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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is chronic absenteeism and what causes it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did chronic absenteeism increase?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EPISD did not respond to a request for comment.

What did Tornillo ISD do differently?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, focusing on that type of COVID recovery framework feels less and less meaningful with each passing day. Since the start of the pandemic, most students have moved up multiple grade levels (or graduated!), and districts are already in the last year of their federal emergency COVID relief funds. 

There isn’t and won’t be an educational equivalent to the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaiming the end to the global health emergency. But it’s time for a new framework that shifts from a temporary recovery mindset to a more lasting and permanent emphasis on growth, equity and continuous improvement. 

What could that look like? There’s a growing consensus around three key levers: getting kids back in school, expanding and monitoring high-dose tutoring and increasing summer or afterschool learning time. Along with the Biden administration’s recent proposal for $8 billion in , researchers such as are all pointing to the same problem areas and potential solutions. 

Three structural shifts must happen to address the needs of the next generation.

First, students must get back in school. consistently that attendance, behavioral infractions and successful completion of academic coursework are strong predictors of outcomes like high school graduation, college attendance and college persistence. That’s true even after controlling for a student’s standardized test scores. In fact, in , NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford found that measuring academic behaviors such as regular attendance also did a good job of capturing other social-emotional skills like self-management, a belief in one’s ability to succeed, growth mindset and empathy for others from diverse backgrounds. 

Their work also uncovered a promising nugget for policymakers. Given how strongly partial-day absenteeism predicted long-run outcomes, policymakers could consider tracking and monitoring it closely. Other factors, such as tardiness, referrals for in-school discipline and participation in extracurricular activities are also relatively easy to measure and potentially contain rich information about students. Tracking these interim outcomes — and then helping students improve on them — is likely to help boost longer-term outcomes as well. 

Second, students who need it most should receive high-dosage tutoring. There’s finding that students who complete high-dosage tutoring post impressively in test scores when those programs are implemented appropriately. That research has convinced to create or expand their tutoring programs. But as the federal ESSER funding cliff approaches, policymakers should work with local education leaders to sustain high-quality, high-dose tutoring programs that are delivering the biggest gains for academically at-risk students. 

Third, schools should provide extra learning time through summer programs. Like tutoring, intensive, short-term interventions during summer vacations and other school breaks have shown success in raising student achievement. Multiple studies on the effects of summer learning programs have found positive impacts on student outcomes, especially in . Those producing the strongest gains tend to offer for and pair struggling students with the most effective teachers.

Learning programs during shorter school breaks can also boost student achievement. For example, the Lawrence, Massachusetts, district offered week-long acceleration academies to students who were having difficulty in a particular subject. They were placed in small groups of 10 to 12 and taught by carefully selected educators. In total, students received about 25 hours of extra instruction per week, and the program was a key part of the district’s successful . 

As the sun sets on the COVID recovery era, state and district leaders will need to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments in things like tutoring, summer programs and acceleration efforts. It has always been important to understand which programs or interventions are working, for which students and at what cost. Those questions must now be part of the new normal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s alarming’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No buses

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

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

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

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

Seitz told The 74 he expects “significant supportive testimony,” based on the success of a similar program led by a .

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

‘Studied in real time’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attendance and academic performance are directly correlated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Districts spend grants on transportation, mentoring & engagement

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

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

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

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

Attendance liaisons focus on relationships, mentoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enhancing extracurricular activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

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

Getting Kids Back To School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helping Underserved Communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bus Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The program was introduced after LAUSD’s chronic absenteeism rate skyrocketed to 40% for the 2021-22 school year after students returned to in-person classes following remote instruction during the pandemic, according to the California Department of Education. In the 2022-23 school year, the district has been able to decrease that number to 30%, Carvalho said.

“We are here to give resources and make parents aware of all of the benefits of ensuring their [children] are at school everyday,” said Andre Spicer, LAUSD regional superintendent, who oversees 200 schools.

Carvalho visited Daisy Morales, mother of four attending LAUSD schools who have been attending classes sporadically. 

Last year, Morales’s children averaged 64 absences.

After working with district officials, that number has been brought down to only two to three absences. Morales said the biggest challenge to getting her kids to school had been transportation issues.

“They don’t like to catch the bus in the morning because of their anxiety,” said Morales, adding she struggled to get her kids to school once they missed the bus. 

But after the district arranged for the bus to pick up her kids as close to their home as possible in what the district calls “concierge transportation,” they began attending school more regularly. 

Carvalho also met with families who hadn’t enrolled their children in the school system, adding many of them didn’t even know they were legally required to sign them up for classes.

For the current school year, LAUSD increased enrollment with 20,000 new students, most of whom were 4-year-olds, an increase driven largely by the district’s new pre-K program.

 “After a decade of 6% to 7% of declining enrollment, we have stabilized to 1.9%,” said Carvalho. 

Sherree Lewis-DeVaugh, principal of 135 Street Elementary, said the school had begun hosting interventions with families who struggle to get their kids in school; bringing chronic absences down from 36% to just 10%. 

“If a student is not in school, how can they learn?” said Lewis-DeVaugh. “We need to make sure the students are educated, and to make sure that we provide support to our parents as well.”

The school has begun hosting interventions directly with family members who struggle to get their kids in school; bringing chronic absences down from 36% to just 10%.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student testing at the national, state and local levels has given policymakers a clear, up-to-date picture of learning loss during the pandemic. But on another key recovery metric, student absenteeism, reporting has lagged badly in many states, making it difficult to know if the hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours states and school districts have spent to get kids back in school are working, and if policymakers should continue to invest resources to bring down absenteeism rates that spiked during the pandemic.

One of the most surprising and least anticipated consequences of pandemic school disruption is that many students didn’t return to school when normal operations resumed. In many districts, chronic absenteeism — the number of students missing 10% or more of school days — increased in the 2021-22 school year from the previous year, even after schools were fully open and vaccines were widely available. Michigan, for example, saw its chronic absenteeism rate almost double, from 20% to 39%, during the pandemic. Virginia’s rate tripled, from 10% to 30%.

Long quarantines and other COVID protocols still enforced in 2021-22 undoubtedly contributed to the increases. But was 2021-22 an outlier, or part of a longer-term trend? In the absence of 2022-23 attendance data in many states, we don’t know. In at least 35 states, the most recent absenteeism information is now 15 months old.

In the relatively few states and school districts that have released more recent information, the results are mixed; absenteeism is improving in some places and worsening in others. In New Mexico, where the state has made detailed 2022-23 chronic absenteeism data on its Education Department website, the statewide chronic absenteeism rate has declined slightly in the past year, from a staggering 40% to 39%. Absenteeism rates in the Albuquerque school district declined from 46% in 2021-22 to 38% in 2022-23. Just 15 miles north, in Rio Rancho, however, the trend continues to move in the wrong direction, with chronic absenteeism rates rising from 24% in 2021-22 to 36% in 2022-23.

The same mixed picture exists in other jurisdictions that have reported numbers. Connecticut — a state that has dedicated millions of federal ESSER dollars to improving attendance through its that focuses on home visits — has released showing a decline in chronic absenteeism statewide. But Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland and Oakland Unified School District in California both saw rates of chronic absenteeism continue to rise last year.

Knowing who’s in school post-pandemic and who isn’t is critical for legislators, local school board members and administrators, and states shouldn’t rely on thousands of local school districts to do the job. Tracking individual districts as they release data is inefficient. If Connecticut and New Mexico can produce 2022-23 attendance data in weeks, there’s no reason other states can’t do so. 

