helping to ease absenteeism last year.

Education Department officials also pointed to new high school programs that allow a small number of students to attend school virtually or on a hybrid schedule that includes some in-person learning.

First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said those schools were created specifically for students who might struggle in more traditional settings or who work jobs during the day and can benefit from additional flexibility. He said those programs are part of the city’s strategy to address chronic absenteeism, but also acknowledged the challenge is much broader.

“Chronic absenteeism is not just a problem in New York City,” he said. “This is a national problem in every large urban district — and many of the small ones.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

How this Detroit attendance agent connects with families to get kids in school

2023-09-01T12:00:00+00:00

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Effie Harris can’t walk down a hallway at Gompers Elementary-Middle School without having to stop several times for a hug, a high five, or a promise of a crayon drawing.

Her pauses have to be quick, though. She has places to go and students to see.

By 8:04 on a cold February morning, she had already been at school for an hour, greeting students at a side entrance for middle school latecomers. After a quick stop in her office to drop off her coat and sanitize her hands, she began her morning rounds.

First stop: Room A115.

“I was just checking to see if she was here,” Harris called out. The teacher inside knew who Harris was talking about: a struggling second-grader who was absent as often as present. On that day, the child was present.

The spot checks only begin to explain the expansive role Harris plays as Gompers’ attendance agent. Unlike the stereotypical truant officers of yore, who might round up troubled youth and drag them back to school, Harris must often serve as investigator to find out why children aren’t coming to school, visiting homes and keeping track of data on barriers to attendance. She is a counselor who listens to families and helps them find resources they need to get their kids to school.

She is the school’s spirit leader for good attendance, showing up in classrooms with prizes — pencil cases, Hot Wheels cars, bubbles — for students who make it two weeks without missing a day. She plans pizza parties for classes with the best attendance, and helps teachers plan fun activities that children won’t want to miss.

And sometimes, she must play bad cop, warning parents of children who are severely chronically absent that they could face legal or financial consequences.

Effie Harris, the attendance agent at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, talks to students during her morning rounds when she visits classes.

After the stop in A115, Harris moved on toward another classroom, greeting everyone in the halls as she breezed past — by name if she knew it, or if she didn’t, with a “Mornin’, sunshine!” or a “Good morning, sweetie!” One elementary school child wrapped her arms around Harris’s legs, and soon she was surrounded by others who wanted her attention, too.

Harris’s goals that day were to check in with nearly two dozen middle school students who were approaching 18 absences, attend a school leadership meeting, call a few parents of chronically absent children, fill in for an absent teacher as a lunchroom monitor, and make a banner reminding kids to show up on Feb. 8 — one of two “count days” during the year when attendance is used to determine how much state funding a school gets.

She walked around the school with a large binder that she uses to track absences and excuses, and interactions with families. Every month, she must provide a report to the district.

“I’ve never been able to get through the volume of work that I’ve wanted to,” she said.

Why aren’t Brightmoor students getting to school?

When a parent shows up, Harris drops everything to listen.

A day earlier, she said, an exasperated mother showed up in her office to tearfully explain why her three children had each missed about 20 days.

“I said, ‘I’m going to get you a tissue, and I’m going to get me a box, because I might be crying, too, today.’”

Harris had reached out to the mother before and even tried to make home visits, but no one ever answered the door. This time was different.

“When she came in, she was at a breaking point,” Harris said. “It was a different conversation. It didn’t seem like she was on the defense. It seemed like she was open” to explaining her struggles and working on a plan.

“We want to find out the whys to offer solutions, to find out how can we help,” Harris said. “That’s the big thing. It’s not doing anybody any good just to stir things up and not to have a solution.”

A portrait of attendance agent Effie Harris at Samuel Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, February 3, 2023. Emily Elconin for Chalkbeat

Gompers serves some of the neediest children in Detroit, a city challenged by high levels of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and crime. Most live in Brightmoor, a 4-square-mile area that’s impoverished even by Detroit standards. It’s the kind of neighborhood where 1 out of 5 homes is abandoned, and a local diner has 3-inch bulletproof glass separating the serving counter from the dining room.

Some parents keep their children home from school for fear of what they may encounter on the way, especially in winter when it’s still dark out. School starts at 7:30 a.m.

“I can’t blame them,” Harris said. “Parents don’t want to walk them to bus stops in dangerous areas. … I tell the parents, you guys have to get them to the bus stop. This is just your reality. You’ve got to do that.”

About a third of Gompers’ 838 students come from other neighborhoods. Those students have their own attendance challenges. When the family car breaks down, they stop showing up.

Other students don’t come to school because they have to babysit younger siblings while parents work, or they live part-time with another parent in a different area. One mother last year kept her three children home because they were in hiding from her abusive partner.

Harris listens with an empathetic ear as parents explain the barriers standing between their child and the classroom — whether it’s homelessness, lack of clothing or transportation, bullying at school, inability to get up on time, or child care challenges.

Then she steps in. Sometimes she calls parents who’ve overslept to wake them up. Other times, she picks up children from their homes and drives them to school herself.

“We want to make sure we actually have practical solutions, and the other side of that is that parents have to be willing to follow those recommendations,” Harris said in an interview in her office.

A few minutes later she was on the phone with a parent whose three children hadn’t shown up to school.

The oldest child had a sore throat. She had a 9:15 a.m. doctors appointment, the mom said. But it was already 9:07, and they were still home. Harris began to wonder.

“Bring in documentation after she has her doctor visit, OK?” Harris asked.

The mother didn’t answer. She hung up on Harris.

It didn’t seem to bother her.

“Something more is going on,” Harris said, noting that she’d talk to the oldest child when she returned to school. “Elementary kids, I say, ‘OK, where were you?’ and then they’ll start to tell me.”

“It takes time to investigate, to find out what’s going on,” Harris told Chalkbeat in a later interview. “Sometimes it takes time for them to even warm up to you to talk about what’s going on.”

For now, there were other children to check up on.

Personal outreach to students: ‘I’m glad you’re here’

Harris headed upstairs and asked the teacher in Room A230 if she could have a word with a student. A few moments later, a boy emerged from the room.

“Good morning,” she said to him. “I’m glad you’re here. You doing OK?”

After a moment, she sent him back to class.

Next she headed to the classroom next door to check on his brother, who spoke quietly and rubbed his face on the sleeve of his hoodie.

Hours later, she was still thinking about him.

“He really looked tired,” she said, and the last time she saw the brothers they also looked exhausted. “But lately they have been here. They have been here, so that’s good.”

Before the start of last school year, Gompers Principal Akeya Murphy moved the attendance agent’s office into the main office, as a way to highlight the importance of student attendance to families as they walked into the building.

A sign that reads attendance matter behind the curtain in the lunchroom at Samuel Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, February 3, 2023. Emily Elconin for Chalkbeat

Once the school day begins, though, Harris doesn’t spend much time in her office.

“I like moving around in the building, going to the kids,” she said. “I like seeing them. I like interacting with them.”

Her next stop took her to the other end of the building. On the way she ran into a middle school student and greeted her by name.

“How many times am I going to see you next week?” Harris asks.

“I really don’t know,” the girl says.

“What do you mean you don’t know? What’s wrong?” she asks. “I want to see you every day.”

“OK. All right,” the girl responded, as if she meant it.

Help is on the way from the district

Being an attendance officer is a tough job in a district where year after year, more than half the students are chronically absent.

Harris’ role got even more challenging during the pandemic, when Gompers and many schools nationwide experienced a surge in chronic absenteeism. There have been days over the years when the sheer number of students who needed to be reached has been overwhelming.

“I had to get past that,” Harris said. “So many need to be helped. You can’t do everything. You can’t make it to everybody.”

Attendance agent Effie Harris holds a binder with protocols for attendance intervention plans at Samuel Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, February 3, 2023. Emily Elconin for Chalkbeat

Harris is getting more help this school year. A new district strategy involves assigning a second attendance agent to schools like Gompers with high rates of chronic absenteeism.

Harris empathizes with the families who are struggling. But she wants them to understand the consequences of their children not attending school.

“At the end of the day, this is who’s being hurt, and it’s your child. At the end of the day, this is who’s not being given the opportunity they deserve.”

Getting that message across successfully is one of the rewards of a tough job, she said. Take Gloria Vanhoosier, whose three children are “smart as a whip” but were absent for nearly half of the 2021-22 school year. After repeated calls home, Harris convinced Vanhoosier to come in for a talk about her struggles at home, and the importance of bringing the kids to school.

By the end of 2022-23, the children were doing much better with attendance. They still missed days, but not nearly as much as they had the year before. More importantly, they were doing better at school.

“Gloria is a fighter. And now we’re seeing the results. We’re seeing the benefits. She’s the one who sat in my office one time and said, ‘I tell my kids … it’s OK to struggle, but it’s not OK to give up.’ You are absolutely right. Because we all have struggles. We just don’t want to give up.”

Vanhoosier told Chalkbeat that talking to Harris was like talking to a therapist. Hearing that, Harris was full of emotion.

“Oh, I love it!” she said.

Tracie Mauriello covered state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach the team at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

One Detroit school’s multilayered effort to get absent students back to school

2023-08-31T13:06:56+00:00

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After missing four days of classes last fall at Gompers Elementary-Middle School, Jay’Sean Hull was called into the cafeteria with 100 other students with similar attendance records.

The group was introduced to attendance agent Effie Harris, a key figure in the school’s efforts to improve on a dismal statistic. The previous school year, a staggering 82% of students in the northwest Detroit school were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days.

Harris explained that the students had been selected for a relatively new program pairing students at risk of becoming chronically absent with 20 adult mentors in the building.

Jay’Sean’s mentor: Harris herself. Over the next few weeks, she would greet the sixth-grader at a side entrance designated for middle schoolers, visit him in his classrooms on days that he arrived late, and regularly check in with his family.

This high-touch, relationship-based investment was part of a multipronged approach at Gompers last school year to tackle a problem with tragic consequences: Chronically absent students are more likely to become disengaged from school and more likely to drop out, research shows. Frequent absences also make it harder to get students on track academically, a pressing need coming off pandemic-fueled declines in academic achievement.

Gompers Principal Akeya Murphy, a veteran educator, tapped just about every staff member to help with the effort. Along with the mentorship program, the school dispatched staff to students’ homes to help families solve problems contributing to absenteeism, used data to track attendance patterns, and offered incentives ranging from field trips to the local movie theater for students to grocery store gift cards for parents.

Students eat lunch at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. In 2021-22, a staggering 82% of the school’s students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more school days.

Murphy, Harris, and other leaders at Gompers set an ambitious goal for last school year: to shave 20 percentage points off the school’s chronic absenteeism rate.

To get there, they would need to reach students like 13-year-old Jay’Sean, and dozens of other students whose absences put them at risk of missing out on their education.

“By the time they’re 16, they’re already thinking about going to work or exiting out of the educational system, because it is rigorous,” Murphy said. “We know the curriculum is rigorous, and so we want to prepare them, and the way we do that is by them being at school every single day, so that they’re not missing anything.”

Attendance struggles reflect Brightmoor’s economic challenges

Across the Detroit Public Schools Community District, 77% of students were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year, when COVID-19 cases in Michigan reached their peak. But even before the pandemic caused a spike in absenteeism in school districts across the country, students in Detroit district and charter schools were missing school at crisis numbers.

The reasons for that vary, but they’re largely rooted in the economic challenges that accompany Detroit’s high poverty rates — transportation hurdles, health problems, family and housing instability.

Brightmoor, where Gompers is located, is one of the most economically challenged areas in the city, with a high concentration of housing instability, poverty, and transportation challenges. They contribute to a high level of transiency among the school’s student population, school officials say.

At Gompers, 91% of students come from low-income homes. The list of reasons for missed school days ranges widely at Gompers, from inflexible parent work schedules to student illnesses and bullying.

By January 2023, Haydin Griggs had missed about 50 days of the school year, primarily because her mother, Shetaya Griggs, had health problems that often prevented her from walking her daughter to school, and she didn’t want the sixth-grader walking to school on her own in their rough neighborhood.

Many parents “don’t have a bunch of money, they don’t have a whole bunch of resources,” said Harris, the attendance agent. “They’re thinking about just surviving.”

The Detroit school district’s strategies to reduce absenteeism have increasingly focused on these economic challenges. The district’s Family Resource Distribution Center regularly offers toiletries, dry goods, school supplies and winter coats.

The district is also set to launch 12 school-based health hubs in the next three years to provide medical resources and services that families would need to keep students attending school regularly.

Students wait in line in the main hallway at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. The reasons for missed school days range widely at Gompers, from inflexible parent work schedules to student illnesses and bullying.

One issue that came up at Gompers ahead of the school year was how many parents were holding their children back from school because they did not have a uniform or clean clothes. Murphy said she sent out a back-to-school letter encouraging parents to send their kids to school regardless of what they had to wear.

“We would prefer them to be at school and just have them wear their regular clothes versus feeling like they can’t come to school because of a uniform,” she said.

When Murphy became principal at Gompers at the start of 2022-23, she made sure to move the attendance agent’s office into the main office, a decision she hoped would amplify the importance of student attendance to families as they walked into the building.

Harris spends a portion of her days reaching out by phone and in person to parents and caregivers, trying to help them make plans to get their kids to class. It can be difficult, she said, stressing to families how two absences a month can quickly add up to a student being chronically absent. Some are unaware of how significant the absences are, and many are weary of the pandemic’s impact on their health, jobs, and households.

“The dust is still settling,” Harris said in February, during a spike in absenteeism. “Families have been affected, loved ones have been lost. There have been readjustments, people have had to adapt to whatever their new normals are and a lot of shuffling.”

A student’s absence, whether excused or unexcused, still counts toward the total number of missed school days they accumulate in a given year.

Gloria Vanhoosier’s three elementary school-age children each accumulated over 80 absences (out of 180 days) during the 2021-22 school year.

In Vanhoosier’s case, a bedbug infestation that lasted more than a year was a contributing factor. She was often too exhausted to take her children to school after spending so much time trying to rid her home of the critters, while also doing her children’s laundry nightly so they didn’t bring the bugs to school. They also missed school because of multiple of COVID infections, because of car problems, and because the children sometimes overslept.

Alarmed by the absences, Harris reached out multiple times asking Vanhoosier to meet with her at the school.

“‘I’m not superwoman,’” Vanhoosier remembers telling Harris when they finally met. “‘I got too much on my plate. I’m trying to take care of my kids and trying to take care of my family.’”

“Once I opened up to her, it’s like her whole face changed,” Vanhoosier recalled. “Now I feel that she sees my struggle and is concerned for me.”

The conversation with Harris motivated Vanhoosier to rethink her attitude about her children’s absences and its impact on their grades. Seeing her daughters happy and thriving after they began attending school more regularly has also helped. The girls participated in volleyball step dance, and after-school tutoring programs.

“I’ve gotten a lot better,” Vanhoosier said in the spring. “We still miss days, but I’m open with her now.”

Absenteeism has ripple effects on students in the classroom

Brittany Parker, who has been teaching for 10 years, wrestles with what to do when her kindergartners don’t show up for class. Absences can create lasting turmoil in a child’s education — children who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to read at grade level by the third grade.

They can also hamper the rest of the class. “The question for me is: Do I push ahead to the next lesson or do I wait for them to come back?” Parker said.

“As a district, they want us to keep going,” she said. “If it’s four kids out, I’m going to push ahead. Sometimes if it’s a larger number I’ll hold back. I’m also looking at: Are these kids who can catch up?”

An instructor works with students at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. Children who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to read at grade level by third grade.

By May, more than half of the 50 third-graders La’Dawn Peterson taught between her morning and afternoon math classes were chronically absent. An additional nine were severely chronically absent, meaning they had missed more than 36 days of school.

One of them missed more than 60 days during the year.

“He would be so good if he came to school,” Peterson said of the boy. When he did show up, he was able to grasp the material, but she worried whether he’d retain the information.

Despite her many attempts to communicate with his family, she said she’s not entirely clear why he was absent so much.

Peterson said she’s tried exhaustively to impress upon her students and their families the importance of daily attendance, and the harmful impact of missing school. It shows up in their academic performance, she said, and explains why some students can become classroom distractions.

One day in June, when extreme heat prompted the district to shorten the school day, just nine students showed up — about half as many as usual. One of them was the boy who had missed 60 days.

On that day, while other students quickly got to work on their online multiplication and fraction exercises, he was slow to get started. He rubbed his eyes with the sleeves of his black and white Adidas tracksuit, and rested his head on one hand as he clicked through the exercises.

