Chronic absenteeism is up across the country. School leaders are trying to address why

ST.LOUIS – Brad Ross knows what happens when a student misses class: They fall behind. But the longtime teacher, high school principal, and now, assistant superintendent for Warren County R-III Schools is still trying to understand the reasons behind why a student doesn’t show up.

“With some of our absences this year, the biggest issue we come to … is that we don’t know the reason for a lot of student absences and the absences that we have currently this year, about a third of them are unverified,” he said, meaning the district doesn’t have any confirmation of why the absence occurred.

What worries him and many other school leaders across the country is that attendance rates have not returned to what they were before the pandemic.

Some 29.7 percent of the nation’s students, nearly 14.7 million, were chronically absent in the 2021-2022 school year — missing school at least 10 percent of the time, according to federal data. About 6.5 million more students fall into this category than before the pandemic, according to analysis from Johns Hopkins University and the education nonprofit Attendance Works.

The issue has drawn increasing concern this year as more data has emerged. Along with poor individual attendance, more schools are dealing with chronic absences, the JHU-Attendance Works analysis noted. Two-thirds of enrolled students attended a school with a high or extreme level of chronic absenteeism in the 2021-2022 year, according to its latest report.

“We need to make sure every student is in school because kids can’t learn if they’re not in school,” Neera Tanden, a White House domestic policy advisor, said Wednesday at an event focused on student achievement. “The truth is we simply cannot accept chronic absenteeism as the new normal.”

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Federal guidelines say districts should aim to have 90 percent of students in attendance 90 percent of the time. In Missouri, about 76 percent of students meet this standard, according to state data from the 2022-23 school year. This marks a drop of more than 10 percentage points from 2019, when 87.3 percent of students met this attendance target.

The length of the average school year varies by state, but in Missouri, where students in schools with a five-day school week see 174 instructional days, being chronically absent would mean missing more than 17 days in a school year.

Research shows the effects of missing school can have lifelong impacts. Chronic absenteeism may make it harder for children to meet early learning milestones and can lead to poor academic performance, according to the Department of Education. At Wednesday’s event, Tanden said absenteeism can account for up to 27 percent of test score declines in math and 45 percent of test score declines in reading, citing research from the Council of Economic Advisers. Absenteeism can also be a predictor of whether students will drop out before graduation, something that can lead to adverse health effects and lower lifetime earnings .

In Ross’ district, the attendance rate dropped from 83 percent in 2019 to around 75 percent in 2022-23 school year, he said.

At St. Louis Public Schools, Superintendent Dr. Keisha Scarlett told the NewsHour nearly half of the district’s more than 16,000 students are chronically absent.

“It is well documented that if a student misses more than 10 days of school in a school year, that there’s a marked impact on their ability to remain caught up or to even catch up, given many of the gaps that we have in educational experiences for students,” she said.

She and Ross, along with other school leaders, have had to search for answers — and solutions.

“The difficult answer is you deal with that [absenteeism] one [case] at a time because each kiddo is so unique and their situation is so unique and in a building of a thousand kids, when you had 60 [absent kids] more that you’re trying to identify and help out, it becomes comes a lot,” Ross said.

What causes chronic absenteeism?

Chronic absenteeism can include excused and unexcused absences as well as suspensions. How this is measured and policies around absences can vary state to state.

But the data only offers a limited amount of context of what students are experiencing, said Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, which partners with schools, districts, states, and communities to address absenteeism. Getting to the root causes behind these absences is key. Attendance Works approaches these challenges through four different categories: Barriers to attendance, aversion to school, disengagement from school and misconceptions about the impact of absences.

These are further examined in smaller buckets of more specific reasoning, ranging from trauma to the misconception that absences are only a problem if they are unexcused.

“At the same time, we have many places dealing with teacher shortages and staffing shortages and what we know as you start getting into solutions is that personal relationships to someone at the school campus, someone who they feel connected to, who they feel care, who can help them think through how to overcome some of the challenges and connect them to needed resources is absolutely essential,” Chang said.