Take Rhode Island. Recognizing that its traditional practice of reporting chronic absenteeism at the end of each school year “is often too late for schools and districts to help get students to school,” the state’s Department of Education has launched a that updates public reports on school-level attendance daily throughout the school year.

But too many states haven’t even announced when last year’s data will be available. South Carolina and the District of Columbia, for example, won’t release 2022-23 attendance data until November. It raises the question of whether states are deliberately slow-rolling unflattering information. If states like New Mexico and Connecticut have released encouraging absenteeism results, are other states withholding less encouraging news?

States that have released 2022-23 chronic absenteeism data as of Sept. 22, 2023: Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia is one of them, something Valencia Stovall, a former state legislator, tried to change in 2020. 

She sponsored a bill that would have allowed a parent to use an address outside their attendance zone as long as the person living there gave permission. The legislation also would have exempted such parents from fraud or forgery charges.

“No parent wants to drive an hour and a half in traffic to get their child in another school,” said Stovall, a Democrat who supports school choice. “They are thinking about the future of their children, and they know education is the key.”

The bill didn’t pass, and to date, only Connecticut has decriminalized what the report — published Tuesday by nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether — calls “address sharing.” 

In a post-pandemic era where more parents are shopping around for schools that better suit their children’s needs, the authors hope other states follow Connecticut’s lead. According to co-author Tim DeRoche, who has previously written about exclusionary , the issue falls under the radar because it’s more common for districts to “quietly kick the kids out of schools, using the threat of prosecution.”  

When districts do involve law enforcement, criminal charges and stiff fines often land on the backs of Black, Hispanic and low-income families, he said. The report points to a in Philadelphia where across 20 districts, families questioned about their residency or disenrolled from schools were disproportionately nonwhite.

“The enforcement is highly selective,” he said. If a school isn’t overcrowded, officials might not report a good student who fits in and doesn’t get in trouble, DeRoche said. “There is a lot of winking and nodding that goes along with this.”

The authors urge states to repeal laws that target address sharing and refrain from using general statutes, like those against theft or perjury, to charge parents who lie about their residence. They also support open enrollment laws that allow families to choose a school in any district, regardless of where they live.

“When Good Parents Go to Jail” follows a 2021 Bellwether report that shows how district boundaries separate families by race and class, with low-income and minority parents often unable to attend a better school in a nearby district even when the district is within walking distance of their home.

Data for sale

As long as attendance is tied to a student’s residence, DeRoche said, districts will be on the lookout for families trying to skirt the law.

“In some ways, districts have to enforce it because these coveted public schools are largely full,” he said.

Those highly desirable schools and districts use a range of investigative tactics to identify offenders, the report shows. 

In released with the report, private investigators say they sometimes use video with night vision software to capture students’ faces on dark winter mornings. Districts also use tip lines and offer rewards to encourage those with knowledge of address sharing to make a report.

, a business that works with over 150 districts in multiple states, purchases U.S. Postal Service records and other databases to track down where students actually sleep at night, said Mike Auletta, a New Jersey-based private investigator who runs the company.

“It’s very difficult these days for a person in the wild to completely conceal where they live,” he said. “You’d be surprised how much of your data is for sale.”

With two young children and a wife who teaches special education at a public school, Auletta said he understands both sides of the issue. But districts are trying to protect their bottom line. Address sharing “strains budgets,” he said. “Now we don’t have enough teachers. Now we have 40 kids in a classroom.”

During the pandemic, which upended students’ living arrangements and caused educators to worry that some had stopped attending school anywhere, districts lightened up on enforcement. But now, more are conducting residency audits because “they’re done putting out fires,” he said.

‘Safe and educated’

Some officials just want to grasp the extent of the problem, while others, especially those with top-ranked sports teams or highly regarded special education programs, enforce the rules more aggressively.

Residency fraud can impact more than just the student in question. A had to forfeit football titles for the 2013 and 2014 seasons because a player’s family provided false residency documents.

In one of the most well-known examples of “boundary hopping,” Akron, Ohio, mother was convicted of two felonies for falsifying records in 2011 after she used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in the suburban Copley-Fairlawn district.

She spent nine days in jail, but former Gov. John Kasich later to misdemeanors.

“If I had had my way, I would have never gotten into trouble,” said Williams-Bolar, now a parent liaison for Available to All. “It’s very scary for an average parent that just wants their child safe and educated.”

was split. Supporters argued she and her children were victims of an inequitable system, while critics said her punishment was justified. Similar debates over the ethics of address sharing show up on community and sites . 

 A Philadelphia man recently defended his actions in a commentary about school choice. “What the hell — the statute of limitations must be up: I lied, so my son could go to top-rated McCall Elementary School in Society Hill,” . “And I make no apologies for it. We didn’t have financial capital at the time, but we had social capital.” 

Parents confronted with such decisions sometimes contact Williams-Bolar to share their stories, but she understands why most are reluctant to speak publicly. 

“Many parents are worried that they will be the next Kelley Williams-Bolar,” she said. “No one wants a mug shot.”

A push for open enrollment

Some states use civil penalties, such as fines or community service, to discourage address sharing. But back tuition for an out-of-district student can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the report. The District of Columbia attorney general, for example, multiple parents who live outside the city for lying about their residency. One family owed over $700,000.

In addition to decriminalizing address sharing, Available to All wants states to expand open enrollment policies that allow students to attend school outside their district or zone, like and did this year. 

Most states have some provision related to open enrollment on the books, but barriers like tuition still keep families from taking advantage of the opportunity, DeRoche said. have laws that make the process easier, like offering transportation, according to the libertarian Reason Foundation.

The debate over open enrollment played out in Missouri this year, with education leaders, especially in rural areas, that would allow districts to opt in. They argued their schools would lose enrollment and the funding that goes with it. And they said it’s difficult to compete for students when they can’t raise as much in property taxes as wealthier districts. The in the Senate, but is likely to return next year.

The idea can be just as controversial in dense urban areas where well-off families pay steep home prices to buy into neighborhoods with the most sought-after schools, DeRoche said. 

“These are families with [Black Lives Matter] , but they go apoplectic if you suggest that maybe this school shouldn’t be closed to families outside the zone,” he said. “[That] leads to the distorted home prices, which exacerbates the problem that only wealthy folks can attend the best public schools.”

Disclosure: Stand Together provides funding to Available to All, Bellwether and The 74. Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether and sits on The 74’s board of directors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the 2021-2022 school year, of students in Board District 2 (BD2) were chronically absent, according to the LAUSD Open Data portal. It was the highest among LAUSD’s seven local districts, higher than the 45.2% of all LA Unified students that were chronically absent that same year. 

At a press conference earlier this year, Carvalho said chronic absenteeism has decreased by this academic year. 

Schools in BD2 are located in the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, Downtown Los Angeles, El Sereno, and Lincoln Heights, with a predominantly Latino population and low-income families, which community advocates say have been hit harder by the pandemic. 

The neighborhoods BD2 serves are still areas with the COVID-19 cases per 10,000 residents in Los Angeles County. 

“The data shows that district 2 is in a crisis,” said Maria Brenes, a senior advisor to InnerCity Struggle, an advocacy organization based in East Los Angeles. “I would compel the district to develop an adequate response, to call for a state of emergency.”