About 10 minutes later, he raised his hand, and a classroom tutor walked over to his desk in the back corner of the room. With a little bit of support, he seemed to grasp the lesson and began to work through the exercises.

Teachers like Peterson are cramming in four to five lessons a week, and they depend on weekly small-group lessons to catch up absent or struggling students. But if kids miss those opportunities, the challenges multiply.

“They’re missing out on so much and then, most of the ones that are absent all the time … there’s no motivation at home,” Peterson said. “So they come to school, and they’re not motivated to do anything.”

Over 18 absences: ‘You can’t bounce back from that’

Eighteen days. Thirty-six days. Fifty days. Sixty days. Eighty days of missed school. How does a student’s attendance record ever get so bad?

That’s the question that haunted Murphy and her team at Gompers, and motivated them to work on curbing absenteeism long before it becomes chronic.

Third grade teacher DeAnna Weeden, far right, instructs a group of students during an English lesson at Gompers Elementary-Middle School. Teachers depend on weekly small-group lessons to catch up absent or struggling students.

“You want to, for lack of a better word, stop the bleeding,” with students just below chronic absenteeism, Murphy said in January. “We need (families) to know that they’re on their way to being over the 18 absences … you can’t bounce back from that.”

In Jay’Sean’s case, it was four missed days of school by the end of October, too many so early in the school year. Jay’Sean blamed inconsistent school bus service that prompted him to start walking to school.

That was enough to warrant an intervention from the new mentorship program for him and the other students at risk of becoming chronically absent. The school’s mentoring program is an offshoot of a national initiative launched by the U.S. Department of Education.

The program’s premise sounded easy enough to Jay’Sean. “I just had to keep coming to school,” he recalled.

In reality, it took more effort than that from Harris and others on the team to ensure that Jay’Sean stayed on track. But it worked.

“By the beginning of the new year … he was always coming,” Harris told Chalkbeat this summer. If Jay’Sean came in late some days, she’d stop by his classroom to check in.

“He always wants to go to school,” said Shamika Hull, Jay’Sean’s mom. “He’ll go stand outside, and it’ll be raining, and he’s out there waiting for the bus.”

Hull also has an 11-year-old son at Gompers who got the message on attendance.

“The only times they have been absent from school since (the program began) has been either they were having a doctor’s appointment, or I wasn’t able to wash their clothes.”

For those whose absences are already beyond the “chronic” threshold, Murphy said she and her staff “continue to work with the family. We continue to make those calls. We continue to try to remove barriers.”

Those efforts won’t help the school improve its chronic absenteeism rate, Harris said, “but it’s still going to help the kid.”

“I tell them, ‘OK, let’s just take it a week at a time. Just five days. Four more days. Just three more days,’” she said, adding: “It’s going to make a difference for the kids and their scores.”

Attendance incentives are a ‘means to an end’

The conference room at Gompers is testament to the school leaders’ determination to make a dent in absenteeism. On all four walls are dozens of easel paper sheets, with handwriting in bright pink, green and orange marker. Each sheet details strategies Gompers staff have employed to try to make kids come to school every day.

Posters hanging in the conference room at Gompers Elementary-Middle School highlight some of the school’s strategies to combat student absenteeism.

Field trips to the local movie theater and bowling alley. Gas and grocery store gift cards for parents. Arts and crafts activities in the gymnasium. A mobile video game truck. “Gator Bucks,” named after the school’s mascot, for students who complete classroom assignments and exhibit positive behavior.

“These are the kinds of things that we’re discussing, constantly thinking and trying to be innovative about,” Murphy said. “How can we entice kids and make sure that families are consistently bringing their children to school?”

“It’s a means to an end … initially to draw them in and then to get them into the habit” of going to school, said Harris, the attendance agent.

A line of plastic trophies sit on a shelf behind Harris’ desk. Every two weeks, the awards go to the classrooms that have the most students with perfect attendance.

Gompers deploys some of these incentive programs when students are more likely to be absent, such as before and after holiday breaks or crucial days such as Count Day or state testing periods.

But while incentives are a significant part of Murphy’s vision to encourage student attendance, relationship building remains the core tenet of the school’s efforts.

“Children need to know that you care for them, that they’re in a safe space, that they have a trusted adult that they can communicate with and someone that is building a relationship with them, because that’s going to open the pathway for learning,” she said.

When absences go unexplained

For all their efforts — and progress — the sense of crisis is never far away.

On a Friday morning in early February, a handful of master teachers and administrators gathered in that same conference room for a weekly meeting to discuss academic performance, attendance, and behavior.

It had been close to a month since students and staff returned from winter break. And yet, teachers were still reporting near-empty classrooms.

“It’s that two-week break, where a lot of our students are moving,” said Shannon Harper, a fourth grade master teacher. “They may have been (evicted from) their homes. They may be living now with a relative, and there’s some friction there. And cars break down in the winter, especially here with all the potholes.”

“I just had a student that was out for 10 days,” Harper told the group. “We don’t know why, and he doesn’t either.”

Despite a barrage of robocalls going home when a child is absent, many parents don’t send their children back to the building immediately. And even when students do return, some may not have notes or reasons explaining why they missed school.

“If you never say this is your issue, we can’t help you,” said Adrian Harrell, Gompers’ parent outreach coordinator. “We can’t see what our next solution is to help you. All we know now is they are absent.”

Gompers Elementary-Middle School in the Brightmoor neighborhood is one of the Detroit district’s newer buildings. But Brightmoor is one of the most economically challenged areas in the city.

After a year of effort, Detroit students and leaders reap the rewards

On the last day of school, the grin on Jay’Sean’s face was hard to conceal, even behind the black hoodie that shrouded his head.

He was one of nine students who won a new bike in an end-of year-raffle to reward students who showed up every day over the last weeks of school.

As he took a seat on his red and black Mongoose bicycle, Jay’Sean welcomed the compliments and cheers from his friends.

The whole school had something to cheer about, too. By the end of the year, the chronic absenteeism rate declined to 64% — just shy of the 20-point decline school officials were aiming for, but down significantly.

The district experienced a similar decline, from the peak of 77% in 2021-22 to 68% last year. District officials attribute some of that to the end of quarantining requirements that forced many students to miss school.

Encouraged by the progress last year, Gompers school staff plan to continue their strategies in the new school year that began this week.

The mentoring program will remain in place, along with the range of incentives the school experimented with. But most significant for Gompers will be the addition of a second attendance agent to work alongside Harris.

Superintendent Vitti announced earlier this year that the district would shuffle its 80 attendance agents to schools in areas with the highest concentration of chronically absent students and poverty.

The added resources provide validation that attendance agents with a coordinated, hands-on approach can make a difference.

Harris said she is proud of seeing her mentees like Jay’Sean avoid chronic absenteeism. He finished the year with 13 absences, five days below the threshold.

Under Harris’ guidance, he found an accountability system that worked for him. By the end of the winter break, for all the attempts he made to get to school on time and every day, he and other students earned snacks and mini-parties every month.

With a challenging sixth grade year behind him, Jay’Sean is ready to get back to school.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Tracie Mauriello covered state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach the team at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit students are heading back to school. Here’s what you need to know.

2023-08-25T19:51:24+00:00

Monday marks new beginnings as nearly 49,000 students in the Detroit school district return to class.

Classes will start just a few days after members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers ratified a new one-year contract deal that provides pay raises and bonuses for members.

The year begins with big questions about how Detroit will manage its enrollment challenges and protect students from the impact of budget cuts.

The new year also marks a stepped-up campaign against chronic absenteeism, as the district plans new health hubs to help kids attend school regularly and reassigns attendance agents to maximize their impact.

Here is what you need to know about some key issues facing in the district:

How will budget cuts affect students?

Detroit district officials made some strategic, but painful and controversial, cuts in the spring to balance the budget and account for enrollment losses and the depletion of federal COVID relief money.

The cuts have already hit hard, as summer school was scaled down significantly, leaving parents who wanted summer learning for their children scrambling for other options.

The big question for this school year is how the cuts will affect student learning. We already know that high school students will feel the cuts with the elimination of college transition advisers, whose job was to help students with the transition from high school to college or careers. Without that help, students may struggle to evaluate their postsecondary options and navigate the college selection process.

The district also eliminated several hundred administrative positions, including assistant principals, deans, and school culture facilitators in some schools. Some staff were able to switch to other positions in the district.

Enrollment challenges continue in Detroit

Nearly 49,000 students are enrolled in the Detroit district, down from nearly 51,000 before the pandemic.

Enrollment declines in Michigan schools can be dire financially. Schools are funded on a per-pupil basis, so the loss of each student in Detroit means about $9,600 less funding this school year.

For the last few years, the district was able to use federal COVID relief money to fill in gaps created by the enrollment loss. But that money is no longer available.

The question this school year is whether the district will see enough growth to stabilize its enrollment. Vitti shared some promising news at a recent school board meeting: As of Aug. 4, more than 2,500 new students had enrolled for the 2023-24 school year, compared with 1,626 at this time last year.

But he has also faced questions from the community and some board members about whether the district is doing enough, and whether its strategy to target preschool enrollment growth will work.

New chronic absenteeism strategies in place

The chronic absenteeism rate was 68% at the end of the last school year. That’s better than the 77% rate from the year before, but the rate of students missing a significant number of days is still high.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 18 or more days in a school year.

This school year, the district is employing new strategies, and getting tougher on chronically absent students.

The district has shifted many of its attendance agents who were assigned to individual schools to work in the central office to provide districtwide attendance outreach. Schools with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism will retain their agents; some will receive an additional agent.

Meanwhile, the district is considering a new policy that would force chronically absent students enrolled in a school outside their neighborhood to attend a school closer to their home. Vitti has also proposed a policy that would force students who missed more than 50% of the school year to repeat a grade.

Lawsuit settlement means more literacy help for students

Michigan lawmakers approved a budget that provided the Detroit district with $94.4 million to settle a 2016 lawsuit over the quality of reading instruction. The suit alleged the state was complicit in poor education outcomes for students while the district was under the control of state-appointed emergency managers.

The lawsuit was settled in 2020, with the stipulation that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would propose the $94.4 million. It took three years to get it through the Legislature.

The district now has additional resources to address longstanding challenges with literacy. DPSCD officials have already shared proposals to use the money to hire academic interventionists to provide one-on-one support to students struggling with reading.

The Detroit Literacy Equity Task Force was created after the settlement agreement was signed and includes representation from teachers, district administrators, students, support staff, and the community. It is tasked with holding a series of community meetings to get input from the public on how the money should be spent and with developing recommendations to the district based on the input. Those recommendations are due by June 30.

The group held its first community meeting Monday.

Student and families to get help at health hubs

The district will open five health hubs at high schools this school year. The hubs are designed to provide students and families with the medical resources and services they need to ensure that students attend school regularly.

Twelve health hubs in total will open in the district over a three years.

Funding comes from a $2.76 million grant from the Ballmer Group and a combined $1.8 million from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Kresge Foundation, and Children’s Foundation. (The Kellogg and Kresge foundations are Chalkbeat funders.)

School leaders have increased flexibility to suspend students

School leaders in the Detroit district have broader authority to deal with discipline problems thanks to a change in the district’s code of conduct.

Under revisions approved by the school board, deans and principals have greater flexibility to impose out-of-school suspensions, and could suspend a student after just the first instance of fighting. It marks a sharp reversal from less punitive policies the district adopted just five years ago.

The changes have drawn criticism from some students and advocates who fear school officials will use suspensions in place of other interventions and strategies.

But they are in line with what’s been happening across the country as lawmakers make it easier to kick disruptive students out of school. The pivot toward stricter discipline reflects growing concerns about student behavior and school violence.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach Lori at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit attendance proposal would kick students out of their chosen school for high absenteeism

2023-08-22T15:07:05+00:00

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Detroit students enrolled in schools outside their neighborhood could be sent back to their local school if they miss too many days, under a policy proposal from district officials aimed at tackling chronic absenteeism.

The policy would allow schools to seek district approval to transfer a student to their designated feeder pattern school — the one they would be assigned to based on where they live — but only after school officials took a series of steps to communicate with the student’s family about the absences.

“The transfer would only occur for the following year — not (during) the current school year,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told Chalkbeat.

As of 2022, only about 55% of Detroit Public Schools Community District students attended their assigned neighborhood school, Vitti said.

The proposal was shared with board members at a school board policy/ad hoc committee meeting Monday. The committee agreed to advance the draft policy to the next school board meeting on Sept. 12 for a first reading by the full board. All district policies must be reviewed by the board twice before they can be voted on.

DPSCD follows a protocol to notify parents or caregivers of a student’s absences. The first contact is recommended to be completed by a teacher for the first two days a student is absent. After every third unexcused absence — the third, sixth, ninth, and so on — a school’s attendance agent can use any of several intervention strategies, including home visits, daily check-ins, parent conferences, and contact with the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office.

Vitti said that with the proposed policy, schools would warn families about the possibility of a transfer if their student’s attendance does not improve, and could request a transfer for a student who ends the school year having been chronically absent, which typically means missing more than 18 days, or 10%, of the school year.

“We would ensure that there were not extenuating circumstances the student or family was dealing with,” such as an illness or death, Vitti wrote to Chalkbeat. “We would also consider the student’s previous attendance at the school, grades, and behavior record. All of this would be reviewed by the District before a transfer was implemented.”

The move is one of several steps DPSCD is taking to address its outsize rate of chronic absenteeism. During the 2022-23 school year, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate was 68% — down from 77% the previous year, but still above pre-pandemic levels.

Before the pandemic, DPSCD had committed to a multipronged reform effort to reduce absenteeism, including offering wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnering with community organizations.

By the end of 2018-19, in part because of those efforts, chronic absenteeism fell to 62%, from 70% in 2017-18.

The policy proposal, Vitti said, could curb some of the transportation challenges that contribute to student absenteeism.

“On the one hand, principals of neighborhood schools have asked for greater accountability for student attendance,” he said. “They also notice families are placing additional burden on themselves by not attending the school closest to their residence. This creates a greater transportation burden than walking to school or using a District bus route.”

Vitti told board members in July that the district had planned to impose punitive measures several years ago, but held off because of the pandemic. Along with the transfer rule, Vitti said he would propose a policy that would require students to repeat a grade if they miss too much school.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit school officials announce new partners for health hub expansion

2023-08-08T21:54:19+00:00

Editor’s note: This story was updated Tuesday, August 8 to disclose the Kellogg and Kresge foundations as financial sponsors of Chalkbeat.

Three regional foundations will help fund the Detroit school district’s new series of school-based health hubs, designed to provide students and families with timely and convenient access to medical services.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Kresge Foundation, and Children’s Foundation will provide the Detroit Public Schools Community District with a combined $1.8 million to develop 12 health hubs in neighborhood schools across the city, district officials announced Monday at a news conference at Detroit’s East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney. (The Kellogg and Kresge foundations are supporters of Chalkbeat.)

The newly announced donations are in addition to the $2.76 million already earmarked from the Ballmer Group. Earlier this month, DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti announced at a community meeting on mental health and school safety that the health hubs would begin in the 2023-24 school year.

In addition to East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney, the first health hubs will be launched at Southeastern High School, Osborn High School, Central High School/Durfee Elementary-Middle School, and Western International High School/Maybury Elementary School.

The remaining hubs will be launched in the next two school years.

At Monday’s news conference, Vitti heralded the health hubs as an “innovation” that will help the district in addressing chronic absenteeism, in which students have missed 10% of the school year, or 18 days.

In the 2021-22 school year, DPSCD recorded a 77% rate of chronic absenteeism, up from 63% before the pandemic, largely stemming from COVID quarantine and close-contact guidance the district observed that year. The district’s rate dropped to 68% this past school year; a positive direction, Vitti said, but still short of the district’s goal.

The health hubs, he added, will provide students and families within a three-mile radius of the site direct access to physical, mental, and dental health services that might otherwise impact a student’s attendance record.

“We had to move to a place of problem-solving, we can’t just accept these numbers,” Vitti said. “

“We believe resources can be provided best, most efficiently, with less bureaucracy, with less red tape in our schools because that’s where our children are at, and often that’s where our families are most comfortable.

“Our data is very clear: when students are absent less than nine times throughout the school year, they’re anywhere from three to five times more likely to be at grade-level performance in reading and math or to be college ready at the high school level.”

Andrew Stein, president of the Children’s Foundation, echoed the superintendent’s remarks.

