This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters
Bronx Principal David Liu did not notice an abrupt change in attendance when students returned to in-person learning three years ago after pandemic campus closures. Instead, the problem became clearer to him as the year progressed.
Students and staff at Gotham Collaborative High School became fatigued by five-day school weeks. Child tax credits and supplemental unemployment benefits also began to wane, forcing parents back into the workplace and requiring students to take on more responsibilities at home.
“The grind of what school was started to hit students at different times of the school year,” he said. “That’s when chronic absenteeism became kind of more like this slowly growing thing in our school.”
Now, the school has begun to crack the code on chronic absenteeism, a problem challenging school districts across the country. Administrators implemented a data system to better track students’ attendance and leverage staff and community organizations to counsel those at risk of chronic absence. The school even offers incentives to get students to show up, such as early-morning breakfast raffles or day trips.
Schools across New York City have introduced new initiatives to address the longstanding issue. Some have started to use restorative justice as a guiding principle in group interventions that target chronically absent students, rather than resorting to more punitive measures. Increasingly, schools are enlisting other students to encourage their friends to attend school regularly.
Most districts, including New York City, consider a student chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, whether those days are considered excused, unexcused, or part of a suspension. With a 180-day academic calendar, that is 18 missed days of school.
The citywide chronic absenteeism rate stood at about 25% before the pandemic. Once students returned to in-person learning in 2021, the city’s share of chronically absent students jumped 15 percentage points. While schools have made progress to lower that rate over the years, citywide chronic absenteeism still hasn’t returned to what it once was. Nearly 35% of public school students were chronically absent last school year, according to data recently released in the Mayor’s Management Report.
Though higher-poverty schools began closing the gap on chronic absenteeism in 2022-23, that gap still hovered about 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts. As a result, more and more schools have found themselves addressing issues that exist beyond the school’s environment, such as students’ access to health care, child care, and transportation.
That is why some teachers and school administrators say tackling chronic absenteeism is so challenging – it often requires a deeper knowledge of the students and families that they serve. In its 2022-23 Comprehensive Education Plan, Gotham Collaborative cited “not knowing our students well” as the root cause of the school’s chronic absence problem.