Brenes said the lack of affordability in L.A., income inequality, and the housing crisis are ongoing issues that impact these communities. With COVID, shutdowns resulted in the displacement of many families, and some still experience its repercussions.  

“Loss of income, loss of loved ones, distance learning, all together directly impacts attendance and engagement,” Brenes said. “Many families feel like they’re on their own, depending on what school their child attends, there’s different levels of support and relationships.”

Many district 2 schools are experiencing staffing shortages and struggling to address the needs of many families.

By comparison, 35.3% of students attending schools in Board District 3, which covers the communities of , largely Latino and white populations, were chronically absent last school year. 

“We have working class communities, we have foster youth, we have unhoused communities,” said LAUSD Board District 2 member Dr. Rocio Rivas. “The pandemic really allowed the district to really see the vulnerable areas in our communities and how that affects education.”

Rivas and community advocates said that chronic absenteeism is a repercussion of the difficult circumstances surrounding these communities, exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The district has really implemented structures and procedures and tool kits for principals,” Rivas said. “They’re really reaching out and trying to understand the resources and services that communities need.” 

Despite ongoing efforts, other factors have also prevented students from attending school. Community advocates have noticed a common pattern among families. 

“Some of the biggest challenges we’re hearing from families are around transportation,” said Icela Santiago, the Senior Director of Operations and Strategy at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an in-district partner with LAUSD. 

She said that in many instances, when there is just one car in a family, it’s used to go to work, leaving children without access to transportation. Santiago also said that when walking to school doesn’t feel safe, it deters students from attending classes. 

Santiago also attributed fear of COVID and general illnesses, especially among elementary students, that have made many parents more inclined to keep their children home. After recovering from an illness, families are also unsure when they should send their children back to school. 

iAttend, launched by Superintendent Carvalho in August, is a district-wide effort to address chronic absenteeism across LAUSD. Carvalho said that three iAttend events have been conducted since it began, in which over were knocked, and thousands of students were brought back to school. 

Asked the number of households visited in District 2, an LAUSD spokesperson could not provide the information.

To address the challenges of attending school, community engagement is a priority for Rivas, and organizations like InnerCity Struggle and the Partnership LA.

“Although it’s gone down… we need to re-engage them, so that these students who are engaged, don’t leave once again,” Rivas said. 

Since she joined the school board, Rivas said her staff have been researching chronic absenteeism policies and other support systems, and providing information to schools, especially to parents who are unfamiliar with district policies.  

Earlier this month, she and her staff visited schools to speak with principals and community representatives, an effort to understand the issues specific to each school 

“I’m really looking at community-based partnerships,” she said. “We have a lot of providers… that are connected to families and know more of the circumstances that a lot of the families are facing.” 

“If families are not well, then that means their city is not well,” Rivas said, “and that means we have a lot more work to do.”  

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite heavy pushback from students, the change had its intended effect. The new rule reduced overall absences by 20-28%, according to a published in July by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“There is a quite substantial impact on absenteeism,” explained co-author Nina Drange, an economist at the and . “These students do indeed reduce their absences.”

What’s more, it became much rarer for students to miss school days en masse. Some 29-39% fewer Norway high schoolers were what researchers call “chronically absent,” missing more than 10% of all school days. Chronic absenteeism remains one of the pandemic’s most serious consequences for U.S. schools.

In Norway, the policy change produced a “sharp” drop, Drange observed. 

Drange and her colleagues were able to document the policy’s impact by comparing Norway high schools students in 11th-13th grade, who faced the strict consequence of missing multiple classes, with 10th graders who did not. That ruled out the possibility that observed changes between the two groups were caused by other factors. Absences among the older students saw a steep decline while the 10th graders’ rate held mostly steady.

Experts highlight the risk of chronic absenteeism and the 10% absence threshold because it can predict by third grade, failure to and later in life.

Now, with the American education system still reeling from the pandemic, many school leaders are concerned with the amount of instructional days their students are missing. Rates of chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed nationwide, hitting , New York City and Los Angeles.

“We believe that chronic absences doubled across the country, maybe more” since COVID struck, said Hedy Chang, who closely follows the issue as executive director of Attendance Works. 

She estimates the issue affected 16% of students nationwide before the pandemic and now affects over 30%. Missing school has escalated into a “full-scale crisis,” a June from her organization said.

Those increases came partly because students were forced to miss class for quarantine. But also because of social factors, such as youth needing to pick up jobs to support their families, having spotty internet connections during remote learning or being fearful of catching the virus at school.

Those are underlying conditions the Norway rule can’t solve, Chang points out.

“The policy itself doesn’t address root causes,” she told The 74. 

The Norwegian government supports unemployed families to a greater degree than the U.S., added Drange. If students were missing class because they had to pick up jobs to financially support loved ones, “I guess we wouldn’t see these huge effects” from the no-grade policy, she said.

Further, Chang worries that penalizing students who miss a higher share of school would disproportionately affect youth who already face severe disadvantages, putting them even further behind. 

“I’m concerned that … the grading approach will exacerbate existing inequalities,” she said.

The Gini index, which measures inequality on a scale of zero to 100, with 100 being most unequal, rates the United States a 41.5 and Norway a 27.7, indicating that students in the Scandinavian state may begin from a more level playing field than American youth. Furthermore, obtaining a doctor’s note to explain an absence due to illness, an exception to the no-grade rule in Norway, could pose a greater challenge in the U.S., where universal health insurance does not exist, the Attendance Works executive director pointed out. 

Through much of COVID, Norway suspended its no-grade policy, said Drange. Though the very youngest students in the country went back to in-person learning after less than a two-month shutdown, localities took for older students.

Even when the no-grade policy was in effect, Drange’s research indicates that the rule had a modest positive effect on teacher-awarded grades, but little impact on externally graded end-of-year assessments — a disappointment for those who hoped stronger attendance would automatically spell increases in achievement.

In the U.S., with poverty-related issues and mental health posing a key barrier to school attendance, Chang says education leaders should use the 10% absence threshold to identify which students might need extra support — not to punish them as truant.

“If you’re experiencing bullying, if you’re experiencing lack of access to health care, if you’re experiencing unreliable housing situations, those conditions are … affecting your learning, in addition to causing you to not show up to school,” she said.

“Could [schools] create options so kids have another way of making up the time?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 74 sat down with the researcher, over Zoom, to glean the key takeaways from his timely work.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why do we care about absenteeism? What are the typical differences in outcomes between Student A, with perfect attendance, and Student B, who misses school a few times a month?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the upbeat mood belies the more serious reason that brings many of them here: They’re missing too much school. A short distance from southern California’s famous theme parks, the bright blue stucco building has become an extension of the Buena Park School District’s response to soaring absenteeism. The club is a place to make friends and for many, offers the only stability they’ve had during the pandemic.

“We are serving a need that the school hasn’t been able to fill,” said Luz Valenzuela-Trout, director of operations.

The district’s partnership with the club is an example of the extensive steps many educators nationally are taking to track down students missing school and reverse unprecedented levels of disengagement. But those efforts are rubbing up against the sheer scope of the problem. Chronic absenteeism has hit 40% in, New York City and Los Angeles, and is reaching dangerously high numbers in many districts in between.

“The pandemic radically changed norms about going to school,” said Emily Bailard, CEO of , a company that partners with school districts to improve attendance.

It has compounded issues that have always contributed to absenteeism, from lack of food at home to bullying in school, she said. Many teens began working or added more hours at their jobs to help out their families. Now educators “have to be able to address four or five things instead of one or two.”

