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Credit: Erin Simon
EdSurge
Districts Pivot Their Strategies to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism During Distance Learning
By Wade Tyler Millward
Jul 29, 2020
Erin Simon had big goals for this school year. The director of student
support services for Long Beach Unified School District wanted to
reduce the number of local students who were chronically absent, a term
that refers to those who miss 15 or more school days of the academic
year.
This has been a goal of Simon’s since she joined Long Beach Unified in
fall 2013. But it has proven elusive. Her district’s chronic
absenteeism rates have actually increased, from 13.3 percent (about
10,000 students) in the 2017-2018 school year, to 15.1 percent (about
11,000 students) in 2018-2019.
By comparison, the state of California reported a 12 percent chronic
absenteeism rate among students in 2018-2019, representing 676,000
students.
Simon was confident that her team’s efforts would help. In the early
months of 2020, her team expanded an attendance campaign called “All
In,” from four to 25 schools across the district, which is home to 85
public schools in total. The team established a partnership with a
local housing project where some of their chronically absent students
live and coordinated attendance outreach activities, which included
workshops to educate teachers, staff and guardians on the consequences
of missing school.
The district also opened 26 Family Resource Centers, where families of
enrolled students can receive health-related services from school
counselors and psychologists as well as support related to parenting,
behavior management, crisis intervention, suicide prevention and
attendance issues.
“We encourage students to attend every second of every day,” says Simon. “It’s crucial to academic achievement.”
On March 16, the district closed schools to help contain the outbreak of COVID-19. Distance learning began March 23.
Simon and the rest of the district turned their focus to food security,
internet connectivity for families in need and online suicide
prevention assessments. But Long Beach Unified—like other schools,
districts and the organizations they partner with to combat chronic
absenteeism interviewed by EdSurge—haven’t given up on efforts to help
students attend school, even without a physical school to attend.
Understanding Chronic Absenteeism
The U.S. Department of Education reported that for the 2015-2016 school
year, more than 7 million students—or 16 percent of all students—and 20
percent of high school students are chronically absent.
Research shows that attendance is key to academic success, so
preventing absenteeism is critical. Reading and math skills are
hindered for students who are chronically absent as early as
kindergarten. In elementary school, frequent absences are linked to a
higher likelihood of dropout—even if attendance improves over time.
In addition to causing learning gaps, absenteeism also has budget
implications. In seven states, including California, school districts
are funded through property taxes or state allocations based on school
attendance. Districts in communities that don’t generate high property
taxes look to attendance revenues from the state.
To address absenteeism, school administrators have turned to outside
groups to help implement data-informed intervention and outreach
strategies.
Attendance Works, headquartered in San Francisco, has worked with more
than 24 school districts—like Long Beach—across 32 states, and
facilitates a peer learning network involving more than 35 states.
In 2019, Attendance Works began to coach Long Beach’s “All In” staff to
use the organization’s evidence-based Teaching Attendance Curriculum to
strengthen prevention and intervention strategies, which include
creating a welcoming environment, using effective messaging and
recognizing good and improved attendance. The organization also helped
“All In” staff design three peer learning network sessions for the 25
“All In” schools.
Attendance Works generates about half of its revenue from foundations.
The remainder comes from service fees that amount to $1,800 per day.
Its contract with Long Beach Unified for the 2019-2020 school year is
for $21,110.
Hedy Chang, executive director and founder of Attendance Works, says
that when the new school year resumes, school officials may well find
more students at risk for chronic absenteeism due to economic or
housing instability. Parents may have lost their jobs, students may
need to work to support the family, family members may have died due to
COVID-19. And students may be unwilling to return to school in person
if they have a health condition or live with someone who is more
vulnerable to the virus.
Identifying students at risk of absenteeism requires a mix of tactics.
For example, gathering information such as which students lack internet
connectivity, who was chronically absent prior to COVID-19 and
understanding whether a student comes from a low-income family, has a
disability, is involved in foster care or is homeless, can help staff
better recognize each student’s circumstance and develop a more
effective support system.
Chang says it is important for schools to check that they have updated
contact information for students and families, so that staff can reach
out and help students and guardians navigate what will be a radically
different school year. It is also important to ensure that students
have devices to support virtual class, coursework and communication.
Her organization recommends that attendance is taken for every
in-person and virtual instructional experience. When schools resume
in-person learning, or for those taking a hybrid approach, Chang
recommends that schools convene a team of social-emotional and health
support staff to reach out and identify students who lost out on
significant learning opportunities since schools switched to remote
learning. From there, they can develop and implement outreach,
engagement and support strategies for these students and families.
Because of COVID-19, the federal government has waived participation
rate as an Academic Achievement indicator for one year, but addressing
absenteeism is still top of mind for many administrators.
Take, for example, the growing interest in Attendance Works’ services.
Its webinars usually host about 500 attendees but that number has grown
since the pandemic outbreak. About 4,600 people showed up for a recent
webinar, Chang says.
Postcards Prove a Point
On the other side of the country, another effort, housed at Harvard
University, is also helping districts tackle chronic absenteeism.
Started in 2015, the Proving Ground program helps school districts
leverage data to design, plan, implement and test interventions to
improve learning outcomes. The program has 59 school district partners,
most of them in New York and Ohio.
One of its first successful intervention programs involved weekly
postcards sent home to families of students in early grades as absences
occurred. The program lasted over the course of 13 weeks during the
2018-2019 school year and included 5,602 students from two unnamed
districts. Each card contained a handwritten message including a count
of cumulative days missed, information on the lessons missed in class
that day, and a guide to help parents understand how the absences
impacted their child’s academic progress. Researchers found that this
approach reduced student absences by an estimated 7.9 percent.
