- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- Chronic absenteeism in a post-COVID world, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by three leaders of charter school systems here in the Memphis area.

First up is Bobbie Turner.

She's Chief Academic Officer for Gestalt Community Schools.

- Correct.

- Which includes the Power Center Academies.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- Tia James is Principal of Schools of Perea.

Thank you for being here.

- Thank you.

- Kristi Baird is Executive Director of Compass Community Schools.

Thank you for being here.

- Thank you.

- And Laura Testino is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start with a few definitions and I'm gonna start real big picture 'cause I was saying to y'all before this, that sometimes 'cause this show, and Laura and I covering these things, and you all living this world of charter schools, that not everyone knows what a charter school is, or they maybe have a misperception of what a charter school is.

Who wants to do a quick definition for...

I'm gonna look at Kristi right here next to me.

Just, what is a charter school?

- So a charter school is a public school, but it's a school of choice.

And so charters in Memphis, most of them are authorized under Shelby County Schools, but they have a little more autonomy in self-governance.

But with that autonomy goes higher levels of accountability.

So it is a public school run by a private entity under the authority of the local school system.

- Great, thank you.

And regulated to, you know, approved by the state and the county.

I'm gonna look at Laura on this, who probably knows better than me.

And then there are some, how many, tens of charter schools in Memphis.

There are many charter schools in Memphis.

Some have come and gone.

These ones have been around for quite some time.

Is that all a fair definition?

I'm putting you on the spot now.

- Yes, yes.

[Eric laughing] Most of them authorized by Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Last bit of definitions is, Compass has 6 K-12 schools across the city.

Five of those are K through eight, and one is a high school.

Perea is a preschool and elementary school.

- That is correct.

- And Gestalt runs the five Community Power Center... Power Center Academy Schools, I'm sorry.

One high school, two middle schools, and two elementary schools.

- Correct.

- Now let's get into this whole challenge of chronic absenteeism.

And I want to set this up to say that this is not simply a Memphis problem.

We did a series of stories back in the spring about this.

People have done national stories.

And just to kind of frame up some numbers real quickly, nationally from the '18-'19 school year to the '22-'23 school year, chronic absenteeism, and we'll define that as there's different sort of definitions, went from 15 to 28%, almost a doubling.

Statewide, it went from 13 to 20.

In the Memphis-Shelby County School system, it went from 18 to 29.

But it was not unique to...

I mean, the suburban schools experienced this as well.

DeSoto County went from 8 to 28.

Lakeland almost doubled from 4.5 to almost 8%.

And these are the percentages of students who are chronically absentee.

And in Germantown it went from 3.5 to 9%.

So it was a problem.

It was a COVID problem.

And while it maybe has gotten somewhat better, it hasn't completely come back from those highs.

Chronic absenteeism, I mean, again, one more definition in the Tennessee Department of Education is defined as missing 10% or more of the days the student is enrolled and missing 'em for any reason, including excused absences and out-of-school suspensions.

And it is different than truancy, which we'll get to.

So many definitions.

Thank you everyone for your patience.

I'm gonna turn to you Bobbie, 'cause you're right here.

And what have you seen?

What are those causes of chronic absenteeism?

I think we can all sort of intuitively understand it whether we're parents, former, you know, have our kids outta... Whatever it is, people can understand, in COVID, all that missed time, even if they don't like it.

But it continued, and it continued, and in some ways still continues, although you all are making headway and other schools are as well.

- Sure.

And I think traditionally those barriers that were always there previously before COVID, around transportation, maybe even a homelessness, are still those issues there.

But out of COVID what we've found is that it highlighted other issues that were already probably there, but we are more aware of.

For us it's been more around mental health issues.

So now we are dealing with not only students or scholars who may be suffering from depression, anxiety, but it could be several members in the family.

And that in itself can have a cascading effect on the entire family.

So that could mean anywhere where I just...

If the parent is suffering from depression, then oftentimes it's maybe the eighth grader or the ninth grader that stays at home to support and take care of that, and not really having the resources to do that.

So that's been a huge problem for us, outside of those traditional ones that already have.

And then there are some legitimate reasons.