Elsie Briseño Simonovski, the Buena Park district’s director of student and community services, sometimes scours apartment complexes with granola bars in her pockets to round up children who might otherwise not make it to class. She escorts families to gas stations to fill up their cars — courtesy of a state grant that covers fuel costs if parents show they’re taking their kids to school.

Yvette Cantu, the district’s chief academic officer, said even high-achieving students have racked up more absences than usual during the pandemic. Such students often thrive on positive feedback from adults, she said, something they missed during closures and quarantine.

‘For no reason’ 

In some districts, chronic absenteeism far exceeds the 10% a year that typically defines the problem. In March, the U.S. Government Accountability Office showing that over a million teachers — nearly half — had at least one student during the 2020-21 school year that never showed up for class. 

Some educators say they haven’t seen any improvement since then.

Jenevieve Jackson, a digital photography and video teacher in the Orange County Public Schools in Florida, has some students who have only been in class twice the entire year. Others have racked up over 80 absences. 

“Many of the absences are for no reason. The students who were not that excited about school in the first place are even less motivated,” Jackson said. The district hired “intervention teachers” to help struggling students, she said, but “they’re often used to cover the massive teacher and sub shortage and to proctor exams.”

Schools are under pressure to reduce chronic absenteeism because most states track it for federal accountability purposes. Those rates, however, offer little information about what schools are doing to improve attendance, according to Jing Liu, an education professor at the University of Maryland. 

He thinks that needs to change. In published by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, he recommended reporting attendance in a way that goes beyond chronic absenteeism. He proposed an “attendance value-added” measure that would reveal schools’ contributions to reducing absenteeism and offer “a much fairer” comparison.

Focusing on ninth graders, Liu analyzed 16 years of attendance data from a diverse, urban school district in California with 60,000 students. On average, students in the sample — he would not identify the district — missed 79 class periods each year, or roughly 11 school days. 

But when he disregarded characteristics that schools can’t control — like race, gender and poverty level — attendance rates leaped by 28 class periods, or about four days, in schools with a strong value-added result. In some schools, the average rates increased as much as eight days. 

Todd Rogers, a public policy professor at Harvard University who studied absenteeism and launched , said the concept “seems like an amazing idea.” Nudging parents to get their children to school and showing them how absences add up — Rogers studied — only reduces chronic absenteeism by 10% to 15%. 

“There’s no silver bullet, so the goal is to do everything you can that works,” he said.

But for the time being, schools are struggling to address the problem in front of them.

“It’s going to be really hard in the short term until behaviors and school norms stabilize,” Rogers said.

‘The heavy lift’

In the Metro Nashville Public Schools — with a 30% chronic absenteeism rate this year — Carol Lampkin, the district’s director of attendance services, said students are less likely to come to school if their teachers are absent, a problem that has intensified with staff members out because of COVID.

The issue has fueled creative approaches to reminding parents of the importance of keeping their children in school. Staff members recently gathered at a local Baptist church as part of their newest strategy — offering information on COVID vaccines, housing and transportation assistance in hopes of pinpointing the reasons children miss school.

Families whose children have at least half a dozen absences were more likely to get an invitation or a knock on the door, urging them to attend the event.

“The idea was to take the heavy lift off of the schools,” Lampkin said. “Our schools, our teachers, our principals … are dealing with so much.”

Lampkin thought grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, served while DJs spun family-friendly tunes, would be more effective at getting frequently absent students back in class than stern warnings about truancy. 

Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy organization, said she appreciates what the district is trying to do, but thinks officials could be overlooking important reasons students are absent. 

“I don’t think it has anything to do with affordable housing,” she said. She urged educators to ask themselves, “What does the school culture look like when [students] enter the building?” 

She’s worked with families whose children have been suspended multiple times this year for dress code violations, and she recently held a to draw attention to a Black student who reported being called the N-word by a paraprofessional. (A spokesman for the district said the employee has been placed on administrative leave and will “face appropriate disciplinary action” if the report is substantiated.)

“We’ve got to dig deeper. Is that child being bullied at school?” Thomas asked. “Is that child feeling like they’re not doing well?”

Liu’s research backs up Thomas’s concerns. Examining three years of survey responses from students, he found that the most likely way to improve the value-added measure was to increase their sense of safety at school.

Meanwhile, Simonovski in Buena Park developed her own method of recognizing schools for reducing absenteeism. Instead of just giving awards to those with the highest attendance — which meant a lot of repeat winners — she highlights schools showing the most improvement.

Winners get what she described as a sort of “Publishers Clearinghouse” ceremony — balloons, certificates and trays of treats. 

That tells schools, “we’re paying attention,” she said, “and we’re celebrating these checkpoints with you.”

Lead Image: Boys did their homework in the teen room at the Boys and Girls Club of Buena Park. The local school district’s partnership with the club is addressing chronic absenteeism. (Linda Jacobson)

Enrollment more than quadrupled among Black children and tripled among Latino students when the Chicago Public Schools expanded full-day pre-K, according to researchers from the Consortium for School Research at the University of Chicago. The findings also focused on an expansion effort in the city’s North Lawndale community.

For all racial groups, attendance was higher among children in full-day pre-K, compared with part-day. For Black children, the difference was the largest — 4 to 5 percentage points. Attendance rates also improved among English learners and students from low-income homes.

The results, researchers said, suggest classes operating on a normal school schedule alleviate many of the logistical challenges that might lead low-income and working parents to turn down a free part-day program — like the need to secure child care for the rest of the day, transportation costs and the inability to leave work.

Past research points to more for children in full-day programs, compared with part-day. But for policymakers making decisions about how to spend limited funds, “there are trade-offs,” said Elaine Allensworth, a co-author of the report and director of the consortium.��

“Full-day preschool requires more resources — personnel and space,” she said, and with full- instead of part-day programs, the “same funding would result in fewer spots available for students to have any preschool.”

Pre-K programs nationally saw a decline in participation at the start of the 2020-21 school year — a drop from 61 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds before the pandemic to less than half, While there was last spring, initial counts from fall of 2021 show enrollment has not reached pre-pandemic levels, which experts say could impact future funding for programs. The lack of a vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds is also influencing parents’ decisions about pre-K this year. Earlier data from the National Institute for Early Education Research’s ongoing survey of parents during the pandemic showed concerns about COVID-19 transmission was the major reason why they decided not to enroll their children.��

Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor at the institute, said she understands parents’ hesitation.

“A vaccine would certainly make me more comfortable sending my child to preschool, but in reality, I work full time and need child care,” she said. “Plus, the socialization benefits are very important. And the school does take a lot of safety precautions. That said, we all got COVID during Omicron, and I’m pretty certain one of my kids brought it home from school.”

But access to pre-K is still a factor as well. The institute’s annual state preschool shows that public programs nationally serve about a third of 4-year-olds and only about 6 percent of 3-year-olds.

Looking ahead to next fall, many state leaders and early learning advocates were expecting to see new federal funding for universal pre-K from President Joe Biden’s plan. Instead, they’re waiting on details of a — one they hope West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin will support. The moderate Democrat blocked the earlier $1.7 trillion package that passed the House, but he’s voiced support for universal pre-K.

“Our crystal ball is not working that well right now,” Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the institute, said about prospects for new federal pre-K funding. As the research center prepares to release its 2021 yearbook in about a month, he said he sees “much increased need.”