In fall 2020, the program will launch intervention efforts with all of
its partner schools. Interventions will include family engagement
including outreach and follow-up designed to foster bi-directional
communication between school and caretaker and enable problem solving
to address reasons for absenteeism, restorative circles in elementary
grades and intensive case management for high-absence students.
Due to COVID-19, Proving Ground aims to support its partner schools
through a newly launched app that suggests strategies based on data
shared with Proving Ground. The app will help districts improve upon
selected strategies over time and allow districts to connect and share
information with each other.
For one district that provided Proving Ground with data, it found that
students were less likely to attend school virtually than they were to
attend in person. Students who were chronically absent before COVID-19
were unlikely to attend school virtually at all.
“We don’t know what attendance is going to look like” in the fall Hersh
says. “The key, if attendance cannot be measured in the same way, will
be replacing it with something with similar utility. Attendance is an
incredibly valuable tool for identifying students in need of additional
support early. Failing to replace it would make it extremely hard for
districts to support students, especially if they cannot see them in
person every day.”
City Year Shifts Attendance Intervention Strategy
Like Simon, the student support services director at Long Beach
Unified, Cory Jones, principal of Rosa Parks K-8 School in Sacramento,
Calif., was fighting a losing battle to reduce chronic absenteeism at
his school. During the 2018-2019 school year, the chronic absenteeism
rate at Rosa Parks reached 26.5 percent (about 240 students)—up from
17.2 percent (about 150 students) percent during the 2016-2017 school
year.
Before COVID-19, Jones saw improvement in attendance with help from the
local chapter of City Year, an education nonprofit that is part of the
AmeriCorps national service network, which has approximately 350
partner schools and 40,000 students it interacts with directly through
one-on-one and group settings.
City Year Sacramento members participated in school attendance teams,
evaluated data trends, identified students in need of support and
determined appropriate interventions. Efforts included attendance
rallies, incentives and teaching students about the consequences of
missing school, and engaging those who needed encouragement and support.
Students who successfully demonstrated sustained improvement in their
attendance received attendance graduation certificates and pins. On one
occasion, students who came to school on a particular day entered a
raffle for the chance to pie a City Year Sacramento member or Jones in
the face.
“Research shows that if a child feels a personal connection at school,
it raises their chances at school exponentially,” says Jones.
Coinciding with these efforts, Sacramento Rapid Transit provided all
students in the city with valid student IDs free bus rides to help
overcome transportation obstacles. City Year Sacramento members helped
students acquire bus passes through the initiative as well as alarm
clocks.
From Jan. 6 to Feb. 24, early data showed about 60 percent of students increased their average daily attendance.
Then, Sacramento City Unified School District closed schools on March
16. “That pretty much sidelined the efforts we were making,” says
Jones. “Now that face-to-face interaction, the most powerful part of
it, was eliminated.”
As schools transitioned to distance learning, City Year Sacramento
turned its focus to family engagement. Members made about 600 calls to
parents and students to check in on well-being, ask about obstacles to
learning and provide technical support on tools like Google Classrooms
and Zoom. They also helped translate district communications into other
languages. The list of students contacted was based on those who did
not participate in online learning activities.
City Year Sacramento also created about 50 videos and social media
posts to engage students. Video subjects ranged from reading stories to
health to dance to origami. Members participated in Google Classrooms,
managing chat windows, creating activities and warm-ups and conducting
small group breakout sessions for homework and academic support.
“We will build off of these initial distance learning initiatives for
the upcoming school year and be able to provide hybrid and distance
learning support,” says Jeff Owen, vice president and executive
director for City Year Sacramento.
The national City Year organization does have a history of success with
attendance. During the 2017-2018 academic year, students in grades six
to nine coached by City Year AmeriCorps members improved their
attendance by at least 2 percentage points, which translates to more
than three additional days in school or more than 5,900 collective
additional days of instruction.
A recent study from Johns Hopkins University showed that the more time
a student spends working with a City Year AmeriCorps member, the better
their attendance and academic outcomes. Students who spent the median
amount of time with an AmeriCorps member—16 hours in math or English
and three hours for behavioral support—were 42 percent less likely to
fall off track in English, a third less likely to fall behind in math
and 41 percent less likely to fall behind in attendance. In addition,
students furthest behind in attendance, grades, test scores or
social-emotional skills saw the greatest gains with one-on-one support
from a City Year member.
City Year services can cost about $200 per student per year for a
variety of school-wide and individualized supports, according to Owen.
Schools nationwide usually cover about 25 percent of the total cost to
deploy the team of City Year members in schools. About 50 percent comes
from contributions and grants from foundations, corporations and
individuals and another 25 percent is funded by the federal government
through AmeriCorps.
Jones hopes that Rosa Parks and City Year Sacramento can continue some
of the new efforts and projects once the school returns to in-person
learning or a hybrid model.
“This is a time to stretch and learn new things,” he says. “These are things we may follow up on when we return to school.”
Back in Long Beach, the end of the school year saw Simon and her
colleagues cross referencing chronic absenteeism lists to make sure
families received the support they needed. They assisted families with
finding temporary shelters and community resources and provided
wellness checks on the staff. “If the staff is not well, they’re not
going to serve the students well,” Simon says.
Long Beach will start its school year online only, possibly shifting to
in person learning later in the year. Simon and her team have been
talking to families by phone, not just to share the importance of
attendance, but to empathize with their circumstances.
The focus for her team is on participation over attendance. Once
conditions are safer, district staff plan to visit students’ homes.
Family Resource Center staff provide telecounseling to students during
summer school and virtual guardian workshops on topics such as anxiety
and grief.
“If you didn’t build a relationship before COVID-19, you’re not going
to hear from those families,” Simon says. “If they trust you, they’ll
accept your calls on a more consistent basis. People see that more so
now.”
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