“We know firsthand the need for the holistic suite of supports that the health hubs are providing,” Stein said. “And in particular, the critical role that a school nurse plays in really any school-based health strategy. The data is clear on the role nurses play in attending the physical and emotional health of students.”

The Children’s Foundation’s investment will support the creation of the health hub at Central High School, as well as funding school nurses at Central and four other DPSCD schools.

The Kresge donation will help fund the 12 health hubs, as well as establish a health hub at the School of Marygrove. Meanwhile, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation will support oral health services at all the health hubs and launch a districtwide oral health clinic in northwest Detroit.

The first five school health hubs will be phased into buildings during the school year. Each site will have a designated full-time coordinator who will assist students, families, and community members with accessing services. The hubs also will partner with local health care providers Ascension, Henry Ford Health, and the Institute for Population Health to staff the physical and behavioral health services at each location.

The coordinator will also work in tandem with school-based or districtwide attendance agents, to refer students and families to the health hub after phone calls home determine what barriers are preventing a student from coming to school.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

These NYC teens overcame school refusal and made it to graduation

2023-08-02T10:00:00+00:00

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Catherine had watched for years as her once high-achieving son’s relationship with school deteriorated.

Michael’s depression, anxiety, and ADHD made the transition to high school painful. Then the pandemic hit, and he spent his sophomore year at home in pajamas.

When schools fully reopened his junior year, Michael refused to return, and he was later hospitalized for attempting suicide. After that alarming episode, a psychiatrist gave Catherine pointed advice: drive your son to his Queens school every day, even just to see the building, or he may never go back.

“It scared me,” said Catherine.

Despite her son’s resistance, she made Michael get into their beat-up Hyundai Sonata and drive the 2.5 miles past the campus nearly every day for weeks. Eventually, he was able to step inside the school building and attend for longer stretches during summer school, with its less demanding schedule.

Then, remarkably, he returned full time for senior year.

Michael played chess with new friends. He went on the senior trip to a camp in Connecticut. He went to prom. While his attendance wasn’t perfect, he was a full-fledged member of the senior class, a development his mom credits to sticking with therapy and medications and eventually getting the accommodations he needed from his school.

In a moment that once felt next to impossible, Michael got his diploma last month and will head to community college in the fall. (Names in this story have been changed to middle names or pseudonyms to protect students’ privacy.)

Several families like Michael’s who overcame serious aversions to attending class — often referred to as school refusal — and made it to graduation told Chalkbeat they had to be determined and vigilant, navigating school mental health systems that are struggling to address worsening student needs since the pandemic without enough resources or updated guidance to meet this unprecedented moment.

Even before the pandemic, about 2 to 5% of children nationwide avoided school. Now, several social workers told Chalkbeat they are dealing with more extreme cases of school refusal than ever before, fueled in part by an alarming rise in suicidal ideation among city teens and contributing to a chronic absenteeism rate in New York City that hit 41% in the 2021-22 school year.

The consequences of missing so much school can be devastating. One longitudinal study estimated that a quarter of students who were chronically absent — defined as missing at least 10% of days — ultimately dropped out.

Meanwhile, the youth mental health system is bending under the pressure, with a shortage of hospital beds for youth in crisis and waitlists for therapists, especially for Medicaid patients, that are monthslong.

This means families rely on schools even more. But New York City’s school social workers and guidance counselors are often strained, with an average of one social worker per 456 students and one guidance counselor per 277 students, according to an analysis. National guidance recommends one school counselor and one social worker for every 250 students. For children with more extreme needs, the recommended ratio is one social worker to 50 students.

Balancing high caseloads and sometimes multiple schools make it hard to follow time-consuming best practices to treat school refusal, such as individualized transition plans with gradual exposure to school. And schools may miss early warning signs altogether.

Several social workers also told Chalkbeat that they do not have dedicated supervisors to regularly advise them on difficult cases, a common practice in clinical settings that could help prevent burnout, especially for newly minted staffers.

“I always go to a trusted colleague to run through a case during a time of crisis, just to bounce ideas off of,” said Dr. Jessica Chock-Goldman, a social worker at Bard Early College High School in Manhattan and adjunct professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work. “If students who are newly out of their masters program, and do not have the training and background in how to properly assess a child for suicidal ideation or any high risk cases, how can we put full trust in this clinician?”

Myka, 17, returned to their Queens home for senior year after spending junior year at a residential therapeutic program in Utah.

Education Department officials confirmed that social workers have no direct supervisors, but said they have access to teams outside of their school in the superintendent and central offices for additional support. Central staffers host office hours with small groups and case conferencing sessions to discuss best practices and challenging cases, officials said, but they declined to provide how often these are held.

Officials also point out that every school has access to a mental health professional — though the fate of 500 social workers hired with federal relief dollars remains a question after that money dries up next year. Schools are focusing on breathing and mindfulness, and the health department plans to roll out teletherapy for high school students this year.

“We’re also working to improve attendance across our school system and ensure that every single student feels safe, seen, and welcomed every day in their school buildings and communities, and engaged in their classroom learning,” education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in an email.

In more than a decade working in schools, Chock-Goldman said she’s never seen the level of student need that she has in the past two years, and she’s worried schools are unprepared. “Kids spend more waking hours at school than any other place,” she said. “We’re the ones doing the work.”

Schools lack training to work with intense needs, some say

Michael’s freshman year guidance counselor was “well-intentioned,” but had little training or experience with school refusal, said his mom, a social worker herself. He started to avoid school that first year of high school, months before the pandemic, and exhibited signs that went unnoticed in elementary school.

His family transferred him in the middle of freshman year to a smaller Queens high school with a strong advisory program. Soon after, classes went remote, and Michael’s mental health spiraled. During his junior year, after Michael spent about a week in the hospital, the school social worker tried to connect the family with a day treatment program. Waitlists were too long.

His family considered various out-of-school learning options, such as a hybrid online and in-person model called Fusion and therapeutic boarding school. They also considered Mount Sinai’s Comprehensive Adolescent Rehabilitation and Education Service, known as CARES, which is a therapy-based school serving teens with severe emotional challenges. Because that program is an alternative school in the city’s District 79, kids earn class credits.

But the number of applicants to CARES, which serves about 50 teens, is often nearly as big as the program itself, said Dr. Kelly Mule, a psychologist at CARES and assistant professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine.

Michael didn’t want to attend any of these programs. He wanted to return to his Queens high school, but he didn’t know how.

By May of his junior year, as he took classes at home as part of the city’s program for students with medical conditions, Michael was able to walk inside the school building. He could sit with the social worker and work on Google classroom assignments, but he couldn’t make himself walk into the classrooms. He felt too awkward when people asked where he had been, Catherine said.

“Some of the teachers made comments, ‘I don’t even know this kid. Who is this kid?’” she recounted.

At CARES, for instance, teachers are trained on how to respond to kids after prolonged absences and follow their lead on workload, often in partnership with a child’s therapist, Mule said. While time-consuming and not foolproof, these strategies can shorten future absences.

But these best practices are often passed down by more experienced colleagues, she explained. That’s why in clinical settings, staffers with a licensed master of social work, have supervisors they meet with weekly to discuss cases — a resource missing for school social workers. To Mule’s surprise, she has met veteran school social workers who weren’t aware of city-funded programs for youth, such as Children’s Single Point of Access, a centralized system for finding mental health services.

“You can’t expect social workers to sustain their work with no supervision,” Mule said. “They need a seasoned supervisor who can connect them to resources that they have vetted and know work for a specific set of symptoms or needs.”

Mental health approaches can be uneven, even within schools

This past year at Manhattan’s High School for Environmental Studies, 17-year-old Myka was required to attend a guidance counselor’s lecture about suicide prevention and awareness. Myka, who was hospitalized for suicidal ideation in December 2020, the middle of sophomore year, thought making the lecture mandatory was “hilarious” and found the counselor’s delivery cringe-worthy.

Myka, 17, holds a fidget device called an infinity cube in their Queens backyard.

When schools went remote for the pandemic, Myka, who identifies as nonbinary, stopped attending classes online and barely left their room because “it didn’t make sense in my brain to do school at home,” they said. Instead of going back to their Queens high school, they spent several months at a wilderness program in Georgia, and then completed junior year in a residential therapeutic program in Utah.

But come senior year, they felt ready to return to New York City. Though they still suffered from social anxiety, depression, and ADHD symptoms, they had more coping skills and a stronger sense of self-advocacy through therapy and self work. That’s why the counselor’s lecture came as a shock.

“She said that telling someone ‘You’re being selfish’ when they tell you they’ve thought of hurting or seriously harming themselves was an okay way to respond,” Myka said. “It just wasn’t the message that should have been sent, and was a bit of a red flag in my book.”

The school social worker, on the other hand, was a source of comfort, helping figure out which accommodations on their special education plan were needed — and which weren’t. (The school’s principal declined to comment, directing questions to the Education Department.)

Myka didn’t, for instance, need classes with two teachers, a requirement that would have prevented them from taking most of their courses, including their favorite course: AP psychology.

Other accommodations were lifesavers. Myka took breaks during class to walk around or go to the social worker’s office. They were also allowed fidget toys in class, extensions on some assignments, extra time on tests, and specific instructions breaking down big projects into more manageable tasks. And their social worker brokered a meeting with Myka’s English teacher to allow headphones to cancel out class noise, as long as no music was playing.

“I do feel as though I am able to advocate for myself and feel heard, which is something I have received a lot of positive feedback about,” Myka said.

Myka will soon head to a dorm four hours away at SUNY Oneonta, where they plan to study psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist or social worker — inspired by their own experience in mental health treatment centers.

Krystal Folk, 31, a middle school social worker, poses for a portrait in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn.

Myka’s success story illustrates the difference a great school professional can make, what KIPP charter school social worker Krystal Folk tries to accomplish with her Bronx students.

As a young Black girl growing up in Brooklyn, Folk herself felt like it wasn’t culturally acceptable to get therapy, a mindset she’s trying to change through her own work.

“In our community it’s taken a long time to accept that we need mental health services,” she said. That’s why she considers it extra important that she disclose to her students her own depression and anxiety.

“They say, ‘No Ms. Folk, you’re fine.’ I tell them, ‘I’m clinically diagnosed,’” she said. “I think normalizing that we have feelings and anxieties is important. As corny and cheesy as it sounds, I try to be the person I wish I had at their age.”

Services beyond schools are still needed

For some students, school doesn’t offer the services they need. But after getting help elsewhere, they are driven to return by a passion for learning.

That was the case with Emma, whose mother, Beth, turned to a private therapist for her daughter’s ADHD, extreme anxiety, and suicidal ideation that led to school refusal. Emma attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where there is one social worker for about 900 students, and one counselor for every 200 kids, according to an analysis. The school’s on-site mental health clinic closed during the pandemic, families said. (The school’s acting principal did not respond for comment.)

Beth credits her daughter’s return to school to dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, which helps patients learn to confront and change unhealthy behaviors. Emma first had access to the “life changing” therapy in her after-care program following hospitalization when she was a sophomore.

But another factor in her recovery was her drive to succeed at LaGuardia and her love of the school’s drama classes, which drew her to school even as dark times returned junior year, when fights with friends on social media followed her into the classroom.

“She considered pulling out of school,” Beth said. “But she didn’t want to give up on LaGuardia. She just put one foot in front of the other.” Being in the drama program remained a big pull: “To be able to spend half of your day working on your art, whatever your art is, the joy of that never diminished,” her mom said.

Emma is now planning to attend college in upstate New York and hopes to become a director or art designer, said Beth.

Echoing other parents of students who suffered from school refusal, Beth said, “We are cautiously optimistic.”

If you or someone you know is considering self-harm, please dial 988 for the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

How these Manhattan educators are trying to reduce the stigma around summer school

2023-07-24T22:29:38+00:00

Manhattan high school Principal Jeffrey Chetirko recently asked a group of his summer school students to pose for a photo for social media. But they didn’t want anyone to know they were in summer school.

“It kind of broke my heart,” said Chetirko, the principal of the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island, which hosts an annual summer school program for its own students and those from three other small Manhattan high schools.

Stigma surrounding summer school is nothing new. For many students, ending up there can feel like a personal failure, and the name still conjures the image of dejected kids plodding through dull packets of makeup work. For younger kids, the city has poured considerable resources into retooling traditional summer school by launching the heralded Summer Rising program, which combines academic recovery with recreational activities.

For teenagers, the city has focused its efforts on expanding summer employment options, but hasn’t made big changes to its academic summer school offerings.

Summer classes can serve a critical purpose for teens. They can be a fresh start for those who disengaged during the school year and a lifeline for kids at risk of dropping out — missions that have taken on increased urgency as rates of chronic absenteeism and mental health challenges continue to soar among teens.

That’s why educators at the Harbor School are working hard to turn summer school into something students can feel proud of and even look forward to.

Instead of viewing summer school as a source of shame and failure, Chetirko tries to get his students to see it as a mark of resilience — a sign they’re not letting the often formidable challenges that bogged down their school years throw them off track for good.

“I just wish that we lived in a society where we would celebrate [that],” he said.

In some cases, the format of summer school can even offer advantages over the school year in luring back struggling students, educators say.

Scheduling is more flexible, so students can attend school part of the day and still have time to work paying jobs or take care of younger siblings during their off hours.

The change of scenery — not every school offers summer classes, so many students wind up in new buildings — can also be helpful for kids who had negative experiences during the school year.

And the academic work is often more targeted: Students are taking a smaller number of classes at once, and are often in rooms with far lower student-to-teacher ratios.

“It’s like another chance, and it’s not as hard [as the school year],” said 17-year-old Gia Johannesen, a student at Manhattan Early College School for Advertising, who’s taking two classes this summer at the Harbor School. “You just come here, take the classes you need, and there’s no pressure of extreme testing or anything like that.”

Summer plays a central role in COVID recovery efforts

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, city education officials have turned to summer programming as a central piece of efforts to help young people recover academically.

In 2020, former Mayor Bill de Blasio banked on online summer school to help scores of students who’d fallen behind that spring during school closures. But the program quickly spiraled into disappointment for many teenagers, who complained about dense, difficult coursework, and unfamiliar and unavailable teachers.

In fact, high school summer school enrollment fell from over 95,000 in 2019 to just 66,000 on the last day of the program in 2020, according to an education department spokesperson, who acknowledged that methods for tracking enrollment were less reliable for 2020, when students were fully online. Enrollment has steadily bounced back since then, climbing to nearly 92,000 in 2022. Officials didn’t provide enrollment numbers for this summer.

It’s largely up to the high schools hosting academic summer school to design their own programs. Schools have the option to conduct summer courses fully or partly online, though it’s not clear how many schools are currently exercising that option. At the Harbor School, summer school instructors use remote learning only to offer extra practice, not for direct instruction, Chetirko said.

Chetirko says the curricular flexibility has worked to his advantage.

Since the Harbor School hosts summer classes for three other small Manhattan high schools, they can pool resources, while keeping the program small enough that students see familiar faces. If disciplinary issues crop up, designated staffers from the schools of the students involved will step in.

Students have to complete 45 hours of coursework, but teachers have wide latitude to plan their curriculum.

History teacher Frank Schwall said that having fewer students and fewer competing demands from other courses means he can spend more time on basics like making sure all students know how to log into their education department email addresses.

“I don’t have 30 other kids… you definitely have a lot more time to work with the kids, and there’s not as much pressure,” he said.

Schwall also takes advantage of the Harbor School’s unique location on Governors Island, launching a unit on the Statue of Liberty, which is visible from his classroom window, and asking students to rewrite Emma Lazarus’s iconic poem in their own words.

For Johannesen, the high school junior, the slower pace has been a welcome change.

During the school year, it often felt like she was trying to “prove to the state that I’m doing good,” she said. But in summer school, “it’s just proving to myself that I can actually pass algebra.”

Summer school offers a much-needed second chance

Last school year, Johannesen, like an increasing number of teens across the city and country, began feeling overwhelmed by anxiety and depression.

“It was just really, really difficult to just get out of bed and go to class,” she said. By the time Johannesen met with a therapist at a clinic in her school and began connecting the dots between her mental health and school attendance and seeking treatment, she’d already missed too much class to pass several of her courses.

Prince Allen, 16, is attending summer school while completing an internship through the Summer Youth Employment Program.