According to last year’s report, just New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia and the District of Columbia spend enough to deliver high-quality, full-day preschool. The authors estimated it would take $30 billion to expand access to all 3- and 4-year olds in low-income families and another $32 billion to provide access for all preschoolers.

The Chicago study, the consortium researchers wrote, can inform leaders’ decisions about where to target full-day expansion efforts. Chicago, for example, focused expansion in communities with large Black and Latino student populations, but where pre-K enrollment rates were low. They also prioritized elementary schools with available classroom space. Between 2012-13 and 2015-16, enrollment in full-day pre-K in the city increased from 1,700 children to more than 6,000.

Even without new federal funds, some states have recently launched full-day pre-K expansion efforts. In , 14 school districts will receive $300 million in COVID-19 relief funds for pre-K, enough to serve 500 children. And New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced he would spend $17 million to increase enrollment in full-day pre-K in 19 school districts.

Even as Omicron surged through Los Angeles early last month, Hilda Avila knew she would send her son back to his public middle school when classes resumed.

“As a parent, it is my responsibility to teach my son that there are going to be challenges,” said Avila, whose 12-year-old son Jaziel attends Wilmington Middle School. “Adversities are going to come, and as a human being one cannot live out of fear.”

But the first few weeks were not easy, said Avila, who recalled feeling frustrated that teachers were absent and substitutes she did not know led her son’s classes. Some teachers at the school taught online after getting a vaccine exemption, she added.

Many LAUSD parents seemed last week to have caught up with Avila’s thinking, sending their children back to school in growing numbers after keeping them home earlier in the month.

According to , attendance increased from  in the first week of school in early January to nearly 80 percent last week. 

When schools resumed classes on January 11, The Los Angeles County Department of Health was reporting

But parents and educators said that while things have slowly gotten better inside the nation’s second largest district’s schools, the first week was not easy. 

Irma Villalpando, an aide at the Maywood Center For Enriched Studies Magnet school, said more than 300 students and at least 10 teachers were out the first week.

“There were two subs sent from the district and the rest of the classrooms were covered by counselors, principal, assistant of principal, some teachers had a training period and they also helped in and covered classrooms,” said Villalpando. “It ran very smoothly.”

But Villalpando said while classes were covered, not much learning was going on: “Some students did tell me that it was difficult because they were not doing much, they were bored.” she said.

 The parent of two high school students attending Maywood, Villalpando said one of her daughters told her “she had a hard time staying awake in one of her classes because she had nothing to do.” 

Last week, Interim LAUSD superintendent Megan Reilly, COVID cases were dropping, and added that 100 percent of school teachers and employees are fully vaccinated. Teachers that would fail the vaccination mandate would get .

“We continued to be intelligent and agile in creating the safest learning environment,” said Reilly, “Monitoring conditions daily, consulting with experts and doctors and reviewing COVID-19 data to ensure all measures are effective.”

District’s health safety guidelines include weekly COVID-19 testing for both students and employees, isolation for five days if testing positive, and mandatory use of masks. The LAUSD a new mask mandate on Monday, prohibiting cloth masks. 

Vanessa Aramayo, a parent advocate with Alliance for a Better Community said the school district is doing everything possible to implement those guidelines. 

“I believe the schools reopening during the pandemic allowed for increased testing, identification of cases and environments that are safe for children, and they also provide environments and information for parents to be able to obtain the resources, they need to be able to protect themselves and their families from infection or from further spread,” said Aramayo.

Despite the guidelines and precautions, some families don’t believe it is safe to send children back to school, including parents of students with special needs, said Lisa Mosko, a parent advocate with Speak UP.

“Many families I know were relieved to be back at school in person because the academic and mental health toll of being out of school for so long on their kids was too much,” said Mosko. “Other families I know did not feel ready to go back, especially families of kids who are medically fragile.”

“They [The LAUSD] have a very difficult job and that’s making sure that schools are safe, that teachers and students, and that all the faculty will not be in harm’s way if they go back to school,” said Aramayo. “And the testing that they’ve implemented has been groundbreaking and they’ve been a leader in doing that.”

Veronica Sierra is a sophomore pursuing a journalism degree at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela; and moved to California in 2015 where she continued high school, graduating in 2015.

“Being taught through the internet kind of sucked,” Benito said. “If I was in class, I wasn’t paying attention.”

It wasn’t until she returned to school in the spring that she saw her grades improve enough to pass. 

The Hartford Public Schools, like other districts across the country, is now providing extra support for students like Benito after chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year — spiked among ninth graders during 2020-21. While it’s clear the pandemic has set back learning for in the early grades, the transition to ninth grade has often fallen under the radar, even though experts call it a make-or-break year in terms of high school success.

Lacking many of the typical routines to help incoming freshmen adjust to the demands of high school and hindered by remote learning, many teens missed Zoom classes and turned up on lists of students considered most in need of support this fall. Now districts are using federal relief funds to hire staff and build new programs to target students that missed too much school.

Hartford — one of 15 districts participating in to prevent further chronic absenteeism — has funded visits to students’ homes, hired staff members focused on student engagement and offered prizes for perfect attendance to help keep teens from backsliding.

When Connecticut officials examined monthly data, they saw a sharp increase in chronic absenteeism among ninth-graders learning remotely — close to 30 percent. Among Black and Hispanic students learning from home, the rates were nearly 40 percent.

Across the country in California, the same pattern emerged in data examined by School Innovations and Achievement, a software company that works with districts to track and improve attendance. Chronic absenteeism rates hit 25 percent in ninth and 10th grade in the 2020-21 school year.

Experts note that even among those who have returned to in-person school, many teens still face pandemic-related challenges that impact attendance.

“We know that many high school students are continuing to struggle with trauma, grief, economic and housing instability, academic disengagement, [a] lack of social connections, or staying in school while holding a job or caring for family members,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization, “High schools can make a real difference despite these challenges.”

‘We went out to their homes’

Research shows that if students are not in ninth grade, their chances of graduating drop, and that ranks nearly as high as good grades in determining whether freshmen stay on track through high school. Districts often use the spring and summer months to smooth the transition from middle school into ninth grade with activities such as campus tours, summer bridge programs and new student orientation. But in 2020, and again this year, many of those efforts were cancelled or replaced with virtual sessions. Students often missed opportunities to meet new friends and teachers.

Administrators looked for new ways to strengthen those connections. In north Georgia, Murray County High School Principal Gina Linder assigned every incoming ninth-grader a counselor and a social worker. Even though her school started the fall of 2020 in person, she said she always loses some students as they “roll up” to ninth grade, and she feared it would only worsen because of the pandemic.

“We went out to their homes. We looked for the kids on social media,” she said. “We went to their job sites and said, ‘We miss you at school and we’ve got programs that allow you to work and still be in school.’”

Absenteeism further increased when students had to quarantine because it wasn’t always clear if and when they were supposed to log on to classes. At one point, about a third of the school’s 1,200 students were out and some had to quarantine six times, Linder said. When cases spiked, parents kept their children at home.

Then the district shifted to remote learning over the winter months when transmission rates increased. Students had Chromebooks and hotspots, but that didn’t guarantee they were keeping up with school. 

“We were pushing work out to them, but these kids needed the same learning expectations at home” that they had in school, Linder said. They were more likely to attend virtual classes if they had to follow the same “bell schedule” at home. Even if teachers recorded their lessons, students “were not going to watch seven videos at 8 at night,” she said.

