Poor students are the most likely to accumulate absences, but students of color and those with disabilities are also disproportionately affected.
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“On some level chronic absenteeism is everywhere”.
Rich or poor, urban or rural, large or small, 89 percent of all school districts struggle with some level of chronic absenteeism, according to a report released Tuesday by Attendance Works, a national advocacy organization.
Chang called it a “driver of poor student outcomes in school” that has been largely overlooked.
“All the best instruction in classrooms just doesn’t make a difference in classrooms if kids aren’t there to benefit from it”, she said. But local data shows school districts might be better off focusing their efforts later in the year. In the South Whidbey School District, for example, 613 students were chronically absent in 2013-14, compared with 9,566 in Seattle Public Schools.
“My recommendation is that there’s a little more emphasis placed on middle to end-of-school”, says Nichole Prescott with E3 Alliance. The report says the district’s use of data to track and then reach out to chronically absent kids; a campaign called Challenge 5, which urged students to try to miss fewer than five school days per year, and partnerships with community agencies to address families’ needs have contributed to the improvement. Those school districts tend to serve students who come from low-income families and who are more likely to be white, Balfanz said. Real-time data systems allow schools to flag individual students who miss school often, and the city has pioneered mentoring programs that have been replicated across the country.
Even affluent districts, such as Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia, both near Washington, D.C., are seeing an increase in chronic absenteeism, due in part “to growing low-income populations”, Balfanz said.
In June, when the Education Department first released the civil rights data collection, it included the first-ever analysis of attendance in almost every public school nationwide.
New York City has been considered a leader when it comes to both tracking and addressing chronic absenteeism.
The researchers said they used 15 days as a midpoint for districts that might have a shorter year or year-round school. California school districts submitted their information from 2013-14, and the data map provides the first statewide glimpse of chronic absenteeism.
The rate is not the same as truancy, which counts only unexcused absences, or average daily attendance, which can obscure a small number of students who are missing weeks of school whether excused, unexcused or caused by suspension. “This was self-reported data and it was a first-time data collection”.
McLoughlin and its sister middle schools in Kennewick, Richland and Pasco first teamed with Attendance Matters to reward good attendance during the 2012-2013 school year.
Rosser says overall attendance increased roughly by two percentage points previous year. The DOE is working to promote awareness about the importance of regular attendance in school by outreach to schools and other stakeholders.
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Adriana Joseph, district deputy chief of youth, family and community engagement, said the key is engaging students. “What we find is if you lose two days every month, over time you will see declines, and it adds up quickly”. Districts in the group of 14 have at least 1,800 chronically absent students a year.