Stories like Johannesen’s have become more common in the wake of the pandemic. In the 2017-2018 school year, 31% of New York City high school juniors ended the school year marked “chronically absent,” or having missed more than 10% of the school year. By 2021-2022, the most recent year for which data was available, 43% of high school juniors ended the year chronically absent, according to education department data.

Prince Allen, 16, conceded that he spent more time than he should have “goofing off” during the school year. Allen, a rising junior at The Urban Assembly Maker Academy, said he’s struggled to readjust to being back in school after extended stretches of virtual learning during the pandemic.

“I feel like that’s the reason I’m not so much on task,” he said. “It’s just you felt separated and I felt like we learned nothing. You just feel like you don’t want to be in that space.”

Coming to summer school has allowed him to make up credit without sacrificing other summer plans. He still works every day from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. helping run a basketball tournament through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program.

Chetirko acknowledges that many of the advantages of summer school are difficult to transfer over into the school year: scheduling doesn’t come with the same flexibility and the low teacher-to-student ratios are impossible to maintain. Some of the kids who flourished during summer school will likely struggle again during the school year and return to summer school next year. But Chetirko doesn’t see that as a failure, or a waste of time.

While some students are embarrassed to be repeat summer school attendees, Chetirko sees it differently. “If you weren’t successful in that first summer, you may not have been here” for a second summer, he reasons. “You may have already dropped out.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit school district’s absenteeism rates declined after COVID quarantine rules ended

2023-07-12T12:00:00+00:00

The easing of COVID safety protocols helped the Detroit school district record a significant decrease in its chronic absenteeism rate this past school year, officials said, an encouraging sign for a district that has one of the highest rates in the nation.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District had seen its rate of chronic absenteeism jump to 77% in the previous year, when unvaccinated students who had possible COVID exposure were required to isolate for seven to 10 days. In October 2021, the district had more than 400 students a week in quarantine.

But this past school year, the percentage of students who were chronically absent — meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year, or 18 days — dropped to 68%, a decline DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti attributes to the end of districtwide quarantine and close-contact guidance. School administrators and educators were instead able to “focus on teaching and learning and intervention,” he said.

“Beyond anything, it was really getting back to the reform this year,” Vitti said at a school board academic committee meeting Monday. The district had projected a “two- to three-percentage point” improvement in its chronic absenteeism rate, he added.

“Our principals have become more comfortable being accountable to improving student attendance, and that meant more problem solving with families and with students, incentivizing improved attendance,” Vitti said.

Before the pandemic, DPSCD had committed to a multi-pronged reform effort to reduce absenteeism, including offering wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnering with community organizations.

By the end of 2018-19, in part because of those efforts, chronic absenteeism fell to 62%, from 70% in 2017-18.

At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Board President Angelique Peterson-Mayberry said she has heard some school principals complain that they have limited strategies and staff to address absenteeism.

“When there are vacancies with staff, it depends (solely) on the attendance agent at that location,” Peterson-Mayberry said. “Sometimes the schools feel strapped, because they feel like they can’t make children come to school.”

Vitti said he’s heard similar concerns over the years.

“A lot of our teachers, attendance agents mainly, will say: ‘What is the recourse after I do a home visit? After I make a phone call?’” he said.

For the coming school year, Vitti said Tuesday, the district may consider adding punitive measures to address absenteeism. In a preview at a finance committee meeting last month, Vitti said he would propose new policies that would penalize students who missed more than 50% of the school year, either requiring them to repeat the grade or, in the case of students who attend schools outside their neighborhood, assigning them back to their neighborhood school.

Vitti said the district had planned to institute the penalties years ago, but held off because of the pandemic. “Now that we are back and functioning on a reform agenda, I think that it’s time to do some things that we planned on doing,” he said.

Meanwhile, DPSCD plans to retain its attendance agent positions, with 20 of those agents shifting to its central office to provide districtwide attendance outreach. The remaining attendance agents will be placed in schools with the highest concentrations of poverty and chronically absent students.

The district is also set to launch 12 school-based health hubs in the next three years to provide medical resources and services that families would need to keep students attending school regularly.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Denver partnership aims to expand mental health services, address youth violence

2023-07-06T23:09:55+00:00

To address youth violence, eight Denver schools would get an additional staffer focused on student behavior next school year, under a proposed city council ordinance.

The proposed pilot program also would add a mobile team going from school to school, addressing mental health needs, supporting behavioral health and providing referrals.

Denver has seen high rates of youth violence over the last five years.

A plan published in 2020 noted measures that the community could take to reduce violence. But with the onset of the COVID pandemic, no action resulted.

Meanwhile, campus closures eroded many of the routines that helped teenagers stay on track. Educators report that students still are missing more school and are less engaged even when they are in class.

Earlier this year, the city produced a new plan. Among other things, it recommended improving access to mental health support in the community, including in schools.

If the city council passes the ordinance this month, the program would launch next month. The health specialist positions also are intended to serve as a career pathway for people in marginalized communities to enter the behavioral health workforce.

The bill proposes to fund the school positions and mobile services with about $860,000 in federal COVID relief funds. The idea is to shift from responding to violence and instead preventing it, said June Marcel, a Denver Public Schools strategy officer.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we could prevent the tragedies from happening in the first place?” she said.

In designing and offering the program, the city will collaborate with Denver Public Schools and community organizations.

School officials said they chose three campuses with two programs each, one a comprehensive high school and the other focusing on careers or serving older students. They are North High School and the North Engagement Center, Abraham Lincoln High School and Respect Academy, and George Washington High School and DELTA High School. They also chose two middle schools, West and Lake.

The new behavioral staffers, dubbed “community navigators,” are intended to help encourage attendance, assess students’ needs, and connect families with city and community resources. The pandemic compounded many problems like chronic absenteeism, disengagement, academic struggle and financial insecurity.

Navigators may work both on campus and in the community. Officials hope to fill those jobs with people interested in behavioral health who may have a shared cultural experience with students and are bilingual.

Schools already have counselors, and some have attendance specialists, but none have health staff specifically tasked with preventing youth violence, Marcel said.

The pilot project is intended to meet some of the needs identified in the Behavioral Health Needs Assessment that the city conducted last year and this year’s youth violence prevention plan.

Last year’s survey found that many people who need behavioral health services have a hard time finding help, with cost, transportation, and lack of convenient appointments all playing a role. Teenagers reported having an especially hard time getting in-person therapy — one of the problems the new partnership aims to address.

“One of the factors (of an increase in youth violence) is mental health and feelings of wellness related to the students, youth and family. If we can get a better handle on what’s underneath the behavior, what’s driving the behavior, if we can connect with the students in a way that feels right to them, we’re more likely to get a more accurate understanding of what’s going on to help,” said Nachshon Zohari, program manager for community engagement at the city’s department of public health and environment.

The mobile units would provide more mental and behavioral health services and resources at community events and when and where there might be a need. The fleet includes smaller versions of the city’s “Wellness Winnie” housed in a large RV. The so-called Mini Winnies will rotate on a schedule among schools.

With the pilot program, school officials said they will be able to identify the resources and needs of schools if the program is funded beyond the first year.

The pilot program will run from Aug. 1 to July 31, 2024.

Sara Martin is an intern with Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Sara at smartin@chalkbeat.org

More school-based health centers are on the way in the Detroit school district

2023-07-05T11:00:00+00:00

The Detroit school district is set to launch new school-based health centers in the next three years to provide students and families medical resources and services they need to attend school regularly.

District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti shared details about the “health hubs” during a recent virtual public meeting on mental health and public safety.

“We want to try to address as many of the challenges that get in the way of students attending school every day, and just generally better support our parents who are facing extreme levels of poverty,” Vitti said at the June 21 meeting.

An intake person at each health hub will field questions and direct patients to dental, medical, and mental health services.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District will receive $2.76 million from the Ballmer Group to help launch 12 health hubs in high schools. The philanthropic corporation was established by former Microsoft CEO, current NBA team owner, and metro Detroit native Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie.

Vitti has said a dedicated hub in school buildings would help address chronic absenteeism — when students miss 10% or more of the school year. In the 2021-22 school year, Detroit’s chronic absenteeism rate was 79%.

The health hubs will differ from the school-based health centers that are already in place at 16 DPSCD schools, according to Vitti. In addition to providing physical and behavioral health services, health hubs also will provide dental services, vision and hearing screenings, and other health-related services.

They will be open to students at that school, family and community members, and K-12 students from surrounding schools.

Soon the health hubs also will include “parent resource centers” that provide legal services, eviction help, energy bill assistance, and access to winter coats, toiletries, and transportation to families in need, Vitti said.

At a school board committee meeting in January, Vitti cited health hubs as “our greatest need outside of the [school] budget, and the best use of philanthropic dollars.”

Ballmer’s charity previously has given to Michigan’s largest school district. In 2019, it donated $5.9 million to DPSCD to help launch its student data portal.

School health clinics envisioned as ‘hub of the community’

School-based health centers have been in Michigan since the 1980s, but the outbreak of COVID and increasing concerns around student mental health have increased their relevance across the state.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services funds over 230 school-based or school-linked health care programs. In the $21.5 billion K-12 budget for the fiscal year 2024, Michigan lawmakers allocated $33 million for school-based health centers, as well as an extra $45 million for facility upgrades of current centers.

But there has been pushback in some Michigan communities. The Grosse Pointe Public School System board in January tabled plans to create a school based health center, citing concern over potential legal and financial problems tied to the project. And a proposal to place a health clinic inside Oxford High School was canceled when a health care provider learned that a majority of community members did not support the proposal, noting a lack of trust with school officials and concerns about the cost of funding a clinic.

Typically, school-based health centers involve an agreement between local health care providers, such as a hospital system, a school district, and the state. All three parties share the costs.

Ascension, Henry Ford Health, and Institute for Population Health will be among the local health care providers running the health hubs, Vitti said. Those organizations will completely staff the physical and behavioral health services provided at each location.

Providing health care at neighborhood schools could be an invaluable resource, some Detroiters said.

Franklin Hugle, a junior at Cody High School, said he believes health hubs could be more convenient for students required to take physicals to participate in sports. Under the district’s plan, Cody would become a health hub for families and students in the northwestern part of the city.

Parent Shante Tyus, whose kids attend Cody, said she thinks a health hub would be helpful for children suffering from minor illnesses or those in need of early screenings for major diseases. As a teenager, Tyus’s older sister discovered she had Crohn’s disease, which caused her to miss multiple days of school. Early testing may help families and school officials in determining how to accommodate students with chronic health conditions.

Cody “is the hub of the community,” Principal Jason Solomon said. The school conducted eye exams earlier this year and provided glasses to about 125 students. Expanding those opportunities for medical care, Solomon said, would give kids and their families more reasons to come to school.

The first five health clinics are set to launch in the next school year, including the School at Marygrove, which will operate a health hub through the school’s P-20 partnership. The remaining seven schools are targeted for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years.

In selecting the 12 schools, Vitti said, the district ensured that every student would be within 3 miles of a hub.

The 12 health hub are proposed for:

Central High School/Durfee Elementary-Middle School
East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney
Southeastern High School
Western International High School/Maybury Elementary School
The School At Marygrove*
Cody High School
Denby High School
Henry Ford High School
Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School
Mumford High School
Northwestern High School
Osborn High School
Pershing High School

* Marygrove will run its health hub in partnership with an outside organization and is not included in the 12-school total.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

How Michigan punishes its poorest families for their students’ low attendance

2023-05-24T12:00:00+00:00

Between August and December of this school year, Shetaya Griggs’ 11-year-old daughter missed more than 50 days of school, a rate of chronic absenteeism that troubled school officials.

It also left Griggs worried that she could lose the public assistance she relies on to feed her family.

Each year, under state law, Michigan yanks a cash benefit from hundreds of poor families because their children don’t attend school regularly enough. Thousands more families who apply for the benefit are rejected because of their attendance records.

The state has enforced this policy for at least a decade — even though family poverty is a leading contributor to student absenteeism, and some research has found that punitive approaches to chronic absenteeism don’t work.

Indeed, reducing income for poor families may actually worsen attendance, with serious consequences for students. Students who are considered chronically absent — meaning they miss at least 10% of school days — are more likely to struggle academically and drop out.

“If the goal is to improve a child’s likelihood of attendance, then withholding financial support from their struggling household is the perfect way to ensure you fail at it,” said Jayesh Patel, president of Street Democracy, a nonprofit legal services agency that works with families.

To parents like Griggs, such policies ignore the often complicated set of challenges that families like hers face, and they assume parents whose children are chronically absent don’t care about their children’s education or future.

“I don’t want to lose that, because my kids need it,” said Griggs, who is a single mother of two children and who has health issues that have been a significant barrier to getting her sixth-grader to school every day.

Griggs said most of the days her daughter Haydin has missed have been because her own chronic health problems made it difficult to walk her daughter to Gompers Elementary-Middle School, and because she feared letting Haydin walk to school on her own in their tough Brightmoor neighborhood. Griggs doesn’t have a car, is unable to work, and doesn’t have a strong support system to help. So when her asthma and painful eczema, which flares up frequently, are a problem, her daughter doesn’t go to school.

Griggs knows she must do better, and so far she has. The school’s parent coordinator convinced her to volunteer at the school daily. So on most days now, you will find Griggs in the parent room at the school, and Haydin in class. But she has a message for officials who want to punish parents like her.

“They don’t understand,” Griggs said. “They’re not in the homes with these families. They don’t get the challenges. I wish they would show up at some of our parent meetings so they can understand.”

Michigan strategy relies on penalties, courts and caseworkers

Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, said her organization hasn’t studied whether other states have such a law. But she is concerned that punitive measures are increasingly being used as a way to crack down on absenteeism.

“There’s a really good study from South Carolina, where they looked at if you take kids and put them into probation, and you use legal strategies, do you get a better outcome? And they found that they got worse attendance,” Chang said.

What school and community officials need to focus on, Chang said, is strategies that address the reasons why students are missing school.

In Michigan, the penalty is one of the few state-level rules intended to reduce absenteeism, which has long been a challenge in Detroit and spiked to alarming new highs in the 2021-22 school year. Michigan law also allows for chronically absent children and their parents to face court charges. Most attendance initiatives, though, are left to school districts, which have hired attendance agents, visited students’ homes, and worked to connect families with resources to deal with homelessness, medical problems, and other issues that can drive absenteeism.

State officials contacted by Chalkbeat said they could not provide evidence that the penalty leads to improved attendance. They pointed to other measures they’re taking to help kids get to school.

“Because MDHHS believes access to public assistance is important to low-income families, the department works with families that have truancy issues to address them so that the young people can get a good education and the family can receive cash assistance to meet their basic needs,” said Bob Wheaton, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the benefit.

The department has placed 209 caseworkers in 277 schools to help families address barriers to attendance, such as transportation, child care, and health care. Last year, 546,000 students in Michigan were chronically absent across the state’s more than 3,000 public schools.

Law targets people with very low incomes

The school attendance requirement in the benefit program was written into state law by the Republican-led Legislature in 2015, though officials had been following the policy for years beforehand.

The law “preys on economically disadvantaged people by reducing access to financial assistance,” said Rep. Amos O’Neal, D-Saginaw. “The funds taken from these families could be used to help them. Education is important, but I just think that taking away the needed funds required by a family to get their kids to school isn’t the way to do it.”

The new Democratic majority hasn’t taken steps to reverse the law, but a spokesperson for House Speaker Joe Tate said his party has an interest in taking “a closer look at the impact of this statute.” A spokesperson for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer did not respond to a request for comment.

The cash benefit in question, known as the Family Independence Program, maxes out at $492 per month for a family of three, and is accompanied by work and reporting requirements. The amount hasn’t increased since the late 1990s, despite inflation that has accelerated in recent years.

Only families with extremely low incomes — roughly $7,000 per year for a family of three — qualify for the benefit, and the benefit shrinks if their incomes rise.

Most of the families who lost benefits because of student truancy were in Wayne County. Wayne is both the state’s most populous county and home to Detroit, which researchers say is a “uniquely challenging” city for school attendance given its patchy transportation system, high poverty levels, widespread housing instability, and high rates of chronic illness.

State data show a steady stream of cash-strapped families missing out on a resource that might have helped with rent or car payments.

327 16- and 17-year-olds were kicked out of the program during the 2022 fiscal year, according to MDHHS.
141 entire families lost their benefit because younger children were attending irregularly.
2,585 families applied for the benefit but were denied because of their attendance records.
37 pregnant teens lost out on the benefit because of low attendance.

Those figures are slightly higher than the comparable numbers reported in 2013, when nonpartisan analysts looked at proposals to turn the policy into law.