This fall, the district is using $255,000 in relief funds from the American Rescue Plan to hire extra bilingual staff members at each school to focus exclusively on attendance.

In the northwest corner of Arkansas, the Gravette School District is using relief funds to support a new director of academic success. 

Last year, if ninth-graders learning remotely skipped classes, the district urged parents to switch to in-person instruction. This year, Kelly Hankins, who took the new position, is relying on data and her personal relationships with many families to nudge students back toward consistent attendance. Working with School Innovations and Achievement in California, she’ll be able to identify patterns, such as whether students are more likely to miss morning or afternoon classes. When students quarantine, she contacts them daily.

“Hopefully, that will keep them motivated,” she said. “It’s hard on those at-risk kids to be in a routine, and [then] all of a sudden, they’re not.”

The return to school this fall hasn’t necessarily solved the problem. Districts like in California are still seeing at least 20 percent of ninth graders chronically absent. And students are missing instruction because many states and districts stopped offering remote learning. According to a recent review by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, only 12 states have provided guidance to districts on how to track attendance for students in quarantine.

In Hartford, when leaders surveyed every chronically absent student, they found that teens were often helping younger siblings with remote learning or doing household chores. The return to in-person learning has removed many of those distractions.

“When a student is in school, they can’t be asked to do anything family-related,” said Isaiah Jacobs, a at Weaver High and a graduate of the school. 

Melvin Viard, a 10th grader at Weaver, said he had trouble understanding some of his assignments last year and couldn’t stay focused during remote classes. He either fell asleep or got up and walked around the house during lessons. But now he said his grades are good and he’s on the football team. “It was way better for me in person,” he said.

The state’s data showed that ninth-graders who attended in person had fewer absences than those learning remotely — about 13 percent compared with the 30 percent for those at home.  But Jacobs said even among those with a hybrid schedule, students sometimes decided to come to school “based on how they woke up in the morning.”

Some students started working during the pandemic and need to continue, so the district has added — with dinner included — to allow them to make up credits. And during the day, Weaver students can get more individual attention to help them with academic and personal challenges through the school’s new success center, an expansion of launched at Hartford Public High School before the pandemic. 

‘No magic solution’

After the initial survey, staff members followed up with interviews to learn more. 

Corinne Clark Barney, the district’s executive director of school leadership, said among high school students, a common barrier to attending school in person was the .

That fear hasn’t necessarily gone away. Milly Arciniegas, executive director of Hartford Parent University, a nonprofit advocacy group, said some parents still worry that the full return to school was too abrupt.

She wants the district to offer a virtual option and to prioritize free, high-speed internet access.

The district, meanwhile, is hoping to entice teens to come to school through incentives like “dress-down” days, attendance competitions between grade levels and raffle prizes like AirPods and big-screen TVs. Weaver added it’s own incentive for September — a $100 Foot Locker gift card — and saw 140 students earn perfect attendance that month. 

Jacobs said the school plans to add smaller goals for students to hit as well, such as two weeks of perfect attendance. “A lot of students need instant gratification,” he said.

In Murray County, Linder found last year that rewarding students with a distance learning Friday was another effective way to increase attendance. Those who were still struggling had to come to school. 

“There’s no magic solution,” she said. “The biggest thing I’ve told my whole faculty is we have to know where our kids are, especially during these times. Try everything to find them and hold them accountable.”

Nearly half of Cleveland’s students, 47%, are on pace to be chronically absent so far this school year. Citing pandemic stress, not feeling supported and being scared of COVID among the reasons they’ve been skipping class, students have missed 10% or more of class in the first seven weeks of school.

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“We’re seeing larger numbers of that by kids who already had a larger COVID impact than a lot of their more wealthy peers,” said district CEO Eric Gordon. “Yeah, I’m concerned.”

It’s not quite as bad as during the 2020-21 pandemic year, when 54 percent of Cleveland kids were chronically absent — missing 18 days of school or more — even while classes were remote.��

But the chronic absenteeism rate this fall is more than double the district’s 22% three-year average.

Gordon, who has made reducing chronic absenteeism a major goal over the last several years, said students have much lower math and reading test scores if they miss even 10 days or more of school in a year and are 30% less likely to graduate. The absenteeism numbers this fall have him worried.

“The pattern is looking more like last year than it looked like pre-COVID,” he continued. “We’re seeing lots more students with off-track behavior.”

Cleveland’s release of  enrollment and absenteeism data for this school year is unusual compared to other school districts around the country, which have yet to make such data available. The 21-22 stats from the Ohio district, where classes started in mid-August, allows Cleveland officials to see trends sooner than other districts that wait until late August or after Labor Day.

As a result, states and districts around the country have been reporting details of absenteeism from last school year and its impact on students.��

A notable exception is California, where . having 17% of students chronically absent pre-COVID, 20% last school year and 33% this year.

Ohio reported in September that chronic absenteeism rose from 17% statewide in 2018-19 to 24% last school year. It was a problem that hit “economically disadvantaged” students across the state hard, rising from 26% statewide to 38%, but barely affected non-poor students. Their chronic absenteeism rate rose only from 8% to 11% last school year.

Shari Obrenski, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, said teachers have noticed that students, after attending remote classes for almost all of last year, just aren’t back at school every day.

“Going back to school five days a week seems to be difficult for some of our students,” Obrenski said. “They were out for a period of time. It’s going to take a while to get a level of stamina where kids are used to being in school five days a week.”

Overall attendance continues to be down this fall from pre-pandemic levels — 84.5% so far this school year, compared to a three-year average of 93.1%. Last year, with classes mostly online, attendance was 81.3%.

Gordon recently asked his Student Advisory Committee – a group he created with representatives from every district high school – why students were skipping class. He polled about 160 students (one from each grade in the district’s 40 high schools) for answers.

Here’s what each said was the main reason for peers skipping school:

• 21% ‐ Pandemic Stress (mental and/or physical stress)
• 18% ‐ Not feeling supported as a student (challenges with mental health and/or  responsibilities) 
• 16% ‐ Scared of getting COVID
• 11% ‐ Unmotivated or feeling lazy

Gordon said he’ll use these results to find ways to draw kids to class. He just isn’t sure what those will be yet.

“The behavior’s different now,” he said. “So the strategies we used before aren’t necessarily going to work.”

The district and Cleveland Teachers Union have already tried traditional tactics such as  calling and emailing families of missing students to press them to return. Using a $150,000 grant from the American Federation of teachers, the union paid teachers to call families starting in July.

Obrenski said teachers reached parents of thousands of students who had skipped school last school year and drew many back, though how many is unclear.

After seeing enrollment drop about 1,500 students last year, the district has regained close to 300 this school year. That still leaves the district with about 35,600 students, more than 1,200 fewer than the 36,800 in 2019-20.

The bulk of the loss comes from preschool students, who have dropped from an enrollment of about 2,000 in 2019-20, pre-pandemic, to about 1,100 this year. Preschool is not legally required by the state, so parents don’t have to enroll their children.

“We’re still in the pandemic,” Obrenski said. “Families are still cautious about putting their children in in-person school situations.”

Katie Kelley, head of the PRE4CLE citywide preschool expansion effort, said preschools across Cleveland, both public and private, are still well below pre-COVID enrollments.

“Certainly the delta variant made a more complicated return to school, with many families reluctant to return their children to group settings,” she said.

Kindergarten, first grade and third grade are all down more than 200 students each. High school seniors fell by nearly 350 students.