Scarlett in St. Louis said one of the biggest obstacles for her district, as well as many others nationwide, is transportation.

“This issue of driver shortages, it trickles all the way down into the states, the individual school districts and into homes,” she said. “It’s really difficult to talk about attendance with families when you don’t have a reasonable assurance, I would say 100 percent assurance, that your child is going to be able to get to school and that their bus driver will show up that day.”

The national bus driver shortage has improved slightly since the start of the pandemic, but staffing levels have not returned to what they were before. Data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that in September 2023, there were about 192,400 bus drivers working in K–12 schools, about 15 percent less than in September 2019.

But this is just one of the many complexities that can exist in any given student’s story, Scarlett said.

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She gave an example from a recent board meeting where one of her principals shared a story about a local mother who would usually drive her children one mile each way to school, but couldn’t make that drive for two weeks while healing from a cesarean section.

In the end, the school was able to “work with a security guard to go pick up the children every day and make sure that they were in school while that mother was healing her body and caretaking for a newborn baby.”

It’s these kinds of community partnerships, she said, that are “imperative” to ensuring students’ needs are met.

“This is what you call a ‘high-touch school district’. We have to have high-touch interactions, school leaders, staff people. Everybody has to go so far beyond sort of the scope of what maybe they signed up for,” Scarlett said.

How districts are responding

While chronic absenteeism can include excused and unexcused absences, once a student has accumulated too many of the latter, it can be considered truancy, though each state has different policies or regulations, often called compulsory attendance laws.

In Missouri, the law states that parents or guardians who have custody of a child between the ages of 7 and 17 must “ensure that the child is enrolled in and regularly attends public, private, parochial, home school or a combination of schools for the full term of the school year.”

But a major challenge, Chang said, “is that people’s reaction to when kids miss school often in this country we think it’s because the kid in and family doesn’t care.” She argues it’s not about that.

“This is not about whether you care or not. This is about whether you face barriers or challenges and issues coming to school,” she said.“Truancy focuses on unexcused absences … When a kid’s absence is considered unexcused. It deeply affects how a kid is treated.”

The pandemic itself created its own set of unique circumstances.

“The communities that were hardest hit by the pandemic, you know, they lost people. They lost a parent, they lost a grandparent. They lost…an aunt and uncle and so that is..affecting them financially, economically, emotionally,” she said. “These are the kinds of things that you don’t easily heal from, it takes a while.”

Last year the Missouri Supreme Court upheld state law that criminalizes parents if their students miss school after prosecutors charged two mothers with misdemeanors. When the two parents challenged the constitutionality of the law, they lost.

“All evidence and inferences favorable to the State are accepted as true, and all evidence and inference to the contrary are rejected,” the decision reads.

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Still many districts say the key is being in partnership with families in order to reach parents and legal guardians.

When a student begins to have an increased amount of absences, Ross said his district, about an hour outside of St. Louis, begins to follow protocol for making contact, whether that be letters home, phone calls and in some cases home visits. Sometimes that effort to make contact can be difficult.

“There is a lot of concern from teachers at all levels when the students aren’t in their classrooms. They’re wondering how can they get work to the students or keep them caught up because the curriculum continues to advance,” Ross said.

But as Chang highlights, to have a conversation about absenteeism means also having a conversation about inequities.

The Attendance Works analysis found that students serving greater proportions of nonwhite students and higher portions of students experiencing poverty were more likely to experience high levels of chronic absenteeism.

Districts across the country are working to figure out how to keep students in the classroom. For Chang, making sure absenteeism data is accurate and available and using those numbers to problem solve are vital in the search for solutions.

“When we see kids missing school, it’s a sign that we need to engage in outreach and support and ensure that every child in our school feels those positive conditions for learning. I want them to not start with blame, but start with seeking to understand what’s happening and how can we help,” Chang said.