They're sick, they're ill. And that can end up being, we talked earlier about where it may be one student, but three or four kids are in the home.

And so now you have multiple students out for several days.

And so for us it has been the mental health issue and the lack of resources to rebound from that, that gets them back into school.

So that's what we are dealing with now a lot.

- Before I go to Laura, before I go to you, again with an elementary school and a preschool, and that kind of real focus on early childhood, are the dynamics the same?

Or are there other dynamics that come into play?

Because you don't, I mean, it's not like high school kids who might be taking the bus, or not taking the bus, or they're transported, or they have a job.

You're talking about very young children, but you're still seeing some of the same dynamics?

- Yes, we are.

Even in the elementary, you have those same dynamics because now you're dealing with trauma.

We deal with a lot of parents that have trauma around school where they didn't like school.

So it's kind of projected onto the student.

And sometimes the elementary students won't come to school.

It might be behavior, or it could be because they don't have clean clothes, mom hadn't washed.

Sometimes it's transportation.

And so we have to deal with all of those barriers still in the elementary.

However, elementary can't get to school themselves unless they walk.

Even though we provide a bus for them, it's still that barrier there of what resources do they need in order to come to school.

And like she said, mental health still plays a part in it.

Now, our preschool students, they come to school more often, they're coming.

But in our elementary, by the time they get to kindergarten, if a parent is like, "Hey, they're sick," they think they gotta keep 'em out the whole entire two, three days versus just the 24 hours that they're fever free, or you know, if they thrown up or something like that.

But we talked about this earlier as well, if you have a sibling that's out, they keep all three or four of them out versus sending the rest of 'em to school.

- And you didn't see that dynamic as much before COVID?

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- We did see that.

It wasn't as prevalent as you notice it now.

- Okay, let me bring in Laura here.

- Yeah, you guys are all here together because you're part of a cohort called Attendance Works, which is a national organization that's working at reducing chronic absenteeism.

To focus a little bit on the strategies that you're learning and implementing from this program, I'll have a question for each of you just about your specific sets of schools.

And Kristi I'll start with you at Compass.

You know, something that's unique about your network of schools is that you're all in different neighborhoods.

And excepting the one high school, most of the schools are K through eight.

Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned from this program and from working to reduce chronic absenteeism about how strategies are different or similar across neighborhoods?

- Yeah, so when Compass had the opportunity to join the cohort with Attendance Works, we were very excited about it.

And Tia and I were both in that first meeting.

And one of the big ahas I think for my school leaders was the difference in truancy versus chronic absenteeism.

Where a lot of our school leaders had really worried about truancy and kept up with conversations with parents whose children were absent that were unexcused.

But if their child had an excuse, then they were like, "Oh, well they were sick or this."

But those daily absences add up and lead to chronic absenteeism, which you know, by definition is 10% or more of the school days.

And so if a child has missed 10% of the school days, and they do that every year, by the time, you know, they get into high school, they're gonna be behind academically.

And so one of the things that we really appreciated in our work with Attendance Works is there's a direct correlation between time in school and academic progress.

And so we know the best way to serve our kids is to make sure they're at school every day that they can be.

And so just a shout out to Attendance Works because they have a awesome website.

You don't have to be a member of their cohort to benefit from their resources.

Attendanceworks.com has tons of resources for schools, and they guided us through the process of using those resources.

We met as a cohort, which was really nice because we would be able to learn from each other.

So Perea might try something and then share how that worked, or Compass might try something and share how that worked.

So we really learned from each other.

One of my favorite resources that we used from the very beginning was a pyramid.

And so we looked at tier one, tier two, and tier three.

So every student falls in tier one.

So what are our tier one strategies for getting kids to be at school?

And so that was like, making sure your classrooms are like happy, joyful places, making sure kids feel a part of the day.

We start our day with a morning meeting so everybody feels a part of the school community, calls home when students are absent to let parents know that they're missed.

So those were just some tier one strategies.

And as we developed our work, we looked at tier two strategies, which our first tier two strategy was really having meetings with parents whose children were either chronically absent or on track to be chronically absent.

Because many times they didn't realize their children were missing so many days.