But there is also nearly a 33% gain — almost 1,000 students — in ninth graders. District officials say part of that comes from opening two new high school buildings, one replacing the deteriorating John F. Kennedy High School built in 1965.

Obrenski also credits the 2020 launch of the Say Yes to Education college scholarship program in the city, which requires students to attend district high schools or partnering charter schools  all four years to qualify.

“If they’re not in a district high school, they’re not getting scholarship dollars,” she said.

How much of the 1,200-student drop is from students moving to parochial or charter schools is also still unclear. State data with those details is still unavailable. But Gordon said early data he’s seen suggest few have just dropped out of school altogether.

The New York City Department of Education has not yet released data on the total number of young people enrolled in its schools, nor has it confirmed exactly how many students have shown up each day — figures that officials say the DOE has on hand but is choosing not to make public.��

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“They are refusing to disclose critical information,” New York City Councilman Mark Treyger, who has repeatedly pressed the district to release the counts, told The 74. “The situation right now is concerning because we don’t have a full picture of enrollment and attendance per school.” 

Those figures will be released, the DOE said, after registers close for the district’s Oct. 31 reporting deadline to the state.��

Meanwhile, officials fear that as many 150,000 students may have in city classrooms this year.��

There’s “no question” the school district has more detailed attendance and enrollment data than it’s releasing, said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children of New York. Using numbers obtained from the DOE, her nonprofit recently found that attendance among students without permanent housing was just through the first weeks of school. Attendance for that highly vulnerable population has since ticked up to , the DOE said on Oct. 18 — further indication there are more detailed data that the city is keeping under wraps.

On Sept. 28, Los Angeles Unified School District made headlines after revealing a compared to its enrollment the previous year — the steepest decline seen by the city in years. The same week, a news analysis of showed the district had lost 10,000 students, meaning it may no longer be the nation’s third-largest. Other top school systems, like Houston Independent School District, have yet to publicize their counts.

In late September, the New York Post that roughly 200 schools in New York City were missing at least a quarter of their student bodies, and 51 had absentee rates above 40 percent. In hopes of tracking down missing kids, the Department of Education pressed principals to reach out via .��

A spokesperson for the school system explained that those numbers may be misleading because the counts include so-called “transfer schools,” which historically have had lower attendance rates because they serve students as old as 19 who often work jobs.��

But the district failed to provide a more accurate tabulation of the share of schools struggling with high absenteeism when asked by The 74.

Last year, New York City schools saw a in their overall student body — from slightly over 1 million students to 955,490 — with indications that the problem may only worsen in 2021-22: In April, kindergarten applications were down , with 8,000 fewer applicants than the year prior.

The district this year is requiring in-person learning for most students after last year when a majority of families opted for online instruction. With for the spread of COVID-19 in schools, especially those whose children are still too young to receive coronavirus immunizations, it remains unclear how many have chosen to keep their children home for safety concerns.

The city publishes a day-by-day attendance rate, which on Oct. 19 was reported to be . But Mayor Bill de Blasio has the numerator and denominator behind the percentage — the district’s total enrollment divided by the number of students in attendance that day. Those counts are normally released later in the school year, the district maintains.

But this year is different, emphasized Treyger, who chairs the Education Committee and  formerly worked as a New York City public school teacher. Anecdotally, the council member said he has heard accounts from principals in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx of attendance rates that have reached what he called “emergency status” — as low as 40 or 50 percent. In light of the dire concerns, he believes the school district ought to release the attendance ledgers.

“Nothing prohibits the city from sharing those enrollment numbers with the public,” he said.

But with the school system dragging its heels, the council member has filed legislation requiring it to publicize those data, as well as school-by-school attendance counts. If passed, the bills could go into force as early as late November, Treyger said.��

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office did not respond to questions from The 74 about whether he  would sign those pieces of legislation should they reach his desk. The mayor leaves office at the end of the year.

Separately, The 74 filed a public records request in May for the number of students chronically absent — those missing 10 percent or more days — in the 2020-21 school year. The DOE, which was forced to reform its public records procedures in 2018 after being sued for non-compliance with the law, delayed its response to the request from June to October and then from October to January.

Levine, of Advocates for Children, feels similarly to Treyger, that quality data are necessary to help diagnose the most pressing problems facing students in the nation’s largest school system.

“If the bus isn’t coming, there’s a very different solution than if a parent is concerned about safety during COVID-19,” she said. “Public data helps to shine a light on disparities within the education system and allow stakeholders to help identify and push for solutions.” 

Previously, she had almost never missed school. A doctor’s appointment here, a sick day there, but save for those rare occasions, she was always in class.

Her parents, immigrants from Mexico, had instilled in her a belief in the value of education as a path to a better life.

“School was one of my priorities,” the California teenager, now in eighth grade, told The 74.

But when COVID-19 forced instruction to move online, her absences began to rack up — sometimes due to a faulty laptop charger and sometimes due to her teachers failing to mark her present even when she had logged in, Miron said. Her grades fell from B’s and C’s to D’s and F’s.

Miron’s mother, Yosadara Carbajal, speaking through a translator, told The 74 that other families had experienced similar attendance problems, but when she raised the issue to school leaders in November 2020, they did not resolve the discrepancies. Pomona Unified School District, however, insisted that they maintained a lenient policy through remote learning toward parents vouching for their children’s attendance on Zoom and initiated multiple measures to re-engage disconnected students, including door-knocking and free one-on-one tutoring, which, as of this school year, Miron now receives.

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Across the country, the obstacles posed by remote learning may have triggered a disproportionate jump in absenteeism among English learners like Miron, new data indicate, despite the group having sported some of the nationwide before the pandemic compared to other learners.

Ten out of 11 school systems that provided data in response to public record requests filed by The 74 reported surges in chronic absenteeism among English learners in the 2020-21 school year. In all but one district, the percent change in absenteeism was higher among ELs than the overall student population.

For example:

● Chronic absenteeism among all 197,000 students in Houston increased 88 percent over the average rates for 2017-18 and 2018-19, but more than doubled — climbing 158 percent — among English learners.

● In Centennial School District in Pennsylvania, the overall absenteeism rate barely nudged upward, increasing just 2.8 percent, while the share of English learners missing a critical mass of classes jumped 42 percent.

● In an especially severe case, the rate of chronic absenteeism among all students in Huntsville School District in Arkansas dropped off slightly while the rate for English learners increased more than four fold.

“The pandemic hit immigrant families very, very hard,” Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, deputy director of , a coalition that advocates for English learners in the Golden State, told The 74.

When the restaurant where Miron’s father worked closed due to COVID last year, her family was without its primary source of income. They launched a business over Instagram as a way to bring in some cash.

“[School] was no longer our primary concern. We had to do anything to survive — to pay bills, rent, everything, before anything else,” said Carbajal.

But despite the disruption, the middle schooler was lucky: She had the WiFi and devices that she needed for remote learning, save for a finicky charger. She also speaks English confidently, although her school has not yet re-classified her out of English learner courses.

Many other English learners over the past 18 months, however, have , juggled child care duties and for platforms like Google Classroom or Zoom, according to reports through the pandemic. Still, COVID-19’s full impact on this vulnerable population has remained blurry.

With finalized nationwide counts of chronic absenteeism from last year still not expected for up to three months, these new figures offer a sneak peak into long-awaited data that helps bring the picture into clearer focus.

