As a young parent, I was surprised schools rewarded perfect attendance. In my childhood neighborhood, many classmates would have earned the recognition.
I grew up in a blue-collar melting pot where both parents often held jobs outside the home. Unless the household included a nana, abuela or nona, children went to school with sniffles or sore throats, smelling of Vicks VapoRub and pockets stuffed with Halls Relief Mentho-Lyptus cough drops.
Parents revered education as the lever to a better life. If something wasn’t broken or bleeding, they would march their children off to school. Children didn’t beg to stay home either as their houses provided little entertainment. Daytime TV only offered game shows, “Queen for a Day” and “The Price Is Right,” and soap operas such as “The Guiding Light” or “General Hospital.”
Today, children enjoy customized arcades in their bedrooms where they can stream movies, video games and TV shows and still chat throughout the day with their pals at school via social media.
Rising absence rates across age groups signal we’re losing the routine of school attendance. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education in Washington, D.C., summed it up well in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “The pandemic did something to change students and families’ relationships with schools to some degree that we don’t yet fully understand. We have also come to understand that there are a not insignificant number of families that actually don’t think it’s crucial to have their kid in school every day.”
In a demographic analysis of 2021-22 school data, 30% of students, 14.7 million, missed enough school to be categorized as chronically absent, defined as “missing 10% or more of school days due to absence for any reason, excused, unexcused absences and suspensions,” according to Attendance Works, a group that combats chronic absenteeism. In the 2022-23 school year, 23% of all K-12 Georgia students were chronically absent, the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute noted.
National data links high chronic absence with substantive declines in student achievement. In September, during a discussion of Georgia Milestones results, Gwinnett staff reported third through eighth grade students absent more than two days per month scored 20 percentage points lower on English language arts than their peers.
One of the longest programs in Georgia to address chronic absenteeism is the Truancy Intervention Project. Created in Fulton County in 1991, TIP began with volunteer lawyers advocating for kids whose absences landed them in the juvenile justice system. The project has broadened its reach and offers an early intervention program that targets children in kindergarten through fifth grade, pairing them and their families with community volunteers who can address barriers to making it to class.
Schools in other states are turning to research-supported strategies, most of which focus on figuring out why students are missing class, such as a bus arriving too early, an untreated health condition or bullying.
In an Attendance Works webinar on national models, Kari Sullivan Custer, who leads the acclaimed Learner Engagement and Attendance Program in Connecticut, said the state raised attendance through multiple home visits to families, not phone calls, but face-to-face meetings. The goal is to develop trusting and ongoing relationships with families, not reprimand or threaten them with truancy laws and prosecution.
The Greater Johnstown School District, a rural upstate New York system with 1,500 students, embraced the Success Mentors initiative. Adult mentors — anyone on the school staff — meet three to five times a week with students to check in and see how they’re faring. The high school improved attendance by 6% in 2022-23, while the elementary school saw a 10% improvement.
“Building a foundation of attendance is so important,” said Scott Hale, principal of Johnstown High School. “We were using more punitive measures and it really put up a barrier between us and their families. It didn’t work.”
What has worked are the caring conversations that mentors hold with students, conversations that include showing kids a calendar with their absences highlighted so they can see how much time they missed. “I think that was really eye-opening to them,” said Hale.
A 2019 study in Georgia found alerting parents to just how much time their kids missed also helped. Text messages apprised parents of the number of days their child had been out and compared it to the absence rate for the student’s peers. Georgia State University researchers said the likelihood of chronic absenteeism dropped by 7.8% on average for kids whose parents were contacted. Many schools now have automated systems and reminders.
As occurred in Connecticut, the Johnstown program in New York produced unexpected benefits. Students with mentors saw their grades improve, as did their organizational and communication skills, said Hale.
The retreat from punitive responses to absences has built more resilient bonds with families, said Hale. “Now we have relationships with families who were fearful of us calling them and used to get that pit in their stomach when we did.”
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