The state doesn’t define how many missed days constitute truancy, so decisions about cutting benefits are left to the discretion of attendance agents and caseworkers.

People who are kicked out of the program or denied benefits can reapply if the student makes it to class every school day during a 21-day period. The state doesn’t know how many actually reapply.

Some officials stress the need for accountability

Most efforts to reduce absenteeism focus on eliminating barriers to attendance and drawing attention to the costs of absenteeism. Some education leaders believe that the strategies should include punitive measures for families whose students miss too much school.

In Detroit, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said he’s not sure withholding public assistance is the solution.

“That can certainly exacerbate the family’s difficult situation and the child’s future,” Vitti told Chalkbeat in an email.

However, he does believe stronger accountability and intervention are needed, something he expressed to school board members during an April 24 meeting.

“At the PreK-8 grade level, students can miss an unlimited amount of school and still move to the next grade level,” Vitti told Chalkbeat. “As a District, we need to address this. It’s not sending the right message to our teachers and principals; our families; the community; and most importantly, to our students. As a Superintendent and School Board team we need to consider what are the right consequences, after documented intervention and outreach, for missing a lot of school.”

Mark Larson, an attendance agent in Kent County, which contains Grand Rapids, said the threat of penalties is a valuable deterrent.

“When you’re counseling a family and trying to work toward family stability, I think it’s a useful tool, especially if it’s not used as a club but as a nudge,” he said.

But for the families who actually lose this benefit — and with it a substantial part of their already small incomes — the result may be destabilizing, said Christine Bell, executive director of Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, a nonprofit that works with families in southwest Detroit.

“Chronic absenteeism is a symptom of poverty, so it makes zero sense that it would take away that you would take away something that is so necessary to be able to even function,” she said.

In Detroit, Griggs is worried about the potential loss of benefits, but she’s even more worried about the possibility of jail time if her daughter isn’t in school. And there’s an even bigger concern: that the lost time in school may put her daughter behind academically.

“I want her to have a future,” Griggs said.

Koby Levin covered K-12 schools and early childhood education for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach the team at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit district attendance agents would keep their jobs next school year under new budget plan

2023-05-04T04:00:15+00:00

School attendance agents would be spared from layoffs under a proposed budget shared by Detroit school district officials at a special board meeting Wednesday.

As recently as March, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said that as many as 20 attendance agent positions could be cut as the district aims to balance its budget and retool its strategy to address persistently high rates of chronic absenteeism, which threaten to undermine the district’s reform and pandemic recovery efforts.

But as of now, Vitti said Wednesday, “all attendance agents are funded” in the budget outline for the coming school year.

Last school year, 77% of DPSCD students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year, or 18 days. Attendance agents have been a key part of the district’s strategy to address that problem.

The district currently employs about 90 attendance agents, assigned to individual schools across the city. But last fall, district officials began to reconsider their allocation of one agent per school.

The new budget recommendations come as the district tries to rein in its spending on staff to deal with impact of pandemic-related enrollment declines, the end of federal COVID relief aid, and its commitments to raise teacher salaries and curtail employee health care premiums. In the past month, the district sent out letters notifying hundreds of support staff that their positions could be cut or consolidated heading into next year.

Roughly 150 district employees — school culture facilitators, kindergarten paraeducators, and college transition advisers — could be laid off or transferred to different positions.

Wednesday’s special meeting was the first time board members have met formally to discuss budget proposals since a Feb. 18 public meeting at the DPSCD Public Safety Headquarters. But at that meeting, board members discussed the budget behind closed doors.

“We know that what we have in front of us is an attempt to address the priorities that were laid out by the board at the study session,” board President Angelique Peterson-Mayberry said Wednesday. “We talked about attendance. We talked about academic achievement. We talked about college graduation rates, and so I think what we see in front of us is an attempt to make sure those things are not compromised.”

In an over 50-page presentation to the board, the district described its current financial state as well as the details of its proposed $1.135 billion budget for 2023-24. Wednesday’s presentation also outlined options for school employees who face layoffs.

Some schools have decided to allocate a portion of their Title I funding to keep their school culture facilitators, paraeducators and college transition advisers, Vitti noted. At the other schools, it will be up to employees at schools to decide whether to take on a different role in the district.

Under the district’s proposal, those employees could still apply for other positions within the district at equal or similar wages. School culture facilitators and paraeducators could sign on as cafeteria workers, day-to-day substitutes, or special ed paraprofessionals, for example, while college transition advisers could become counselors or academic interventionists. In some cases, employees might have to pursue further education to qualify for the new positions.

“There is no reason why any individual in those three groups would not be employed next year,” Vitti said.

He said the district’s budget recommendations reflect positions that district officials believe will advance their long-term reform efforts.

But some educators and parents weren’t happy with the recommendations, which outline cuts that would fall heavily on smaller schools. For example, most schools with fewer than 300 students would no longer have their own attendance agents next year.

Taura Brown, a DPSCD parent, said her son attends a school that could lose its school culture facilitator because its student population is under 300 — below the district’s threshold for schools that would keep some of their support staff and administrators.

The culture facilitators “save a lot of lives,” Brown said. “Sometimes those culture facilitators — those Black men — are the only Black men these children encounter all day. There’s no father in their home. They’re suffering through abject poverty and they are coming to school where they are being encouraged and … made sure to feel loved, challenged, and prepared.”

Daniel Butts, a school culture facilitator at Nichols Elementary-Middle School said many of the staff, parents, and students call him “the glue that helps keep our school together.”

“They need me there, not as a security guard, not as someone wiping tables, but someone that will sit in a circle with them and tell them in spite of their mistake to try again.”

Detroit high school teacher Gavin Buckley warned against laying off or reassigning critical support staff.

“People that are going to get transferred into positions that are significantly worse will leave this district … will leave my students lacking in my school, and we’re already short-staffed.”

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

NYC parent coordinators are essential school workers. Many feel undervalued and underpaid.

2023-03-27T10:00:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free New York newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

“Family engagement” and “parent empowerment” are not mere buzzwords to Ana Maria Aguilar.

They are her touchstones as parent coordinator at a Brooklyn elementary school, where she sees the faces of her own parents — immigrants from Mexico — reflected in many of the families at drop-off and pickup.

“They come in with such fear. I try to make them feel welcome,” Aguilar said. “As a brown woman, who is also an immigrant, I can relate to their stories.”

That kind of connection drew Aguilar to become parent coordinator at Sunset Park’s P.S. 24 in the fall of 2020, a decision rooted in her desire to give back to her community after losing loved ones to the pandemic. But she found a job remade in many ways by COVID, which caused some parents and students to fear being back in school and ushered in a host of new challenges for staff.

New York City schools created the parent coordinator position 20 years ago as a way to connect families to their children’s schools after then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control of the nation’s largest school system, abolishing the local school boards that had given parents some direct decision-making power.

The role, which typically varies from school to school, has become more critical — and stressful —during the pandemic. Nearly a dozen parent coordinators described how they became their school’s tech support, public health workers, and family therapists. They doled out devices and got families logged onto school accounts. They communicated with families about COVID-related protocols and quarantines, and were often the ones standing outside of schools each morning taking students’ temperatures and collecting health screeners. They fielded calls from families with concerns about returning to buildings and were the ones reaching out to parents when kids went missing from classrooms for prolonged periods of time.

And many are now charged with helping the thousands of migrant families that have entered the public school system.

Parent coordinator salaries, however, have not kept pace with the job’s demands, staffers say, or with inflation. Starting salaries for parent coordinators two decades ago were between $30,000 and $39,000 a year. That would be about $49,400 to $64,200 in today’s dollars.

New hires for parent coordinators start at $38,235, according to current job postings.

It’s not uncommon for parent coordinators to turn to public assistance or take on additional jobs, several school staffers told Chalkbeat. And unlike teachers, parent coordinators are required to work some weekends and nights, getting comp time rather than extra pay. They also must work summers and during school breaks, where they have to report in person to borough offices.

Ana Maria Aguilar (center), the parent coordinator at P.S. 24 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, helps organize events celebrating families’ culture.

“We’re helping struggling parents, but we’re also struggling parents,” said Aguilar, herself a graduate of Brooklyn public schools and a former parent/teacher association head of her childrens’ school. For the upcoming spring break, she will likely have to take personal days since she doesn’t have child care for her first and fourth graders.

The city recently reached a tentative deal with District Council 37, the union representing parent coordinators, along with other city workers, including school aides, cafeteria workers, and other staffers critical to the day-to-day functioning of schools.

Under the deal, union members will get a one-time $3,000 signing bonus and four years of 3% annual raises, with a 3.25% bump in the fifth year. The deal, which runs retroactive to May 2021, remains below the pace of inflation, which hit 6% last year. But it was higher than Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed 1.25% increase in his preliminary budget.

Members have until the end of the month to vote on the deal, which is largely expected to be ratified. Many parent coordinators, however, remain upset that the contract doesn’t address certain issues like their in-person work requirements during school holidays.

Parent coordinators are helping families process trauma

Though COVID protocols are no longer as time-consuming, parent coordinators are still helping families whose lives have been profoundly impacted by the pandemic over the past few years. They are also on the frontline working with the families of the 14,000 asylum-seeking students who have enrolled this school year, many of whom arrived with few belongings, a lot of trauma, and little English.

Parent coordinators are often part of a school’s team focused on tackling chronic absenteeism, which has become a major problem, with about 40% of children last year missing at least a month of school. And they continue to have other duties, including marketing their schools — which has become more important as enrollment has dropped. They organize school tours and help families with admissions questions, both those interested in coming to their schools as well as those who are graduating.

At the start of this year, before the city lifted vaccination requirements for parents to enter the building, de-escalating tense situations often fell to parent coordinators, said Jonathan Figueroa, who started in the role at P.S. 59 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, two days before the pandemic closed down campuses.

“I do feel like the job has taken on more. I see the burnout is real,” said Figueroa, who hopes to finish his bachelor’s degree and become a social worker. “But for me, it’s about being involved and advocating for my community.”

Aguilar began building routines during the pandemic that have continued to serve her school community this year, as it welcomed an influx of migrant students.

Her Mondays focus on community resources, providing information about food pantries or rent relief. Tuesdays touch on self-care: A recent workshop with New York University’s ParentCorps discussed the importance of helping kids hold onto their roots after coming to a new country. On Fridays, she leads “community walks” to sites such as the large manufacturing and shopping complex at Industry City or the office of their local City Council member. Weekends are for coat and food drives as well as “family fun” activities.

Like Aguilar and Figueroa, Erica Ramos became a parent coordinator during the pandemic, where her ability to listen and her bilingual skills were a great asset. She let parents “release their stress,” and tried to help them manage their fears and frustrations as the various guidance from the education department shifted. With several families still too scared to send their children back, Ramos geared up with masks and face shields to do home visits with counselors.

“I spent hours and hours on the phone listening to parents just terrified,” said Ramos, parent coordinator at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a middle and high school in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. “What was it going to look like? How were we going to keep students socially distanced? And there were all these Catch 22s. We had the windows open, but it was freezing. So parents were calling to complain that their kids were too cold.”

She continues to help families in whatever way they need. Amid growing concerns about an uptick in marijuana use across city schools, she recently held a family workshop on drug use organized with her school’s substance abuse prevention counselor. She’s become the point person for a school-based pantry, ordering the food and reaching out to families to let them know about it.

Erica Ramos, the parent coordinator at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Her full-time job as parent coordinator isn’t enough for Ramos, a single mom who lives in Bushwick, to pay her bills. Her paycheck every two weeks of $1,500 covers her $1,900 a month rent in Brooklyn, but leaves little left for food and other necessities. Ramos recently reapplied for food stamps, but missed an enrollment call from the program. The process of starting over feels too daunting, she said. She also works at a restaurant on Thursdays nights and for Sunday brunch. On Friday evenings or Saturday mornings, she cleans houses.

She’s been eyeing other positions in the education department because her current one, she said, is “illogical” in terms of how much they get paid for the work and time they put in compared to other school staffers.

“Why am I working full time for the city of New York, and I can’t afford to live in the city of New York?” Ramos asked.

A wave of parent coordinator job openings on horizon

For some parent coordinators, the role is a stepping stone, while they finish degrees or get other higher-paying school secretarial jobs. For some, it’s a second career, which gives them a cushion of savings. But many have been doing the job for the long haul, and as the position reaches its second decade, schools are bracing for a wave of retirements.

As part of last June’s agreement in Albany to extend mayoral control over the city’s school system for another two years, the state tweaked the hiring process for parent coordinators, requiring that each district’s parent advisory boards, known as Community Education Councils, approve each new parent coordinator.

Rosa Diaz, president of District 4’s Community Education Council in East Harlem, said the change has been fruitful in building relationships with the new parent coordinators.

“I see it as another opportunity to work together,” Diaz said, explaining that they tell the new hires, “If you need any support, reach out to us.”

Sara Sloves was a teacher at a Harlem charter school before becoming the parent coordinator at the Upper West Side’s Computer School in 2007. The job took on a different “energy” during the pandemic, she said, as families eagerly awaited her weekly newsletters with updates on the city’s evolving COVID guidelines. She started hosting meetups at local parks to help them feel connected to the school. She still sets up time on Fridays to meet families at local coffee shops, but more recently has begun to host breakfasts again at school.

“You need to have a kind and understanding soul at the end of the day,” Sloves said. “You have to be able to connect with people and want to do that.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit school district is pressed for answers on how impending budget cuts will affect staffing

2023-03-24T21:50:05+00:00

Community members and union leaders are asking the Detroit school district for more clarity on how impending budget cuts will affect certain categories of district employees, as officials prepare for the end of federal COVID relief money.

Over 100 district positions may be cut or consolidated moving into the 2023-24 school year, including school support staff such as general ed kindergarten paraprofessionals, school culture facilitators, attendance agents, and college transition advisers. At a meeting of the school board finance committee Friday, the community groups pressed the district to prioritize student and family needs as it decides where to make cuts.

“We know that a lot of our paraprofessionals are really important for student relationships,” said Molly Sweeney, director of organizing for education advocacy group 482Forward. “So as we think about the budget process, if there are staff cuts, we want to be able to really justify that for what that impact is in our families and really stand with the community members.”

The Detroit Public Schools Community District received a total $1.3 billion in federal aid to help students recover from the pandemic. DPSCD will have spent most of the money by the end of this school year on initiatives such placing nurses in every school, increasing mental health resources and staff support, creating and expanding the DPSCD Virtual School, and after-school and summer school programming. And it has already committed $700 million to renovate and rebuild schools across the city.

The depletion of those funds will force the district to make some tough spending decisions for the coming year, because one of its main remaining sources of revenue is state aid based on enrollment. And DPSCD has seen its enrollment drop by about 2,000 students since the start of the public health crisis in 2020.

Discussions about next year’s budget are still ongoing, and the budget will not be finalized until board approval in June. But district officials are hoping to soften the impact of expected cuts on district employees and families by moving employees in positions that are expected to be phased out into roles with staffing shortages, such as pre-kindergarten paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, cafeteria aides, and academic interventionists.

“We want them to stay with us but move to another area,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.

Principals across the district have received their proposed budgets and are working on determining their priorities.

Part of the discussion about staff reductions, Vitti added, has been to ensure equitable funding across the district, particularly for neighborhood high schools and large K-8 schools — schools that typically have higher rates of student absenteeism and lower achievement metrics. Those schools, he noted, will have “more flexibility this year with deciding what positions they want in their building.”

After spring break next week, Vitti said, the district intends to host engagement sessions for district employees and community members to go into “greater depth and talk about the recommended changes as we go into the budget adoption in June.”

One category of employees that will see adjustments from new district priorities is attendance agents, the employees assigned to help school administrators track down absent students and get them to class.

As many as 20 attendance agent positions may be cut from the district’s budget, according to Vitti, as the district retools its strategy to address chronic student absenteeism.

In the latest school year, 77% of DPSCD students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year, or 18 days.

Attendance agents have been a key part of the district’s strategy to address the problem. The district currently employs roughly 89 attendance agents, assigned to individual schools across the city. But last fall, district officials began to reconsider their allocation of one attendance agent per school.

In the future, Vitti said, the district wants to prioritize its placement of attendance agents at schools with the highest number of chronically absent students. Another group of about 20 agents would operate districtwide to support schools with less absenteeism.