Students are typically defined as chronically absent when they miss more than 10 percent of school days, a benchmark for the typical 180-day school year that researchers say determines whether students have lost so much instruction that they may be academically at risk. Missed school days predict academic difficulties such as trouble reading in third grade, lower grades in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school.

The 74 requested absenteeism data from 30 districts nationwide, including the largest school systems and a sample of randomly selected suburban and rural districts. Some, such as New York City and Douglas County, Colorado, had not yet finished compiling absences and a handful, including Hillsborough County, Florida, were non-responsive. But 13 districts fulfilled the request, including 11 that delivered data disaggregated by factors including race, income, disability and English learner status.

The increased share of English learners missing class may reflect a breakdown in schools’ communication with non-English speaking families through the pandemic, said Melissa Castillo, Arizona associate state superintendent of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“When we shut schools down, the challenge in communicating was taken to another whole level,” she told The 74.

The immigrant families Castillo works with are resilient and believe strongly in the value of education, she said. But with many lacking internet and devices, remote learning was very difficult.

“Schools weren’t equipped,” she added. “It was a structural issue.”

In the two rural districts in the sample, jumps in chronic absenteeism among English learners were especially pronounced, more than doubling in Firebaugh-Las Deltas, a rural district between Fresno and Salinas, California and more than quadrupling in Huntsville, Arkansas — likely reflecting a double disadvantage created by simultaneous linguistic and digital divides.

The Arkansas district did not have an explanation for the troubling pattern. Superintendent Audra Kimball wrote to The 74, “I don’t feel like I have enough knowledge … to give you an accurate answer.” She did not answer whether the district was aware of the high levels of absenteeism among English learners in the district before The 74’s inquiries.

Neither Houston ISD nor Centennial School District responded to The 74’s requests for comment on their disproportionate increases in English learners missing class.

Contrary to initial reports on absenteeism through the pandemic that have found , the numbers delivered to The 74 tell a story that’s less clean cut. Five out of the 13 districts actually reported small drops in overall chronic absence, but often with glaring differences between sub-groups. On top of jumps in the rate of English learners missing class, Black and low-income students tended to also have greater increases in absenteeism. White and Asian students often saw less severe jumps — and sometimes dips — in their rates.

Students with disabilities, who had some of the of chronic absenteeism nationwide before the pandemic, saw 2020-21 rates that remained elevated, but did not represent as large of a proportional increase as that of English learners or low-income students. In fact, five out of 11 districts reported drops in the share of students with disabilities persistently missing class.

“A student with ADHD might have found it easier to focus (during online learning) or a student with autism might have found it easier to interact with their educators,” Lindsay Jones, president and CEO of the , wrote in an email to The 74. “Now, we need to better understand what worked for the students who found remote learning easier or more engaging.”

Further patterns included elevated rates of absenteeism among younger learners. Although persistently missing school was much more common among high schoolers before the pandemic, some districts saw the pattern shift to younger grades during remote school, perhaps due to elementary schoolers struggling with Zoom when they lacked proper supervision.

In Miami-Dade County Schools, for example, which did not disaggregate their data by student group but did break down results by age, chronic absenteeism increased 6 percentage points among the district’s 110,000 elementary school students and 11 percentage points among its nearly 52,000 middle school students. It also increased 7 percentage points among its 101,000 high school students, but that jump represented a proportionally smaller increase due to higher pre-pandemic absence rates.

Inconsistencies in how schools took attendance through the pandemic confound direct district-to-district comparisons. Some schools, like Huntsville High School, told The 74 they did not track daily attendance among virtual learners because instruction was asynchronous, effectively lowering the pool of students who could be considered chronically absent, while others, like Olathe Public Schools in Kansas, said they took note of exactly how many online learners had missed class each day.

Chandler Unified School District in Arizona, the only school system in the dataset where proportional increases in chronic absenteeism were higher among the overall student body than among English learners, said differences in how attendance was coded for online versus in-person learners may have impacted the numbers. Districts also differed in whether they counted quarantined students as absent, whether they relied on families to proactively mark their kids present and whether webcams were a requirement for online learning.

“A lot fell through the cracks” in attendance counts last year, Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the , told The 74.

In districts where students missed less class last year than before the pandemic, Executive Director Hedy Chang worries that the numbers might tell a misleading story. During remote learning, it was often hard to tell whether students were truly engaged in class, especially when cameras were off.

“The data from last year masked, often, a loss of instructional time,” she told The 74.

In Gwinnett County Public Schools outside Atlanta, where about half of all 181,000 students learned remotely last year and chronic absenteeism fell roughly 1 percentage point below pre-pandemic levels, the reasons for the drop — and exactly what that reduction represents — remain unclear.

“We would just be guessing at this point,” admitted district spokesperson Bernard Watson. He did point out, however, that teachers worked hard to engage students, driving through young people’s neighborhoods during lockdown for socially distanced greetings.

But even in Gwinnett, as overall absenteeism trended downward, days of missed schooling among English learners ticked up. To re-engage those students, experts say schools need to be proactive in connecting with their families.

“Reach out in 10 different ways: texts, phone calls, home visits, flyers, direct mail — all the ways you can think of,” suggested Conor Williams, senior fellow at and a frequent contributor at The 74. “Then once you make contact, ask… ‘What’s the best way to [stay] in touch with you?’”

A recent U.S. Department of Education study from Providence, Rhode Island supports this approach, finding that texts, calls and mentorship could , although the data were collected before the pandemic. And last year, sending teachers door-to-door proved an effective — if labor-intensive — strategy to coax students back to class in districts across the country.

To mark the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month, a category to which , the White House on Sept. 13 launched an all-new to address the “systemic causes” of barriers to Latino achievement. It’s not yet clear how much the initiative will focus on English learners, who make up only about a quarter of the wider Latino student population in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Education granted waivers for states’ 2019-20 federal data reporting requirements, but for 2020-21, the it’s requiring all states to . Those numbers will likely be available by spring 2022, a department spokesperson told The 74.

As the Biden administration underscores the importance of a safe return to in-person school, many families of English learners feel trepidation about sending their children back into classrooms, said Rosario Quiroz Villarreal, policy director at The New Teacher Project. They, like any family, want to understand schools’ COVID safety protocols, especially because many live with older relatives, she explained, but oftentimes schools’ translation of these protocols can be lacking.

“It’s exclusion by omission,” the specialist on immigrant education told The 74.

In a school year already riddled by tens of thousands of student and staff quarantines, and as students no longer have the convenience of rolling out of bed and clicking into Zoom, researchers are worried there may be even more students missing class in 2021-22 — and not just English learners.

“We’re hearing about huge increases in chronic absenteeism in many of the districts that we’re speaking to,” said Chang, of Attendance Works. Oakland, California, for example, which publishes real-time data, has already seen the share of persistently missing students jump from .

“We’re going to have to really expand our personalized outreach and supports to families to make sure that their kids can get access to make up for whatever they lost,” said Chang.

Miron, in Pomona, is among the students who went back to in-person learning this fall, and her case underscores the importance of returning English learners to classrooms. Last year, she said, she “wasn’t really learning anything online.” But now that she has returned in person, “it’s a complete change for the better,” her mother reports. The teenager agrees.

“​​I feel like I’m actually learning something right now,” she said.

Editorial Fellow Marianna McMurdock contributed to this report.

Lead image: New data exclusive to The 74 show that English learners saw disproportionate surges in the rate at which they missed class during the pandemic. (​​John Moore/Getty Images)