And parents want the best for their children.

And so when we were talking about like, your child may miss a day or two a month, but that adds up over time, that really was like the main thing that changed our trajectory of changing our numbers.

And then, you know, Tia and Bobbie can speak more about it, but we also started to get into tier three strategies looking at our students who missed and getting to, like, root-cause analysis.

And so Attendance Works did sessions about root-cause analysis so that we could look at subgroups and start to focus in on subgroups, and then particular families as well.

- Yeah, super.

Thank you.

And Bobbie for Gestalt, you guys have two schools in southeast Shelby County, and then a continuum of three schools in Hickory Hill.

- Mm-hmm.

- What can you share about maybe some of those same strategies?

Are there ones that you have found worked better in the elementary grades that didn't work as well for middle school?

And how about high school?

I guess, what has your network learned about how this differentiates, if at all, by grade level?

- Yeah, so similarly, I think we took the same approach in, first of all, educating our parents around that.

So what we did was this summer during the series of parent orientations, most of them were mandatory.

So what we found that oftentimes the families that we're working with are the same families year over year, right?

So we've built relationships around them, and then previously have tried to do this root analysis to try to find the right supports for them.

But going through Attendance Works, we set up a series of parent orientations where we first educated them on that, of what that means.

And we went down to the minute.

And I think parents didn't really realize what three days, five days, seven days meant in the totality of a day.

So it's not 365 days, it's really 180 days.

Once we've done that, then within our meetings we actually had a series of pullouts.

So if you were elementary, middle, high, you had an opportunity then to sit down with the social worker, the counselor there, and really figure out... We literally ask them "Why are the kids missing "these particular days?

What are the barriers there?"

And I think what we found, again, like, you know, K through eight, they don't have necessarily a lot of control in how they get to school.

And so then you're talking about the issues that parents are actually dealing with.

And like I said before, not only mental health issues, but jobs, right, when I get off.

We have one parent who talked a little bit about doing overtime and, right?

And because they were doing overtime by the time, you know, that's two periods that their child had missed because they were dropping them off late.

So really trying to think through some of these real issues because, you know, I think it would be lazy for us to assume that parents don't want their kids there, that they don't want them to experience a quality education.

But there are a lot of real life barriers that get in the way of that.

And so then we look at high school, which is very different where they have a little more autonomy in getting there and really trying to figure out what's happening during the day that kids would maybe not want to come to school.

And then the other part is, I feel what we've learned, particularly with high school is, okay, I've already missed 10 days.

What does that mean?

Can I even get this credit?

At that point they can oftentimes feel defeated.

And so we are trying to be really intentional about building out communities and spaces where number one, they know they're wanted, they belong there, that we have a way forward for you to still be able to successfully earn the credits that you have.

So being really intentional to let them know that yes, you at this point what we know is you're chronically absent or maybe at risk, but you don't have to remain in that space.

So it is different in terms of, to me, so elementary is really parent/family focused, and really with the high school being really intentional about meeting with them one-on-one to remove those barriers.

- Okay.

And Tia, if I could follow up with what you spoke about, about some of the trauma that parents have associated with school.

Working with a preschool to elementary school aged group, what are you seeing?

Are there any ways that you are finding that you're able to set some of the students up for better success and better attendance in preschool, and see that carry to elementary school with any of these strategies?

- Yes.

I will say we have a wonderful family engagement team.

They work with our parents and our students and they started, as Ms. Bobbie said, we kinda started in the summertime having parent meetings.

And we had to really hone in and talk to them about how important it was to come to school, right?

And what resources do you need?

Because we have a food pantry, we have a clothes closet.

How can I get you on the route to get on the bus?

So we had to really just sit down and have those kind of hard conversations.

But there were a few times where we had conversations with parents and they would say, "I didn't like school."

So if the child said that they didn't wanna come to school, they were okay with not bringing them to school.

But we had to make the environment safe for them.

And then that's when we bring in the teacher, and we just have a whole meeting to say, "Hey, it's safe here at school for them.

"They will be okay.

We want them here, and this is what we have in place."

So that's why we have to have our teachers put in incentives in place in their classrooms in order to get them to come to school.

