This article was originally published in Chalkbeat.
Bronx Principal David Liu didn’t notice an abrupt change in attendance when students returned to in-person learning after pandemic campus closures three years ago. Instead, the problem became clearer to him as the year progressed.
Students and staff at Gotham Collaborative High School were becoming fatigued by five-day school weeks. Also child tax credits and additional unemployment benefits started to declineforcing parents to return to the workplace and requiring students to take on more responsibilities at home.
“The school grind started to hit students at different times during the school year,” he said. “That’s when chronic absenteeism started to look more like a slowly growing phenomenon at our school.”
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Now the school has started cracking the code on chronic absenteeism, a problem plaguing school districts throughout the country. Administrators implemented a data system to better track student attendance and use staff and community organizations to guide those at risk of chronic absences. The school even offers incentives for students to attend, such as early morning breakfast raffles or day trips.
Schools across New York City have introduced new initiatives to address the long-standing problem. Some have begun using restorative justice as a guiding principle in group interventions that target chronically absent students, rather than resorting to more punitive measures. Schools are increasingly using other students to encourage their friends to go to school regularly.
Most districts, including New York City, consider a student to be chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, regardless of whether those days are considered excused, unexcused, or part of a suspension. With a 180-day academic calendar, that’s 18 missed school days.
Before the pandemic, the citywide chronic absenteeism rate was about 25%. When students returned to in-person learning in 2021, the city’s share of chronically absent students rose by 15 percentage points. Although schools have made strides over the years to lower that rate, chronic absenteeism citywide has still not returned to what it once was. Nearly 35% of public school students were chronically absent last school year, according to data recently released in the journal Management report mayor.
Although schools in higher poverty areas began closing the chronic absenteeism gap in 2022-2023, that gap still remained about 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts. As a result, more and more schools have addressed issues that exist outside the school environment, such as student access to health care, childcare and education. transport.
That’s why some teachers and school administrators say tackling chronic absenteeism is so challenging; it often requires a deeper knowledge of the students and families they serve. In the period 2022-2023 Comprehensive education planGotham Collaborative cited “not knowing our students well” as the root cause of the school’s chronic absenteeism problem.
And while collecting data often serves as a first step in addressing chronic absenteeism, creating plans that lead to improvement requires people, says Kim Nauer, education fellow at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, who has looked at how poverty contributes to chronic absenteeism.
“Each of those numbers has to be a child and a name, a parent and a person associated with it,” she said. “Otherwise you won’t make sustainable progress. Like robocalls [are] useless.”
Use data to target specific student groups
Gotham Collaborative High School, which served just over 300 students last school year, considered chronic absenteeism a problem worthy of intervention even before the pandemic. The school’s pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rate was already higher than average, at about 56%, and then grew to 61% in 2020 as the pandemic forced school closures across the city.
However, during the 2022-2023 school year, the percentage of chronically absent students in high school dropped to about 29%, the lowest in years.
Tackling this problem has taken years of targeted work and is based on a data system the school has developed, which divides students into four groups based on their absence. Each group receives certain interventions, depending on the severity of their case. These are delivered through a range of support teams including peer mediator ambassadors, school counselors and a social worker.
Sometimes an intervention may resemble an in-depth, individualized assessment of a student and their needs, or a home visit with a student and their family. But other times it might seem like a school party for students who feel like they don’t have a strong network of friends, or an early morning breakfast lottery.
Addressing the needs of students whose attendance and academic performance did not raise any red flags was critical, Liu said. Before the new system was introduced, he said, the school identified only a small selection of students: those who attended at least or about half of the school year, and those who had near-perfect attendance. Changing their focus has helped the school shift toward less chronic absenteeism, he believes.
“This was a big ‘aha’ moment for us,” he said. “These are our students who come 80% of the time, four out of five times a week, maybe B-average students. It led to a lot of conversations about how can we show them that what they are doing is not living up to what they can do and their potential?”
Many schools with a large share of chronically absent students use a variant of the Gotham Collaborative data tracking system.
Schools in New York City will automatically receive weekly reports there are students who have missed five or ten days of school. Schools can also print additional reports listing any students who have missed school five or ten times, or chronically absent students from the previous school year. The reports are most effective when schools create workflows to immediately respond to what they see in the data, an education department spokesperson said.
Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to address this problem, also noted that early intervention is important. When she and other researchers started study chronic absenteeism Using the current, widely accepted 10% rule, she said one of its main purposes was to serve as an early warning benchmark. So if a student misses two days of school a month, she said, that should alert teachers and staff that a student needs support.
“I don’t want you to wait until 17 days before you realize it’s a challenge,” Chang said, referring to the annual absence. “Or even in the first month, if it’s ten days, that’s a problem.”
Using peer-to-peer support to overcome chronic absenteeism
Researchers like Chang and Nauer often study chronic absenteeism among younger students because it is more representative of family circumstances. For example, a five-year-old doesn’t have to miss school on their own, Chang said.
But for teens, chronic absenteeism brings its own complexity. Liu has noticed that some of his students are missing school because they have to work long hours or take younger siblings to and from school. Some may choose not to show up to avoid conflict with friends, he said.
And because the conversations staffers have with students inevitably look different from the conversations students have with people closer to their age, Liu now focuses on tapping into students’ ability to connect deeply with their peers to avoid chronic to curb failure.
“Every year we get older, but the kids stay the same age,” he said. “So every year the staff gets a year to be generative and culturally relevant.”
At the International High School for Health Sciences — where all students are newly arrived immigrants — students may also struggle with other barriers to engagement, such as learning English for the first time or preparing for standardized tests they are unfamiliar with, according to administrators at the school. Still, the chronic absenteeism rate at the high school dropped to 29.5% in the 2022-2023 school year, nearly halving the rate from the previous two years.
In 2018, the school began using restorative justice — a practice the school has used in place of other disciplinary measures since it opened more than a decade ago — to address chronic absenteeism, administrators say. A chronically absent student – usually in his final year of high school – sits down with a group of his best friends, a teacher with whom he has a strong bond, and the vice principal. The group discusses the student’s strengths, reasons for not showing up for school, and how others in the group can help him progress.
International High School also receives additional support from staff at Queens Community House, the school’s community partner. The partnership, now in its third year, is funded through NYC Community Schools, a grant-based program that extends to about a third of the more than 1,500 schools in the city.
Queens Community House offers services such as tutoring outside of regular school hours – especially during the rainy season – and events ranging from self-care workshops to game nights. However, communicating with families is one of the school’s most important functions, said Lizbeth Mendoza, director of the school’s community schools.
“The framework for a lot of these conversations is relationship building,” she said. “So I’m actually the person who sends the message to let a parent or guardian know that their student was absent at the end of the day.”
At the High School for Teaching and the Professions in the Bronx, groups of older mentors and younger students begin pairing up in October. The mentors, usually 11th or 12th graders, receive training in their own classrooms on how to support their mentees, whether that is by doing activities together or discussing the mentees’ experiences.
“They go in and really create a bond,” says director Roberto Hernandez. “And what I have discovered over the past two years is the sense of ownership that our mentors have for their mentees.”
This sense of commitment has spilled over into other areas of focus for the school, such as attendance, Hernandez said. For some students, it has also created a sense of commitment to the school as a whole: two of the high school’s guidance counselors are former students. Now that the school has a designated guidance counselor for each grade level, Hernandez said it is easier for administration to connect with individual students.
“It’s not just teaching, it’s getting to know them and letting them get to know you, and they love it,” he said. “And I think that all contributes to where we are today.”
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site about educational changes in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
