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Monica Williams
The Hechinger Report
Will the students who didn’t show up for online class this spring go missing forever?
Districts are scrambling to locate the ‘lost’ kids of Covid and reengage them in school this fall
By Peggy Barmore
October 1, 2020
Monica Williams remembers the late May day she and first grade teacher
Lizette Gutierrez reconnected with the four young siblings from Cable
Elementary. No teachers from the San Antonio elementary had heard from
the children since schools closed abruptly in March due to the pandemic.
Williams is a former social worker who serves as a site coordinator for
Communities in Schools of San Antonio, a support program for low-income
families operating in more than 100 schools in Bexar County, including
the city of San Antonio. She and her colleagues have had to intercede
in evictions, deliver supplies and report children in dire
circumstances to child protective services since the start of the
pandemic. This time, she knew the family. She’d become acquainted with
the children before the pandemic because of their academic struggles.
After making some phone calls, she located them at a hotel, where the
family had moved after wearing out their welcome with relatives.
Williams arranged to meet the children at their grandmother’s.
Gutierrez and Williams spent 90 minutes standing on the sidewalk
outside the house in the Texas sun, at arm’s length from the students,
showing them how to sign into Google Classroom on their school-provided
Chromebooks and helping their father figure out passwords.
The siblings logged on for the remainder of the school year. But then
they went missing again, failing to show up for the district’s summer
school program, which teachers had recommended for each of them. Now
Williams and school staff are heading back out into the field, trying
to relocate the siblings and other children who’ve gone missing and
reengage them in learning this fall. With the siblings, they finally
had some luck: The children showed up for school on September 29, the
second day of in-person classes.
An estimated 3,000 students, or roughly 3 percent of enrollment in San
Antonio’s largest school district, Northside Independent, where Cable
Elementary is located, didn’t participate in remote learning and
couldn’t be reached by school staff this past spring, according to
Barry Perez, a spokesperson for the district. Other districts around
the country have reported similarly high numbers of missing students.
Poor internet, a lack of laptops and hotspots, and instability at home
are the factors most commonly cited for making participation in online
learning difficult for kids.
Nationally, some school administrators took advantage of the summer to
find new and better ways to identify and engage with missing students,
and to build stronger connections between school and home. They
replaced the hodgepodge of learning platforms and apps with more
uniform systems, eliminating multiple passwords and making them easier
to navigate. And they endeavored to better define how to take
attendance and what it means to be absent or present in virtual
education. These measures are showing signs of early success as some
districts report a decrease from the spring in the number of kids who
are no shows. But, with nearly 14,000 school districts nationally, the
whereabouts of countless students are unknown, and some may never
reenroll, administrators say.
When the San Antonio Independent School District moved to remote
instruction in the spring, 6 percent of students (nearly 3,000 kids)
never logged on.
The reality for many schools is that the search “could lead to a
dead-end,” said Northside’s Perez. As of September, he said, the
district’s enrollment is still 2,700 students shy of projections. While
they might still show up, he said the district won’t learn of some
children’s whereabouts unless they enroll in another district and their
new school contacts them.
In the neighboring San Antonio Independent School District, Mohammed
Choudhury, who serves as chief innovation officer, likewise anticipates
that it will have children who won’t return this fall. Some families
have decided that there are too many other things going on in their
lives to think about their kids’ school or how to do online learning,
and they’ve given up, Choudhury said. He and other educators worry also
about the perception among some families that when school buildings are
closed, school is also closed. For them, there’s no substitute for
in-person learning, “So, they’re not going to respond to anything or
even log in,” Choudhury said. “We’re going to lose students.”
When his district moved to remote instruction in the spring, 6 percent
of students (nearly 3,000) never logged on. Early on, members of the
district’s family and community engagement teams knocked on doors to
find the missing students, but those visits were suspended in late
March due to local health orders. Phone calls to parents and messages
on social media went largely unanswered.
Late this summer, as the lockdown lifted and schools prepared for the
new school year, staff were able to go back out. As of early September,
Choudhury said, they had found all but roughly 100 of the missing kids.
Choudhury, whose job is to problem solve, attributed his district’s
progress to its early recognition that it had to closely monitor daily
attendance and student learning online. As soon as school buildings
shut, he and his office began working with other departments and the
district’s chief technology officer to create an easy-to-use phone app
to allow educators to monitor students’ online activity. By April it
was a data hub, tracking student engagement at all 90-plus district
schools, including any contact between students and staff. Over a
million pieces of information were collected by the end of the school
year, according to Choudhury. Administrators used it to monitor trends
and determine the neighborhoods and schools with low participation,
then readily provide individual schools with data on which students
weren’t signing on. It enabled school-level administrators to decide
where to quickly deploy staff for home visits and other outreach,
Choudhury said. Now the district is relying on a new learning
management system, which replaced the app created in the spring, to
enable it to identify and respond “better, faster and smarter” to
struggling students and families.