So that's like our tier one.

And then we do a big school-wide tier one every 20 days.

And working with Attendance Works, that's how we started putting a lot of stuff in place.

We also work with communities and schools now, so that is helping as well too.

- Thank you.

- What kinda results have you seen?

I'm looking at Bobbie.

What kind of results?

I mean, again, you know, I mean is it working or is it working?

I mean, can you see statistical differences in the number of kids in school?

- Absolutely.

So if, even pre-COVID, you know, chronic absenteeism was always there, right?

We were averaging about 5%, which was about 150 of our kids that we were already working with.

As we were coming out of COVID, that moved up to 30%.

At the end of last year, we reduced that down to around 20%.

So our goal is to get it under 10%.

So part of the work that we've seen at the beginning of the year is because of the work that we sort of changed how we approached our families this summer.

I think the main thing that we saw is that they showed up the first day of school, right?

So that was always an issue of when they started maybe 7 days, 10 days, sometimes even moving into September.

But because of these consistent communication and touch points we had with parents, what we've already seen was there was a decrease at the beginning of the year, which is for us a start.

We have seen an uptick in high school that we're now focusing, you know, strongly on.

But we did see a decrease in terms of kids showing up for the first day of school.

- We'll try to put some more of these numbers, so we don't just hit everybody.

I've hit you all with a lot of numbers.

But, no, I appreciate that.

Thank you.

But we'll try to put some in the article.

I'm looking at Laura.

- Okay.

- Who's gonna write the article, so people can kind of break that down.

But one question I have for all of you, and I'll go to Kristi.

- Mm-hmm?

- This sounds terrible the way I'm gonna say it.

It sounds exhausting.

I mean because it sounds... Because you're trying to teach, right?

I mean you're trying to teach math and history and writing and you know, all the things you teach.

You're trying to deal with all the things you do in a school.

You're trying to get kids fed, and get to class, and get over here, and get the library books back, and all the things that are sort of the bread and butter of a school is a lot.

And now you've got this layer on top of it.

Have you had to staff up to do this?

And that's not cheap?

Or is it more just, "Hey, here's one more thing we're gonna put on the staff to be successful?"

- We did not add staff, however, we did add some resources.

And we became more strategic in how our staff worked.

And so again, with our work with Attendance Works, we put together attendance teams.

So it's not just on one person at the school.

It's kind of a divide and conquer approach.

And we put some just strategies in place that are common across all of our schools.

For example, when the first thing in the morning, someone in the office, either our ops manager or secretary, the first 30 minutes of the day they have blocked off for parent calls.

So if your child isn't here by 8:10, you're getting a call.

- Yeah.

- You know?

Because we'd rather have kids there late than not at all.

And so- - Oh, that's an interesting dynamic.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So, you know you're gonna be an hour late, you just give up on the day.

- Yeah.

- And you don't want them to do that.

And I assume that's calling and texting and emailing.

I mean, there's modes of communication.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- And we used to have an automated call system, but we found a difference when we had a person call and talk to that parent.

- But again, which is still resources.

- Yeah, it is, it is.

- And time in a..

I mean, anybody who's been around a school, most schools, people are pretty busy and bogged down.

I wanna go back to something you said which was, that struck me.

Charter schools are, as you define it, schools of choice.

People are generally...

They identified a school, they really want to get into that school.

It's not just the school in their district.

And so I was somewhat surprised that parents would have this sense of, "Well, I don't like school."

Yet, they've made the effort to get into Perea.

Or am I framing that poorly?

- No, you're framing it correctly.

We are a social-emotional learning school.

So we do help students build the whole child, and parents build the whole child, where you're looking at their social-emotional needs and their learning needs.

And so we merge those two together.

So where we also have a family engagement team and we have cell clinicians, it's all merged together, right?

But at the same time, you have parents that have trauma.

And when you're dealing with trauma, you deal with trauma even with their students.

So we have to take time to say, "How can we help everyone?"

'Cause we are truly a community school at the end of the day for Perea.

- We have just five minutes here so we're gonna run through.

I'll get one more question from Laura, but I guess I'll go to you.