As with the other positions designated for cuts, current attendance agents will be able to transition into other high-need staff roles, Vitti said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

How NYC’s school bus delays help drive chronic absenteeism and missed learning for students with disabilities

2023-03-15T16:15:13+00:00

One morning in late October, 8-year-old Eric Vilchis’s school bus picked him up on Bushwick Avenue at 7:30 a.m. About three and a half hours later, his mother, Araselis Pedrasa, received a phone call from his school: Her son had never arrived.

Panicked, the Brooklyn mom began calling the bus driver and bus attendant. Neither answered their phones.

“We didn’t know where the bus was,” she said in an interview translated from Spanish.

Pedrasa learned later that the bus had never left Brooklyn. A new bus driver had gotten lost and eventually “just shut down and sat there,” said Laura Cruz, the director of pupil personnel services at Eric’s school in Queens, the Lexington School for the Deaf. Cruz reached out to the bus company during the incident.

About 150,000 students in New York City rely on the city’s yellow buses to get to school each day, and 43% of them are students with disabilities. Many of those students are guaranteed bus service in their individualized education programs, or IEPs, legal documents that outline services and accommodations.

Yet parents and caregivers across the city say the long-standing problem of delayed, overcrowded, or missing buses is contributing to chronic absenteeism in schools and causing students to miss out on hours of instruction. They say the problem has only gotten worse amid a major shortage of bus drivers. About 300 yellow school bus driver positions in New York City were unfilled as of December.

Delays were nothing new for Eric. He typically arrives at school around 10:30 a.m., about two and a half hours after the day starts, his school said. But on that October morning, when his bus driver never left Brooklyn, Eric sat on the bus for six hours, arriving at his school at 1:40 p.m., his mother said.

“He had nothing to eat. No water. Nothing,” Pedrasa said.

About 350 school buses in New York City are delayed each day, according to data released by the city in October. In that month, 14,000 school delays were reported, more than any other month since 2017. On average, the buses showed up 41 minutes late.

As of March 1, almost 63,000 school bus delays had been reported for this school year, an average of over 10,000 each month. Of these, the majority were buses for students with special needs, according to public data.

Some parents and advocates believe the bus problems directly contribute to chronic absenteeism in schools — that rate that reached 40% in the 2021-22 school year, according to the department of education. A student is considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of school days.

Students with disabilities were significantly more likely to miss school. In Brooklyn, where Eric lives, about half of students with disabilities were chronically absent compared to about a third of their general education peers.

The city says that if a student is absent or late due to a transportation issue, their absence is coded differently in the attendance system to ensure students are not penalized. But absences due to busing issues are still included in citywide chronic absenteeism rates — and the children still miss out on hours worth of instruction.

Janyll Canals, an attorney at Advocates for Children, echoed this point. “Busing does have an impact on chronic absenteeism for students with special needs,” she said.

Josiah, 17, has missed 11 days of school so far this year because of bus-related issues.

April Blakely’s 17-year-old son, Josiah, wakes up at 6 a.m. each morning to catch his 7 a.m. school bus, a service mandated by his IEP.

“There were times I waited downstairs until 8, 8:30, 9,” she said. “One morning he was late because they didn’t have a bus. He got picked up at 10,” two hours after his school day officially began. Most days he arrives at school just before 9 a.m., missing out on a hot breakfast and his first period.

Blakely said her son has missed about 11 school days so far this year due to transportation issues.

She tries to take Josiah to school by public transportation but is not always able to. This journey takes about two hours round trip and involves the Long Island Railroad, a subway, and a bus.

Students with disabilities disproportionately affected

The education department contracts with 52 different bus companies. These buses cover around 9,000 routes and pick up 150,000 students. Routes zigzag through the city, grouping students from different neighborhoods and schools all on the same bus.

Eligibility for yellow buses depends on grade level, walking distance, and special accommodations. Once a student reaches seventh grade, they are only eligible for a yellow bus if they have an IEP or other accommodation. While about 20% of all New York City students have IEPs, 43% of all students who receive busing have disabilities.

The city’s website states that students as young as kindergarten, traveling out of borough for school, can legally spend up to 115 minutes on their buses each way. Some students have IEPs that mandate the maximum amount of time the child is able to spend on a bus for cognitive and medical reasons, and several families say the buses often violate these limits.

At the start of this school year, the Office of Pupil Transportation received 18,000 complaints from families who reported missing or delayed buses and bus routes, according to a report released by the New York City Council.

City officials say they have been working toward a solution, trying to make it easier for people to become bus drivers and creating an app that they say will eventually be able to track all buses and design more efficient routes. In the meantime, they’re paying rideshare apps, like Uber, to take some students to school each morning. Department of education officials were unable to provide data on how many students use the rideshare option or how much money has been spent on these rides so far.

Students with disabilities have been disproportionately affected by issues with school transportation.

“Every student and family deserve the support and resources they need to safely travel to and from school,” said education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle. “We are committed to providing quality transportation and outstanding service to the approximately 150,000 students we transport to and from school each day.”

Some parents aren’t willing or able to wait for the city’s solutions. Sara Catalinotto and her husband began to get involved in school bus transportation advocacy in 2008, frustrated by their then-second-grade son’s “long long long” commute from one end of Manhattan to the other.

Catalinotto said a group of parents, mostly from the same school, were all comparing notes and trying to figure out why their routes were so convoluted. By 2010, fed up with the city’s alleged incompetence and inaction, they founded Parents to Improve School Transportation, or PIST.

Twelve years later, Catalinotto still runs PIST and is in near-constant communication with parents and bus drivers across the city. She said some days she doesn’t want to open her email because reading all of the accounts from families makes her cry.

Catalinotto’s group has begun petitioning for a “School Bus Bill of Rights,” to “empower a panel of parents/caregivers, disability advocates, educators, and bus workers over pupil transportation policy decisions.” They also provide families across the city with resources, such as a pamphlet with tips to navigate the intricate bureaucracies of the Office of Pupil Transportation.

Rideshare apps, an imperfect solution to busing gaps

Even as advocates and city officials say they are working on long-term solutions, many families say the city’s short-term solutions — Ubers, taxis, and other rideshare options — are inaccessible.

Diana Sombrano, another parent at Lexington School for the Deaf, said her daughter’s bus route has no driver. One morning a bus did show up, but it was so overcrowded that her daughter, Brittany, could not fit, she said.

“I was standing at the door looking inside the bus, and I was like, ‘It’s impossible,’” said Sombrano. “I don’t want my daughter on a bus like that.”

Because of bus issues, Brittany now travels to the Lexington School for the Deaf with her mom using a prepaid rideshare provided by the city’s education department.

After contacting the Office of Pupil Transportation, the office offered her daughter prepaid rideshare trips to and from school. But Sombrano would have to accompany Brittany in the car, both ways. The car is supposed to take the parent to their child’s school and then back home or work— but it’s hard for many working parents to make the roundtrip.

According to the education department’s website, this prepaid service is only offered to students who are eligible for curb-to-school transportation if their route is “out of service.”

Cruz, who works at Lexington School for the Deaf, said that in reality, this option is limiting. “The problem is that a family member has to accompany the students, and a lot of families can’t. They gotta go to work,” she said. “We offered the car share to like 30 families.”

Of those families, the Sombranos were the only ones able to utilize it.

While Sombrano ultimately secured prepaid trips to and from school for her daughter, she said it was a frustrating process requiring repeated follow up with the pupil transportation office.

Lori Glick, a social worker at the school, said this experience is common. She said the school sent a list of students eligible for the rideshare option to the office on Nov. 21. By mid-December, she still hadn’t heard back.

In an emailed statement, an official at the department of education said, “NYC Public Schools works to proactively identify and notify any families who may be eligible for rideshare services. If there are any families who were not contacted proactively and they believe they may be eligible for rideshare, we encourage them to reach out to their school to request the service.”

Eventually, the city assigned the Sombranos a taxi service, which now transports them to and from school each day.

Even that solution is imperfect.

“Sometimes the taxi driver is late so I have to call them every morning and remind them,” Sombrano said. “It’s ridiculous.”

Bus delays have been such a common occurrence that the administrators at Lexington have created an after-school schedule to ensure at least one adult is always available to sit with kids until their late buses arrive.

Eric, the student who was stuck on his bus for six hours in October, is still waiting for a permanent bus driver to be assigned to his bus. His parents do their best to get him to school on their own each morning and, in the afternoons, he sits with the administrator on duty, often for hours, waiting for his ride home.

Amanda Geduld is a Columbia University Stabile Investigative Fellow.

Correction: The city’s rideshare program does take parents to or from work after school drop off or pick up.

NYC schools want to boost enrollment. It might prove a major challenge.

2023-02-09T05:01:00+00:00

New York City schools Chancellor David Banks wants to win students back.

The nation’s largest school district has hemorrhaged students since the start of the pandemic, with enrollment down about 11% to 813,000 students in grades K-12 since then.

Earlier this week, Banks even tweeted: “Increasing enrollment and boosting opportunity for all of our students is our North Star.”

But such an effort might not be so simple, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project, and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee.

Across 21 states, about 230,000 of the students who left the public school rolls from 2019 to 2021 cannot be explained by rising private school or homeschool enrollment or population changes, according to the analysis. A quarter of those children — roughly 60,000 — were in New York.

These students could have fallen off school rosters for various reasons, Dee noted, such as being homeschooled without registering with the state or skipping kindergarten. Other students might have disengaged during remote learning or amid mental health struggles.

But there could be other factors that complicate the chancellor’s goals of rebuilding enrollment. Besides a declining birth rate, immigration to New York City has slowed, and families are leaving New York for places like New Jersey and Florida — often in search of cheaper housing. Together, demographic change could account for at least 40% of New York state’s public school enrollment decline, according to the analysis.

“There’s growing evidence for how much domestic migration happened during the pandemic,” Dee said. That likely reflects “underlying structural factors,” he said, “such as the enduring nature of work-from-home arrangements that have allowed people to relocate, as well as the push-pressure from things like rising housing costs.”

He added, “On some level, that reduction in public school enrollment wasn’t just a flight for public schools. It was a flight from these communities.”

Enrollment losses mount in NYC

New York City school enrollment has been declining every year since 2016, due in part to declining birth rates.

Between the 2018-19 and the 2019-20 school years, for example, the city saw enrollment fall by 5,000 students. But the decline has accelerated. Three years later, there are 99,000 fewer kids in the city’s district schools, even as additional classrooms for 3-year-olds have been added to the system, according to preliminary education department enrollment data from October.

Where did they go? The picture is not entirely clear. During this time, the number of homeschooled students in New York state has gone up, though it still represents comparatively few children. The number of private school students statewide, however, dropped.

At the same time, the school-age population statewide fell by more than 60,000 children, according to census estimates.

After accounting for the non-public school increase and the population loss, that leaves just over 59,000 students whose exit from the state’s public schools isn’t explained. At least in theory, those students are missing.

But the census estimates used for the analysis have shortcomings, especially when it comes to counting children. The New York state census estimates, in particular, have been known to be off-base compared to the official 10-year estimates. Dee’s analysis notes that the enrollment data and census data are collected over different time periods, which could understate the role of population change.

Demographic experts warned against using a specific number for the state’s students missing from school rosters.

“The population estimates may not be the best basis for comparison in this case,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research. “You may be able to generally determine the direction of the gap,” he added, but cautioned against “calculating seemingly precise population counts representing the ‘gap.’”

Because of these limitations, Dee ran a similar analysis for pre-pandemic years in New York, which found a much smaller number of unaccounted-for students, pointing to something “out of the ordinary” during the pandemic, he said.

“Over the pandemic, we’ve seen this historically unprecedented exodus from public schools,” Dee said.

City officials said they have accounted for students who left the system, sharing a breakdown earlier this school year detailing the numbers of children who went to different parts of the state, the country, or left the U.S., as well as those who dropped out or transferred to charter or private schools.

“Like districts and schools across the county, our enrollment has been impacted by fluctuations resulting from the pandemic as well as long-term trends in birth rates,” Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg previously said in a statement.

The enrollment drop has real world consequences for schools. As students leave the system, the city is bracing for a dramatically smaller budget once COVID relief dollars dry up since schools funds are based on enrollment.

Grappling with students who left, and who are frequently absent

Banks, in prepared remarks for Wednesday’s Albany budget hearing, acknowledged that families left New York City public schools for various reasons, and he showed optimism for winning some back.

“The answer to declining enrollment is clear: we have to give our students and families the opportunities and experiences they want in the classroom,” he said, “and we must do a better job of showing them how our schools are giving students the skills and knowledge that will drive success in their lives after school.”

He added: “My administration is focused on rebuilding trust with our families and bringing families back to our schools.”

To that end, the city continues to open new schools. Two that include remote learning opened this year, along with a school focused on robotics. A school focused on design and social justice is expected to open next year. But it also remains to be seen whether the city will soon propose a rash of school closures or mergers. There are a couple of proposed mergers on upcoming agendas for the city’s Panel for Educational Policy.

David Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, cautioned about using the big-picture “rough” data to make “finely tuned” policy decisions that affect individual students.

“It doesn’t get to the granular level of individual kids’ needs,” he said. “We know they’re not missing in a real sense. They’re just not on anyone’s radar. It’s the radar screens’ fault, not the kids’ fault.”

He compared the issue to the debate around learning loss, saying it’s “valid and important” to research the phenomenon, but that there are also so many variables and unknowns that are difficult to parse out.

“I think it’s much less important for the macro than the micro: For a given kid who’s not in school, it’s much more important,” he said.

Bloomfield remained more concerned about the larger number of New York City students who are chronically absent and might be enrolled but “alienated” from their schools. More than 30% of students this year are on track to have missed more than 18 days, or about a month, of school, city officials have said.

“The other piece is the in-school situation,” Bloomfield said, “The kids who can be found but are not being served.”

Correction: Due to an update to one state’s enrollment figures, this story has been corrected to change the estimated number of missing students in all states from 240,000 to 230,000.

This article is based on data collected by The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project. Data was compiled by Sharon Lurye of the AP, Thomas Dee of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Justin Mayo of Big Local News.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Is your student facing barriers in getting to school every day? Tell us why.

2023-02-08T21:53:57+00:00

Newark Public Schools has a history of poor attendance rates and chronic absenteeism among its students. The pandemic disrupted student learning and in-person interactions, further eroding school attendance.

To better understand the barriers to attendance, Chalkbeat Newark is looking to speak with students, parents, guardians, educators, and family members who know or have a student who’s missed school in a Newark public school and the challenges they face in getting there.

Regularly missing school can be disastrous for students and may lead to lower test scores and a higher risk of dropping out. The district continues to average a 91% daily attendance rate but schools with high average daily attendance may still have a core group of chronically absent students.

Students are considered severely chronic if they miss ten school days or more a year and chronically absent if they miss less than nine and a half during that same time frame. In a month, a student is chronically absent if they miss more than two days and severely chronically absent if they miss more than three and a half school days.

According to experts, students who miss that much school tend to have a greater risk of getting in trouble with the law, among other negative impacts.

Newark absenteeism is on the rise this year and exceeds fall 2019 rates, when 17% of students were chronically absent, but remains behind fall 2020 rates when 32% of students were chronically absent during remote learning.

Chronic absences sometimes vary from year to year for different reasons that can be tough to pinpoint. This year, Newark school leaders are grappling with pandemic-era challenges and barriers to getting to school such as transportation issues, housing instability, student illness, and school learning environments as they work to get students in classrooms.

A look at the district’s fall data shows that roughly 21% of students were chronically absent from September to December 2022, with 8% of those students considered severely chronic, according to Newark Public Schools in January.

In November, just over 35% of the district’s students were reported as chronically absent, with roughly 12% of students categorized as severely chronically absent that month, according to data presented by the Newark Board of Education. The numbers reflect a roughly 4% increase from the previous month when 31% of students were reported as having a chronic absence.

The district has used attendance campaigns to motivate students to get to school every day in the past. This year, it launched an incentive program offering gift cards and tickets to New Jersey Devils home games to students at four high schools to help reduce chronic absenteeism among high school students.

Some students can find motivation in rewards programs that incentivize students to be in school, but those who are chronically or severely chronically absent may need more intensive support to address their attendance issues, according to Hedy Chang, the executive director for the national nonprofit Attendance Works.

Does your student face barriers in getting to school? Has the pandemic made it harder for your student to attend classes regularly? Please fill out the survey below to help us understand what’s causing chronic absenteeism in Newark and why students are struggling to get to school.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Tell us: How has your relationship to school changed since the pandemic started?

