Keeping Students in School

It is common knowledge that attendance is crucial to school success, with chronic absenteeism negatively impacting students’ grades and even serving as an indicator of future dropouts. However, it is not just truant students who are “at risk.” Students who miss a lot of school due to legal absences are also at risk for having academic issues.

The Huffington Post reported that many states are now looking at students who are frequently absent for any reason, in hopes of being more proactive in promoting student success. The students being targeted for intervention are usually those considered to be “chronically absent,” or missing 10 percent or more of school during the academic year.

“Attendance Works”

Attendance Works is a national program that is leading the efforts in keeping students in school and providing intervention support for students who continue to be chronically absent. The group’s goal is “to ensure that every district in the country not only tracks chronic absence data beginning in kindergarten or ideally earlier, but also partners with families and community agencies to intervene when attendance is a problem for children or particular schools.” Attendance Works aims to achieve its goal through public awareness campaigns, working with states to provide appropriate interventions and policies and helping smaller communities establish services and support networks.

Chronic absences are a serious problem in schools with one out of every ten students missing at least a month of school every year; at least 7.5 million American students are considered to be chronically absent. In fact, chronic absences in ninth grade are a stronger indicator of future dropouts than eighth grade standardized test scores. As a result of this issue, Attendance Works has declared September to be “Attendance Awareness Month” to get more schools, politicians, families and community members involved in this important cause. Schools and community organizations are currently holding awareness events across the nation.

Children at Risk

Last year, Johns Hopkins University conducted a study that closely examined the detrimental effects of chronic absenteeism. Entitled “The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools,” researchers Robert Balfanz and Vaughn Byrnes lamented that schools often do not act in the case of chronic absences which were compared to a “bacteria in a hospital” that “wreak havoc long before it is discovered.” The data from six states — Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island — were analyzed and the researchers estimated that 10–15 percent of the nation’s students are chronically absent. A large majority of these students are from high-poverty rural and urban areas, with absenteeism increasing during the middle and high school years. In the study, chronic absences were found to be contributing factors in low achievement and grade level retention as early as first grade.

Proactive Approaches

Hedy Chang, from Attendance Works, believes that states need to play a more assertive role in identifying chronic absences by assisting schools in establishing monitoring systems and interventions.

Teachers in Providence, Rhode Island, discovered that some students were often missing school because parents worked overnight shifts. To assist exhausted parents, the district started an early morning care and breakfast program that parents could drop their children off at following their shifts. To date, eight states are tracking chronic absences: Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Rhode Island and Utah. Some of these states discovered some discouraging statistics. Utah found that more than 13 percent of students were chronically absent while Oregon’s numbers topped 20 percent.

States that have made real efforts in providing interventions have found overwhelmingly positive results, especially when schools uncover the reasons for chronic absences and address student and family needs. Instead of simply identifying the problem, Brad Strong, senior director of education policy at Children Now, says it’s important to find out what is preventing students from attending schools. By doing so, Strong claims, “If [students] are in school, if districts do this, if schools do this, you’re going to see achievement gains across the board.”

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