Are you held accountable by your board, by the state?

I mean if you have too much chronic absenteeism, does that put you all at risk?

Do they come down on you?

- Absolutely.

- Absolutely.

- And that's true, I assume, of all schools in some way?

- That's all schools.

- Yes.

- So the state is expecting you to be doing stuff.

- Yes, to get that under 10%.

- Under 10.

- Yes, that is one.

But I know for us, we actually did increase our staff.

'Cause like I said, we were able to get to some root-cause analysis of that.

So we added, with the help of ESSER, social workers, family engagement, behavior specialists, coming right out of that because we knew that that's what we were gonna have to be supporting.

Again, not just the students but also our teachers, our leaders, as well as our parents.

So we put in additional resources to pair our parents up with outside counseling because that's what we saw as a major push and why our kids and our families weren't able to engage.

- Were these kinds of expectations before COVID, or did they ramp up post-COVID?

- They ramped up, right?

So we had a social worker at every school, a nurse at every school.

With ESSER being removed- - ESSER?

What is ESSER, I'm sorry?

- So it's the additional money and funding that we received from the state- - Gotcha.

- Due to COVID.

- Okay, thank you.

- It allowed us to... And that's why we decided to spend our money in spaces.

And as that has of course decreased, we've had to make some decisions about it.

But we still need those types of services in-house to support both in-house, and then of course the resources that we use outside of that.

So that's the model we would love to have.

- Sure, okay.

- And ESSER ended last year.

- It did.

- And so those monies that were available during COVID are no longer available, and so- - The problems are still there.

- The problems are still there.

- The whole resource and exhaustion of this.

And thank you for doing what you're doing.

I mean- - Yeah.

- But it's, yeah.

- Well, and so like at Compass we reduced our chronic absenteeism numbers last year from 33% to 20%.

Our state goal this year is 17%, but we've set an in-house goal of 15, to eventually get to that below 10%.

But we've had to partner with a lot of outside agencies because of the ESSER money missing, such as United Way, Driving the Dream.

Bobbie mentioned earlier mental health, which has a huge impact on our absenteeism numbers.

So we've had to partner with outside mental health services for our families.

- Just a couple minutes left, last question here from Laura.

- Yeah.

Bobbie, I'll come back to you and if we have time, we'd love to hear from you, Tia and Kristi as well.

You're Chief Academic Officer, and you are here talking about indirect issue for academics, but one that ostensibly, you know, keeping kids in school, reducing chronic absenteeism should show a boost in academics eventually.

As you're getting these strategies rolling, and doing these root-cause analyses, how are you thinking about how that translates on the academic side?

Are there data points that you're chasing?

Are you looking more kind of, you know, anecdotally for student engagement in classrooms?

Can you talk a little bit about what you hope to see as chronic absenteeism is reduced?

- Yeah, I think it goes back to the idea, and we talked a little bit about this, is that we are still required to give grade-level instruction every day to our scholars.

And we have particularly kids who started in COVID, and we talked a little bit about our current students who are now middle school who started in that space, and the tremendous gaps that are already there.

So a lot of our work is to ensure that our interventions are so well designed and strategized that we are able to quickly close those gaps, you know, over time.

We still have AMO goals and targets we have to meet.

And so a lot of...

I think if you think several years prior to COVID, a lot of the programming that we had as supplementary are now part of our core because many of our kids, really, all of them, have to have extensive high-dose tutoring during the day, after school, on Saturday in order for us to be able to hit those grade-level standards.

So part of the thing is making sure that we have schools that, first of all, kids want to come in, that they understand that it is a joyous place.

That it is a place that's welcome and open to that, but also we have to ensure that we are consistently presenting rigorous instruction every day, you know, to them.

So there are a lot of practices that we are continually supporting.

- I'm so sorry to do this to you because we're right up against the clock.

I'm sorry, we could do a whole other 26 minutes on this.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you, Laura.

Thank you for what you do.

It is daunting to say the least.

It's been overwhelming.

But thank you.

That is all the time we have this week.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the full episode at wkno.org, YouTube, or The Daily Memphian, recent shows as well.

Next week, Doug McGowen from MLGW.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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