2023-01-25T21:45:59+00:00

To say it’s been a long three years feels like an understatement. Much has changed for many New Yorkers since the COVID pandemic started, particularly when it comes to their relationship to school and education.

Where does that leave parents, students, and educators? What kind of support do families and schools need?

It’s still a trying time for many New York City schools.

The nation’s largest school system continues to lose students, resulting in budget cuts. But in many cases, having fewer teachers meant they had to do more with less, often with class sizes ballooning. Compared to the year before, elementary and middle school classes increased this year, according to city data. And the privately run but publicly funded prekindergarten centers that are the backbone of the city’s free pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds has been rife with funding and other problems.

Meanwhile students are still healing from prolonged isolation, but are once again going on field trips and are back in their classrooms — except when they don’t show up, as chronic absenteeism rates remain high, and educators have seen an increasing number of students who feel like school is optional, in a way.

Some children are trying to self-medicate with marijuana, experts have said, and schools are reporting an uptick in student marijuana use, particularly in younger grades. On top of social emotional needs, many students still need academic help. The city has also been grappling with how to better serve a rising number of homeless students, particularly from migrant families sent here on buses from Texas.

Please fill out our brief survey to let us know how things have changed for you:

Newark high school students can earn hockey tickets, gift cards in campaign to fight chronic absenteeism

2023-01-20T15:00:28+00:00

Newark school leaders are offering gift cards and tickets to New Jersey Devils home games to students at four high schools as part of a new initiative to raise attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism.

Among the high schools, Newark Vocational, Barringer, and West Side saw the highest levels of students who are chronically absent in October and November, according to data presented last month by the Newark Board of Education. But in a new partnership with the Devils Youth Foundation, the district launched an incentive program this month to raise attendance at Barringer, Central, Malcolm X Shabazz, and Weequahic High Schools, which are home to roughly 3,400 students combined.

A student is considered chronically absent if they miss between two and three days of school in a month, and severely chronically absent if they miss more than three and a half school days in that period. Chronically absent students are those who miss 10% or more of school days — or at least 18 days — during a school year for any reason.

Newark has long struggled with poor attendance and previously used attendance campaigns to motivate students to get to school every day. This year, Newark school leaders are grappling with post-pandemic challenges and barriers such as transportation problems, housing instability, student illness, and school learning environments as they work to keep attendance rates up.

The state uses chronic absenteeism as a measure of school quality and success for accountability under the Every Student Succeeds Act, according to the New Jersey department of education.

Just over 35% of Newark Public School students were reported as being chronically absent in November, according to data presented by the Newark Board of Education last month. The numbers reflect a roughly 4% increase from the previous month, when 31% of students were chronically or severely chronically absent. At the beginning of this school year, the district reported 27% of all Newark students were chronically absent in September.

Among the high schools, 30% of students at West Side had severe chronic absences by missing three and a half days of school or more in November. Newark Vocational reported 29% of its students had chronic absences because they missed two or three days of school that same month.

In October, 35% of students at Barringer had severe chronic absences while Newark Vocational reported 28% of students had chronic absences because they missed two or three days that same month. Both Shabazz and Central reported 18% of students had severe chronic absences in November while Weequahic reported 13% that same month.

Under the new initiative with the Devils Youth Foundation, the district aims to raise attendance by 2 percentage points in the high schools and reward students for achieving attendance goals. Students can earn Amazon gift cards and tickets to select New Jersey Devils home games as part of the program, which runs until June.

“Absenteeism among students, especially since COVID, has been on the rise,” said Kate Whitman Annis, the executive director of the Devils Youth Foundation, in an email to Chalkbeat Newark. She said they are trying to address “the core issues students are facing that contribute to students missing school.”

During the 2018-19 school year, the district had a 26.8% chronic absenteeism rate – a roughly 6% improvement from the previous school year when 32% of students were chronically absent, according to New Jersey School Performance data.

According to experts, students who miss that much school tend to have lower test scores, higher dropout rates, and a greater risk of getting in trouble with the law. Experts cautioned that chronic absences sometimes vary from year to year for different reasons that could be tough to pinpoint. Hedy Cheng, the executive director for Attendance Works, a nonprofit focused on improving school attendance rates, said some challenges include school practices that can affect attendance, transportation issues, housing instability, and academic engagement.

“Kids who aren’t so challenged are generally having better attendance,” Cheng said. “But there’s a group of kids who are still experiencing challenges and their attendance might be even more challenged.”

High school students might face additional barriers to getting to school such as work, taking care of an older sibling, or an unsafe passage to campus due to community violence. Some find motivation in rewards programs that incentivize students to be in school, but those who are chronically or severely chronically absent may need more intensive support to address their attendance issues, Cheng added.

As of Nov. 30, the district reported a 91.7% average daily attendance rate, similar to the 2019 rate when the district averaged 91%. But schools with high average daily attendance rates may still have a core group of chronically absent students.

“Those kids also need [rewards] but it just won’t be sufficient,” said Cheng who also noted that severe chronic absences could still be high even in schools with strong daily attendance rates.

In 2018, Superintendent Roger León launched a back-to-school campaign called “Give Me Five.” It required each district employee, from custodians to assistant superintendents, to call the families of five students to urge them to show up to school on the first day of classes. He noted the success of the program while the chronic absenteeism rate grew to 26% that school year.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools’ watchdog flags unchecked overtime pay, lost students, sexual misconduct

2023-01-05T06:05:00+00:00

Chicago Public Schools’ watchdog is raising red flags about sharply increasing extra pay for school staff in recent years, rising sexual misconduct complaints, and a troubling practice of schools mislabeling students as transfers when they’re missing school.

The district’s Office of Inspector General detailed these and dozens of other instances of fraud, misconduct, and wrongdoing in a sweeping 120-page annual report released Thursday.

Inspector General Will Fletcher said his office received 1,825 complaints and opened investigations into 725 — or about 40% — of them. Hundreds were allegations of sexual misconduct taken up by a special unit of investigators created in 2018, which also is investigating complaints received in previous years.

In response to the annual report, Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Mary Fergus said in an email that the district supports the inspector general’s work.

“As a District, we take seriously our responsibility to serve our families with integrity and to address individuals who breach CPS policies and the public’s trust — and hold them accountable,” Fergus wrote. “CPS will continue to ensure our District policies and procedures support the highest ethical standards to ensure our valued team members act in the best interest of our students.”

Here are five highlights from the inspector general’s 2022 report.

Truant students have been mislabeled as transfers

Chicago Public Schools has a “chronic problem” of mislabeling students who are not showing up to school, according to the inspector general’s latest report. Since 2014, there have been five other investigations into the issue. This year, the inspector general found “extensive evidence” schools across the district are mislabeling students as transfers when they are truant, lost, or have dropped out.

Fletcher said the district’s own Office of Internal Audit and Advisory Service audited dozens of schools in 2019 and 2020. His office’s review of those audits found a “districtwide problem of schools failing to document transfers and lost children as required by law and CPS policy.”

More troubling, Fletcher said, is the district’s lack of follow-up to correct these problems.

“We have not been able to confirm or see any evidence that CPS is taking adequate corrective actions even when these audits bear out that schools are not in compliance with what they’re supposed to be doing to verify transfers or missing students,” Fletcher said. “When you have the information, by way of an audit, then you need to correct the problem.”

When students are mislabeled as transfers, they are removed from data used to measure how well schools are doing — including their attendance and graduation rates. Besides compromising data quality, this miscoding also means students may not receive support to get back into class and on track with learning.

The inspector general’s report outlined one case at an elementary school, where 20 students were incorrectly labeled as having transferred without evidence that these students requested transfers. In emails, school staff discussed “dropping” a student who didn’t return after winter break. The report said the school’s principal retired and one of two clerks resigned during the investigation. The other school clerk received extra training and the school culture coordinator -– who the report said was “most responsible” for the issue — was suspended for one day and got extra training.

The audits reviewed by Fletcher’s office were from before the pandemic, and data shows students have been missing more school in the two years since then. The inspector general recommends that the district spot-check transfer verification data and create a process to hold schools accountable for reporting false data to the district.

A district spokesperson said they are creating a new team within the Office of Student Support and Engagement to “address the improper use of leave codes and the documentation of transfers and dropouts.”

Surge in overtime pay, stipends raises red flags

The Inspector General is calling on the district to increase transparency and overhaul how it tracks the way staff earn extra pay beyond their salaries.

The watchdog found a dramatic surge in overtime, stipends and other extra pay that staff earn for taking on extra work, including coaching and after-school supervision. According to the report, Chicago Public Schools paid $73.9 million in extra pay, overtime, and stipends in 2021 — a 74% increase over the previous five years.

Amid this increase, the inspector general’s office cited “recurring problems and a lack of internal controls” with how extra work is tracked. Investigators found payments with no supporting documentation like digital or paper time sheets. The report noted the problem is not being properly audited because the district lacks rules to limit overpayment and staffing to correct issues.

“There’s no one set of rules or directions for how some of these extra pay categories are earned,” Fletcher said. “And then after they’ve been paid out, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of central monitoring or oversight on you know, to deter fraud for certain but then also just to make certain that the district is getting the bang for its buck.”

Since 2019, investigators found staff engaged in so-called “buddy punching” where they would clock in or out for other employees. The report highlights several egregious cases of fraud, including an employee who collected $150,000 in extra pay over four years with video evidence showing they were at a casino or elsewhere.

The watchdog called on the district to implement “clear, concise, organized guidelines” that include written penalties and corrective actions for violating rules. Other recommendations include: mandatory online training sessions for staff; warning and consequences for failing to clock in and out; restrictions on stipend payments; and considering video surveillance of schools’ digital time sheet machines, biometric swipes, or other timekeeping upgrades.

A spokesperson said the district will begin training on the “Timekeeper and Supplemental Payment System” Jan. 31 and will require all school clerks to complete it by Feb. 24. The payroll department is also beginning quarterly audits of extended day pay, overtime pay, and stipends, the spokesperson said.

No preferential treatment for Lightfoot donor in emergency computer purchase

The district watchdog is closely tracking the district’s spending of $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief dollars, the bulk of which is going toward salaries and benefits for current and some new staff. The district recently has begun to spell out more clearly how it’s using these dollars — and a state dashboard allows the public to look up district spending — but the inspector general seeks more transparency.

One of the office’s investigations into spending federal COVID relief money stemmed from a 2020 report by Chalkbeat Chicago and the Better Government Association about the $1.6 million purchase of roughly 5,000 computers for remote learning from Meeting Tomorrow, a local company owned by a campaign contributor to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Chalkbeat and the BGA found that Lightfoot personally reached out to Janice Jackson, the district CEO at the time, about the company’s interest in providing computers, calling its president and CEO, Mark Aistrope, “truly genuine and very generous.”

The inspector general’s office found that the email from Lightfoot, referred to as Elected Official A in the IG report, did not improperly influence district officials or result in preferential treatment for the company. The office found that the district was facing “an extraordinary demand for computers” amid the abrupt shift to virtual learning and its established technology vendors, CDW and Apple, grappled with delays in delivering tens of thousands of devices the district ordered that spring.

Based on Chalkbeat and BGA’s reporting, most of the used laptops and tablets the district bought from the company did not meet district purchasing standards. Officials said that the purchase was largely meant to help out charter schools, and district technology purchasing specifications do not apply to them.

The report found Meeting Tomorrow sold the used devices at reasonable prices: at a discount or “only slightly higher” than the new computers bought in bulk from established vendors; it helped set them up and delivered quickly. And although a fraction were missing cameras — an issue that district officials at the time said they discovered after Chalkbeat and the BGA’s inquiry — or had other issues, the company replaced them at no cost to the district.

According to the inspector general, the company initially cooperated with its inquiry, but its CEO Mark Aistrope ultimately declined to be interviewed, in violation of district purchasing requirements that vendors cooperate with its watchdog’s investigations. As a result, the inspector general recommended that the district bar the company from future contracts, a step the district has not initiated.

Automatic assignment to military programs ends

After a 2021 Chalkbeat Chicago investigation revealed a dozen high schools were automatically assigning students to the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, the inspector general opened an investigation into the practice.

The district signaled in May it would end the practice of automatic enrollment in JROTC programs, which disproportionately impacted Black and Latino students on the south and west sides.

The inspector general’s report confirms there’s been a sharp drop in enrollment at neighborhood schools where more than 90% of freshmen were enrolled in the military education program without parent consent or notification. The investigation found that a key factor for automatic enrollment into JROTC was the school’s lack of a regular physical education program. In Illinois, enrollment in JROTC satisfies the physical education credit required for graduation.

“I didn’t like being forced to have the class,” one student is quoted as saying in the OIG report. “JROTC is not for everyone. It should not be forced on people.”

The district said it is committed to making sure every school offers standard physical education and gives students a choice between the two. The report said the changes appear to have had an impact.

The report singles out one South Side neighborhood high school where JROTC enrollment dropped from 100% of freshmen to just 9% this fall. The report quotes the principal as saying he hired a physical education teacher and now “students are requesting physical education.”

A district spokesperson confirmed that all 37 of the high schools that have JROTC programs also have physical education teachers on staff. Across all schools, there are 911 physical education positions and 32 are vacant, the spokesperson said.

Progress investigating flood of sexual misconduct allegations

The most complaints fielded by the inspector general’s office this year alleged sexual abuse and misconduct against students. These complaints go directly to a 30-person team of investigators in the watchdog’s Sexual Allegations Unit, which was created in 2018 after a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found Chicago Public Schools had failed to protect students against sexual misconduct and abuse from adults in the system.

Fletcher said the special unit in his office was “flooded with complaints” since it was created and has been staffing up and improving how it handles allegations.

Since 2018, the special investigative unit has confirmed policy violations in 302 instances and its investigations have led to at least 16 criminal charges for sex-related crimes against Chicago Public Schools students.

This year alone, more than 600 of these cases were closed — double what was closed last year.

One involved the head of Urban Prep Charter Academy, who resigned abruptly this summer amid sexual misconduct allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a student while he attended one of the school’s campuses and after he graduated. Chicago Public Schools and the Illinois State Board of Education have since revoked Urban Prep’s charter agreements.

The report also highlighted an investigation at Marine Leadership Academy, which substantiated allegations against 12 employees and a volunteer for sexual abuse, failing to safeguard students, or helping cover up misconduct.

The watchdog opened an investigation in 2019 following an anonymous tip and issued two reports in 2021. During the investigation, investigators warned district officials and child protective services of pervasive sexual abuse at a West Side school since the start of a 2019 investigation into allegations of misconduct, according to the reports.

The report describes a school employee having a sexual relationship with a student after that student turned 18. Another staffer groomed a student and began a sexual relationship after that student graduated. Another employee sexually harassed and retaliated against a student after the student filed a report. A separate employee groomed a student and crossed boundaries with others.

Seven other staffers failed to report and actively hid suspected violations including the principal, the assistant principal, head of security, a counselor, and a teacher’s assistant. They were alleged to have known about the abuses but failed to report, according to the OIG.

The OIG recommended termination, disciplinary actions for staff and administrators, and permanently blocking a volunteer. Most staff resigned and were placed on the Chicago Board of Education’s do not hire list, according to the report. Chalkbeat Chicago and WBEZ reported in October that the district’s top military officer quietly resigned over the summer in the wake of the investigation and another involving a teacher and student at Roosevelt High School.

Other recommendations include an active role by the district to correct culture, training related to mandatory reporting, and evaluate the training for JROTC staff and military instructors.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org. Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org. Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org. Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

Chronic absenteeism went up when COVID hit. It got even worse last year.

2022-12-19T12:00:00+00:00

One in three Illinois students missed at least a month’s worth of school last year.

English teacher Briana Morales is not surprised. She notices her high school students in East St. Louis 189 missing for weeks at a time. Many are working during school hours to support their families, lack access to transportation, or need child care but can’t afford it or find someone that they trust.

“I have a lot of students who have missed 40-plus days of school at this point in the school year,” Morales said.

Her district – where 100% of students come from low-income families — had one of the highest chronic absenteeism rates in Illinois last year at 69%.

Statewide chronic absenteeism climbed to almost 30% last year, after it shot up in 2021 to 21.2%, according to state report card data. A student is labeled chronically absent if they miss more than 10% of the school year — or about 18 to 20 days — with or without a valid excuse. Illinois defines the school year as a minimum of 185 days, with student attendance required for 176 days.

Chronic absenteeism is sometimes conflated with truancy. But Illinois defines truancy, which could lead to legal consequences for families, as a student missing about 5% of the school year without a valid excuse.