The district won’t know until October just how many students it has
saved or lost. That’s when it, like many school districts around the
country, will submit to the state the all-important enrollment data
that helps determine its funding.
At Redland Elementary, a rural school in Florida’s Miami-Dade school
district, nearly 10 percent of its roughly 900 students were
unaccounted for this spring, according to Principal Adrian Montes.
That’s when he and his staff fanned out across the mostly agricultural
community in groups, using addresses they had on file and carrying
laptops and hotspots in case families needed them. But often they’d
show up at an address only to find it was a parent’s place of
employment, not their home, or that the family had moved away.
“We had to do a lot of digging, a lot of searching, speaking to the
owners of these businesses” and workers to locate the students, said
Montes.
But the outreach deepened the school’s connection to its families, he
said, and helped them understand more about the lives of the children
it serves. Some 90 percent of the school’s students are Hispanic,
including a large population of migrant children from Guatemala whose
parents work in local fields and plant nurseries. School staff learned
that many of those parents kept working through the pandemic, leaving
their children home alone and often in charge of younger siblings.
Redland Elementary staff distributed food and toiletries and worked
with a district program that serves homeless families, Project
UP-START, to ensure that students had access to services such as health
care. Over the summer, Miami-Dade County Public Schools introduced new
online learning software that will make it easier for students and
their caregivers to log on remotely and will, ideally, increase
participation in online learning this fall, Montes said.
Education experts say that closely monitoring attendance will be key to
ensuring that kids don’t slip through the cracks. When schools closed
abruptly this spring, few opted to take regular or daily attendance,
according to Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance
Works. “It wasn’t seen as the highest-priority concern.”
In June, a survey of 201 school districts in Connecticut by the state
education board found that 22 percent of students (some 116,000) had
only partially or minimally participated in remote learning and 4
percent (21,000) had not participated at all.
Chang said that’s starting to change as schools reopen. But she
cautioned that districts ought to use attendance not for purposes of
“high-stakes accountability,” school funding or to punish parents whose
kids don’t participate, but to learn which kids need support and which
interventions are helping kids stay engaged.
The costs of kids missing instruction — even virtual teaching — are
high. Studies show that students who miss 10 percent or more of school
days a year are at risk of not learning to read in the early grades and
dropping out in the later grades. Low-income students, students of
color and students with disabilities are most vulnerable.
Connecticut has long been in the forefront of addressing chronic
absenteeism. “We’re dogged” about making sure we have kids in school,
said Charlene Russell-Tucker, a deputy commissioner for the Connecticut
State Department of Education. From the outset of school closings in
the spring, the education board has worked to ensure that teachers
continue to track student participation and give the data to school
administrators. It created webinars to allow districts to share best
practices, such as sending school staff to non-attending kids’ homes
and addressing families’ obstacles, according to Ajit Gopalakrishnan,
chief performance officer with the department.
Still, the state fell far short of universal participation in remote
school. In June, a survey of 201 school districts in Connecticut by the
state education board found that 22 percent of students (some 116,000)
only partially or minimally participated and 4 percent (21,000) did not
participate at all.
Responding districts cited family, health and trauma issues and
internet and device access as the biggest obstacles to student
participation in online learning, according to the study. Students
enrolled in the state’s 10 lowest-performing school districts were
reported to have faced those issues more than students from wealthier
districts.
In an effort to boost participation in learning this school year, the
state invited input from families on how to reopen schools. In August,
Russell-Trucker facilitated two virtual “house calls” with doctors,
pediatricians and other health care officials to answer families’
questions about going back to school during the pandemic. Some 2,300
people signed on, she said.
The state has also prioritized “meeting families where they are” and
ensuring that students in remote learning can occasionally meet in
person with their teachers and peers, Gopalakrishnan said. “That
personal connection is huge.”
Back in San Antonio, Choudhury cautions that even if districts locate
every missing student and do everything right to keep them engaged,
schools are likely to see more turmoil.
“There’s an eviction crisis clearly looming,” he said. “Housing policy is education policy.”
“We could again have students who ‘disappear’ into the first months of
the fall semester because of a disruption in the house when it comes to
socioeconomic needs,” Choudhury said. “We’re not blind to that, but
much of that is out of our control, and we will do everything we can to
mitigate that.”
Meanwhile, the district is being more proactive about checking in with
students on a weekly basis and supporting the schools in doing so,
Choudhury said. “We know the in-person is our bread and butter,” he
said. “We’re never going to drop the in person.”
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