The pandemic broke school attendance efforts.
Not only did it create new reasons for children to miss school, it compounded most of the old reasons. Families’ routines shattered, and absenteeism rates soared in Oregon and across the country.
With COVID-19’s effects easing last school year, educators began re-building the mindset of going to school every day. School leaders said their intensive efforts coupled with less restrictive quarantine rules last year likely improved attendance numbers, but the Oregon Department of Education won’t release official 2022-23 statewide attendance data until the fall.
Attendance experts said school leaders can’t wait for those results to see whether their efforts worked. They say school leaders should be working now to improve attendance in the coming year, using tried-and-true methods as well as some evolving relationship-building approaches.
This past school year was “the year of experimentation,” said Jessica Brenden. Last school year as the Oregon Association of Education Service Districts’ program administrator, Brenden met with educators around the state about attendance. Oregon ESDs provide training and support for districts tackling attendance issues.
In 2018-19, 20.4% of Oregon students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days. Because of the pandemic, ODE did not collect data for 2019-20, and the data for 2020-21 was collected under more lenient rules, making it impossible to compare. The 2021-22 data, though, showed a nearly 16 percentage point increase in chronic absenteeism, with most underserved student demographics marking even larger increases. Around the country, students and families seem to have lost the school habit.
“Attendance work now is different from attendance work before the pandemic,” Brenden said.
During the pandemic, schools told parents to keep their children home if they showed signs of illness. Now schools are asking parents to differentiate before the bus arrives between the sniffles and a serious contagious disease.
Brenden said schools need a clear communication plan for parents on procedures and expectations. She said districts also need to consider their responses when a student is missing class. Automated letters or threats of legal action don’t take into account individual family challenges and can fray bonds with students. Instead, districts need to be asking how they can support the child and family, she said.
“When the school and family have a solid relationship, the kid is going to succeed,” Brenden said.
Jessie DuBose, Klamath Promise program manager, said wraparound family services are a key component of improving attendance. Klamath Promise, an initiative funded by the Southern Oregon ESD, connects schools, community organizations and businesses to support education.
“Absenteeism is a symptom of other things a family is experiencing,” she said.
DuBose said school board members foster a powerful connection between schools and communities, offering unique perspectives and networks to support children. She said school board members can help attune attendance efforts to a community’s sensibilities.
“An involved school board member is invaluable,” she said.
Whitney Wagner, Northwest Regional ESD attendance adviser, encourages schools to focus more on positive reinforcement for good attendance efforts rather than punitive reactions to missed school that were common in the past.
Wagner said schools need to start the year with a strong message: “School is the place for your child to be. Come in wherever you are, and we want to help you learn.”
Neah-Kah-Nie Middle School Principal Lori Dilbeck, inspired and supported by Wagner, created a powerful system last year by involving teachers. Dilbeck put together an attendance committee that included teachers with the counselor, family resource coordinator and attendance secretary. They met weekly and identified students with high rates of unexplained absences.
Staff members, usually teachers, would then visit the families in their community north of Tillamook. Dilbeck said initial visits might not even bring up attendance. Instead, the visits were aimed at connecting and learning what students and the families needed. If the student improved, the child would be cheered in school and a letter would go home praising the child.
If unexcused absences continued, the group would use information from the teacher meetings to craft more targeted supports, such as a meeting with the family resource coordinator or a change in classes.
In the beginning, the connections were hard because families didn’t want to answer the phone or come to the door for fear of consequences, Dilbeck said. As the year went on, families started working more with the district and unexcused absences went down and the number of regular attenders climbed significantly, she said.
Wagner said the pandemic created a huge new category of absences based on parents being unsure when to send children to school sick. But it also amplified all the old reasons for missing school, such as social anxiety, economic challenges, trauma at home or academic disengagement.
Students who missed a year or more in school sometimes aren’t socially and mentally ready for higher grade levels and the daily grind. Students who struggled during online learning often don’t want to be in classes where they feel behind. Families who faced economic disruptions have an even harder time managing transportation, or they need the students to work or take care of siblings.
Wagner advocates for a tiered attendance support system to offer intensive and individual supports for students missing the most school. But she said if a school has a lot of students in the chronically absent tier, it often means it is not paying enough attention to the students who are just starting to miss days.
A proper school attendance response requires school board support, Wagner said. School board members should ask for specific information and listen closely to what their administrators need, such as training or data collection, she said.
“This is nobody’s fault. Nobody is doing a bad job,” she said. “But we need to look at what is broken and fix it.”
– Jake Arnold, OSBA
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