Missing school — with or without an excuse — impacts student learning, especially at a time when districts across the state are dealing with the academic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. National and state test scores have shown a significant decline in math and reading scores for students.

Chalkbeat Chicago’s analysis of state data found that 228 out of the state’s 852 school districts had a chronic absenteeism rate over the state’s average in 2022. Some had rates as high as 80%. Chicago Public Schools rate was almost 45%.

School districts with larger populations of students of color and students from low-income families had higher rates of chronic absenteeism, according to Illinois’ most recent report card data. The chronic absenteeism rate was 48% for Black students, 36% for Hispanic students, 43% for students from low-income families, 35% for English learners, and 40% for students with disabilities.

Illinois is not the only state seeing chronic absenteeism soar. Michigan’s rate in 2022 was 38.5% and Ohio’s rate was 30%.

Nationally, about one in five students was chronically absent during the 2020-21 school year, which means 10.1 million students were chronically absent, 2 million more than in 2019, according to an analysis by nonprofit Attendance Works and John Hopkins University.

National data for 2021-22 is not yet available, but Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, found that in some states chronic absenteeism rates have doubled this year. As the pandemic enters a new stage, Chang says schools will need to step up efforts to get students back in class.

“The high level suggests that it’s going to take a real intentional approach to help our kids fully recover and get back into school,” said Chang. “Make sure they feel confident about being in the classroom, given how much they’ve missed.”

Rockford students did not have a normal school year

Across Illinois, many schools were looking forward to a return to normal last school year after the state shuttered school buildings in 2020 and many schools continued remote or hybrid learning for the following school year. Principals, teachers, and students looked forward to seeing each other in person every day.

But getting students in classrooms regularly was harder than expected.

In Rockford School District 205, the state’s third largest district after Chicago and Elgin U-46, students struggled to get to class. The chronic absenteeism rate in the district rose to 61% last school year, up 26 percentage points from 2019 when it was 35.4%.

Morgan Gallagher, Rockford’s chief of schools, attributes the high chronic absenteeism rate to lack of transportation for students, a spike in COVID-19 cases, and students who transfer between schools within the district due to insecure housing that makes families move around a lot. About 45% of Rockford’s students are from low-income families.

Rockford, which serves almost 28,000 students across 44 schools, struggled to find bus drivers to transport 18,000 students at a time when districts across the state and country grappled with a national school bus driver shortage, Gallagher said.

The district provided additional bus service to schools with a higher chronic absenteeism rate to ensure that students who were more likely to miss school got there, he added. But the district still had to cancel routes for students for several months.

Gallagher also noted that it is harder to increase attendance for students who live 1.5 miles within their school’s walking distance because they are not eligible for bus transportation due to a state law.

When omicron hit schools across the state last winter, Rockford’s average daily attendance rate dropped from 82% to 72%. After the surge in COVID-19 cases eased during the spring semester, daily attendance went back up to 84%, but was still below pre-pandemic rates.

Another issue for Rockford is the district’s high student mobility rate — defined as the number of students who transfer between schools. Students who transfer outside of school multiple times throughout the school year or between school years are four times more likely to be chronically absent than students who do not change schools.

When a student transfers out of a school it doesn’t mean that they transfer out one day and start at a new school the next day — they often miss days in between the process, Gallagher explained. Many factors contribute to students transferring in and out of schools, including insecure housing, he noted. Families that have to move to find an affordable place to live often move outside the attendance boundaries for their schools, requiring students to transfer schools.

While Rockford struggled last year to get students back into classrooms, Gallagher says there are signs that this school year is better. Rockford has enough bus drivers and is trying to add more bus routes to support families that need transportation.

Gallagher believes that the chronic absenteeism rate should be lower on next year’s state report card because the district’s average daily attendance rate is 6% higher than last year.

Illinois dedicates money to bringing students back to classrooms

As the state and local school districts, such as Rockford, start to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, they are taking steps to encourage students to come to class every day.

The Illinois State Board of Education provided $12 million to the state’s 38 Regional Offices of Education and Intermediate Service Centers and Chicago Public Schools to hire more staff to connect with families through home visits and phone calls.

In Rockford, district officials have allocated $27 million to schools to use for any services that would help students in academics or with social-emotional support. Some schools have focused on chronic absenteeism and decided to hire attendance specialists who will reach out to students missing 18 or more days of school. Others hired parent and community liaisons who call and visit chronically absent students.

Schools are constantly looking at attendance because it plays a significant role in how students will do in school, Gallagher said.

“Attendance is the number one predictive factor related to a student being successful in school and ultimately getting to graduation,” he said. “The flip side of that is if you are chronically absent, the likelihood of you ultimately graduating with your high school diploma plummet.”

In Springfield SD 186, where about six out of 10 students were chronically absent last year, many students aren’t just missing classes for a day or two throughout the month, said high school English teacher Crysta Weitekamp. They often miss weeks of school and might show up one time and then miss another 10 days.

That puts them far behind their classmates. It also means more work for Weitekamp, who has to help those students catch up while making sure the rest of the class stays on track.

“As a teacher, I want the students here in my classroom. I want them to learn,” she said. “I want them in my classroom doing the work learning alongside everyone else, so they can be successful so they can graduate.”

Many of Weitekamp’s students are either working or babysitting kids in their families. About 56% of the district’s student population comes from low-income families.

Weitekamp’s school has hired a truancy interventionist, who works with both students who are chronically absent and truant, to contact families and students and do home visits to get students back into the classroom.

Morales, the East St. Louis teacher, is glad her district has partnered with an organization to provide therapy to students dealing with mental health crises that could be preventing them from going to school.

She said they also hired a truancy officer at each of the district’s 10 schools to make phone calls and home visits to help students who are missing school because of chronic absenteeism or truancy get back to class.

But Morales worries that one person won’t be able to track down every chronically absent student. There are just too many students missing too many days.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education, and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

As family homelessness climbs, calls grow louder for solving school attendance woes

2022-12-12T11:00:00+00:00

Nine-year-old Ameerah remembers when her commute to school was a five-minute walk. That was before her family left their Queens home for a shelter in another part of the borough.

During the year they lived in the shelter, Ameerah was at the bus stop with her mom and sister at 6:30 a.m., commuting at least 45 minutes on two buses and two trains. They often returned nearly 12 hours later, her mom said, and the girls were sometimes too tired to complete their homework in the evenings.

“My legs, sometimes they hurt. My backpack, it’s heavy,” Ameerah said during one of her bus rides last spring when she was in third grade. She fell behind in math, requiring her to go to summer school. (Chalkbeat is using pseudonyms to protect the family’s privacy.)

Last school year, nearly 30,000 New York City public school students lived in shelters. For these students, getting to school is often a problem, as many are placed far from their current schools. Nearby shelters may lack space, or if the family is in a domestic violence situation, they may be deliberately placed far from home. Shelter transfers can be hard to come by. So families must often choose between punishing commutes like Ameerah’s or transferring schools, which research shows can lead to chronic absenteeism and the need to repeat a grade.

Chronic absenteeism — often a key indicator of academic performance — is a growing problem for students citywide following the pandemic. But for homeless students, it’s a crisis: 64% of students living in shelters were chronically absent in the 2020-21 school year, meaning they were absent for at least 10% of school days, according to the most recent data obtained by Advocates For Children. That’s compared with about 30% of students citywide.

Advocates fear attendance problems could worsen as homelessness continues rising to historic levels in New York City amid rising inflation, the end of the eviction moratorium, and the threat of a recession. Additionally, an influx of asylum-seeking students from South America have entered the shelter system. Last month, more than 12,100 families with children were in shelters run by the Department of Homeless Services, compared with roughly 8,500 in November 2021.

Ameerah’s family had little help navigating the shelter system and their school-related transportation needs, they said. This left her mom, Huma, an immigrant from Pakistan who sometimes struggled with English, to wade through bureaucracy while trying to work enough hours to qualify for subsidized housing. Many advocates believe that families can benefit from having a dedicated, shelter-based coordinator to support them and have been pushing the city to hire such staffers for the past year.

By June, the city had committed to hiring 100 such coordinators — 75 of them funded for the next two years with about $17 million of the $33 million in federal relief money earmarked for homeless students, according to Advocates For Children. (The education department declined to share how much the initiative would cost.)

But in the nearly five months since then, the city has hired just 45 of these coordinators, with another 33 in the hiring process, according to an education department spokesperson, who declined multiple times to explain why there has been a delay.

Dozens of advocacy organizations had originally called for 150 of these staffers, given that the city has more than 160 family shelters serving children. But now they’re concerned that the city hasn’t yet hired all of these staffers and are wondering what happens when the relief dollars run out in two years.

They also note that the problems go deeper than such a role can address and intersect with a variety of systemic issues, large and small, from intergenerational poverty to transportation issues.

Historically, there has been a failure to cooperate and minimize disruptions to students’ schooling between the multiple agencies connected to homeless children, including the education department and homeless services, said Jennifer Pringle, director of Project Learning In Temporary Housing at Advocates for Children.

This moment, in particular, is critical for figuring out solutions, said Pringle, whose organization is one of more than three dozen calling for an inter-agency task force focused on how to tackle a slew of issues, including reducing chronic absenteeism among homeless students.

“This is an opportunity to figure out, OK, as families are coming in, how can we make sure that kids are connected with school, connected with their peers, with their teachers,” Pringle said, “so that while the family is going through this process and ultimately finds permanent housing, the kids’ education doesn’t get derailed.”

One of Huma’s daughters holds on to a pole on a city bus during her commute to school.

Transportation from shelters to schools remains difficult

A longstanding federal law attempts to create some stability for students who become homeless. Under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, later expanded in 2001, school districts are required to provide transportation to and from a child’s “school of origin,” or the school they attended before becoming homeless.

But in vast New York City, students crossing between boroughs may have hours-long commutes between shelter and school. In response to news reports in 2017, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to ensure more families were placed in the same borough as their youngest child’s school.

His administration began to deliver on that promise. In 2018, about half of families were initially placed in shelters located in the same borough as their youngest child’s school. By last fiscal year, that grew by 11 percentage points, to three in every five families — including Huma’s.

But even a shelter placement in the same borough can mean a challenging commute to school.

When there are school attendance issues, many shelter providers’ default position is to encourage families to change schools, Pringle said, rather than to revisit shelter placements and try to move families closer to their schools.

“In a city where we have so many shelter locations, the needs of children are not being prioritized as a part of this process,” she said.

For its part, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services said their teams, along with the Department of Homeless Services, reach out to families in shelters “with longer commutes to schools, offering them shelter placements close to their youngest school-aged child’s school.” Last fiscal year, 75% of families were in shelters in the same borough as their youngest child’s school; however, advocates noted that it’s unclear how much of that reflects children transferring schools instead of shelters.

When Ameerah’s family moved into one of New York City’s family shelters in April 2021, they had escaped what Huma described as an emotionally abusive home she had endured for many years. Adjusting to the shelter was tough. Even after the girls managed to fall asleep while sharing a bed in the small roach-infested room, the shelter’s 9 p.m. bed-check often woke them up.

Huma’s case worker had asked where she wanted the children to attend school when they first entered the shelter. She thought that transferring schools felt disruptive, as the girls were returning to school for the first time since the onset of the pandemic while adjusting to a new, strange place.

“My kids, the big one especially, she is so sensitive now because of all this stuff,” Huma said, noting that they’d moved several times in the past. “She said, ‘I’m so tired from moving, every single time I change my school, but this time I don’t want to change my school. I like my school.’”

And for her younger daughter, arriving at school each day felt like a silver lining. She enjoyed seeing her friends and said that “time goes a little bit faster there.”

After exiting their final bus, Huma and her younger daughter walk to her school.

Transferring schools can have significant drawbacks for students without stable housing. One study from 2015 found that New York City students who transferred schools were more likely to be chronically absent, missing at least 10% of school days. Chronically absent homeless children were three times more likely to repeat the same grade, compared to their homeless peers who missed fewer than five days of school, that report found.

Students in shelters in kindergarten through sixth grade are eligible for bus transportation to their schools, no matter where they are. Older students, like Huma’s eldest daughter, Ayaneh, who was about to start seventh grade, receive a MetroCard, though some seventh and eighth graders can get busing on a case-by-case basis, such as if they have a disability. But Huma, who felt that Ayaneh wasn’t yet ready to take public transportation on her own, said this information wasn’t shared with her until weeks into the school year. (The city’s yellow bus system is also notoriously problematic, and a recent City Council report found that service delays have been higher this fall than the past five years.)

After Huma called the girls’ schools for more information on busing, school staff directed her to a general education department telephone line for transportation issues, she said. She didn’t call it.

“I said, ‘I just need the answer if you’re not providing a bus,’” she said of shelter staff. “They just kept promising it, but it never came.”

Huma didn’t trust that calling the education department would solve her issues. That might be why officials there said they did not have records of transportation issues or complaints related to her children.

Navigating the shelter system feels like a second job

There are 117 “family assistants” working across shelters, who are supposed to inform families about their school transportation rights, provide route information, and help with enrollment. But those employees don’t work year-round and often are not equipped to untangle more complicated problems, such as why a child may be chronically absent, advocates said.

The newly added shelter-based community coordinators would have broader responsibilities and are expected to proactively reach out to families living in shelters. They’re supposed to ensure students are getting to class, helping families navigate problems with transportation and enrollment using data compiled by the city. The education department is also using stimulus funds to better track homeless student attendance in hopes of working with shelters to address chronic absenteeism.

“There should be support services for families both at the shelter and at school that can help them with issues they might be facing, especially if there are attendance issues,” said Jacquelyn Simone, policy director for Coalition for the Homeless, an organization that advocates on behalf of homeless New Yorkers. “If someone is struggling to get to school, and it’s the proximity of the shelter to the school, then there should be, in an ideal world, a team that would identify the issue.”

At 6:30 a.m. on a day this past spring, people line up to board a bus in Queens.

Bus service eventually was set up for Ameerah by October of last year, a few weeks into the school year, Huma said. Ultimately, she decided against it because it no longer made sense. She would still need to accompany Ayaneh to school — and she would need to be with both girls to get back to the shelter since minors can’t go inside without a parent or guardian. This would prove a complicated juggling act as Huma tried to increase her work hours.

Like all shelter residents, Huma was eligible to apply for rental assistance after 90 days of her placement, but she needed to work at least 30 hours a week. After months of struggling to find employment, she took a job as a home health aide. Her job locations frequently changed, which made it more challenging to coordinate her daughters’ transportation to school, she said.

Meanwhile, Huma had been told that she needed a more stable work schedule in order to meet the qualifications for rental assistance.

Catherine Trapani, executive director of Homeless Services United, said she’s often found parents who struggle to meet their required number of work hours while also taking care of other responsibilities and following all shelter rules, such as ensuring children are accompanied at the shelter.

“It’s very difficult to get your employment in with that schedule, plus your obligations to cart your children to and from school, particularly if you don’t have a robust network of support,” Trapani said.

In a sign that job requirements had become too burdensome to qualify for the city’s rental subsidy requirements, city officials recently cut in half the required weekly work hours from 30 hours to 14.

The family chooses a new school, after all

After a lot of back-and-forth providing pay stubs and other employment documents, Huma was approved for subsidized rent in March of this year — seven months after her caseworker informed her that she would start the process. That was much longer than the median 26 days it took for families to receive vouchers after completing applications last year, according to the annual Mayor’s Management Report.

Huma moved her family into their own apartment in May. Nearly 5,200 homeless families found permanent housing last fiscal year, a 30% drop from the previous year, according to city data.

Their new commute still required two buses for the girls to get to school, but their travel time was cut by 20 minutes.

Huma waits for a subway train.

But the instability has not gone away. Shortly before school started, Huma had attached a $622 utility bill to the fridge, marked with a bolded “final notice.” Huma was bringing in about $450 a week, and typically had nothing left after paying rent and other bills. Food stamps help provide some respite, she said. But she left her job in October after tensions with a patient’s caregiver, and she was still looking for work in December.

They’ve acknowledged that the apartment is not perfect. Their oven broke in the fall, and her landlord hadn’t arranged for it to be fixed. Carpet curled up at the edges of the walls. Still, the family seemed happy.

“At least they have their bed and they can sleep good,” the mom said.

Ayaneh still attends her middle school from last year. Her mother said she is seeing a therapist to deal with the family issues that caused them to seek shelter in the first place.

In the end, Huma decided to change Ameerah’s school to one around the corner from their new apartment.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.