As chronic absences remain high, officials hope 2022 brings clearer attendance picture

Aug. 21—Empty seats, missing assignments — Capital High School medical sciences teacher Natalie Garcia saw it all last school year.

"I imagine people would be kind of shocked and surprised. My students for the most part self-select into this pathway," Garcia said. "For the most part, students want to be here in our classes, but we're still seeing a high number of absences, for sure."

Garcia is serious about making sure students who graduate from Capital High's medical pathway are reliable enough to gain real-world experience in doctor's offices and in college.

In a field in which lives could one day be on the line, she noted, showing up for class is a huge indicator of whether a student is likely to be successful.

She and other educators are worried about the effects of chronic student absences, especially since the coronavirus pandemic took hold of the state in March 2020 and led to a long shift to remote learning.

According to attendance data reported to the state as part of the Attendance for Success Act, Capital High School tracked a chronic absentee rate — students who miss 10 percent or more of school days — of 94.27 percent in 2021-22. Students averaged 17 excused and 32 unexcused absences.

The district's average was much lower, just over 50 percent, with 12 excused and 14 unexcused absences per student. That compares with a state rate of 40 percent.

Crystal Ybarra, the chief equity, diversity and engagement officer at Santa Fe Public Schools, said even as the district, schools and teachers follow required protocols to alert parents and, eventually, child welfare authorities, some kids continue missing school.

"Honestly, some of these students do move through the system and continue to accumulate the absences," she said.

Causes for absences — highest statewide among students with unstable housing, Indigenous children and English language learners — vary widely, she said, adding the district hopes to get more outside organizations to help track down students and identify why they miss school.

"It's all about creating this web, this real-life safety net," she said.

Garcia said some of her students missed 40, 50, even 60 classes throughout the last school year. Others, she said, weren't completing homework or makeup work.

"We really do try to uphold the same expectations you might find in the nursing program at the community college or some of these other programs that are competitive but high need," Garcia said. "We try take some baby steps with that here, so our students are prepared for that rigor when they leave high school."

Garcia said she and other teachers often don't know why students are absent despite efforts to call home. If they're missing her classes but attending others, she added, she fears they're less likely to come on the radar of the district's truancy specialists.

"It makes it extremely difficult for me to make interventions to help them if they're not in this class," she said. "I don't know how to help them; I can't help them. They get frustrated."

Garcia believes some of the absences and skipped assignments she sees stem from expectations lowered by remote learning.

"I hope there are some good solutions," she said. "I think there's not necessarily a consequence for being gone."

When the state lawmakers passed the Attendance for Success Act in 2019 — which added excused absences to the chronic absentee rate, heightened attendance reporting requirements and called for all districts and schools with high absentee rates to submit attendance improvement plans — part of the goal was to institute nonpunitive measures for students who miss class. Instead of disciplinary actions, the law calls for a system of alerting parents and, if the problem persists, state authorities.

Additionally, as Santa Fe Public Schools overhauls its grading system, swapping letter grades for a model based on mastery of standards, students will no longer be graded on behavioral actions, including poor attendance.

"If you're not in class, you're not learning, so grades will probably reflect a little on that," district spokesman Cody Dynarski said. "But if a kid is not showing up to class, they're not going to get a lower grade."

Thirteen Santa Fe schools are set to fully implement the new standards-based model this school year, while others will phase it in over the next few years.

Ybarra was hesitant to draw many conclusions from the district's attendance data since the new law took effect.

"Last year was a very tricky year in terms of attendance for a few different reasons," she said, listing midyear transfers, students switching between online and in-person learning and COVID-19-related quarantines as factors that have muddied the picture.

"I believe that's where our rates really fluctuated," she said of quarantines. "This year, hopefully we will be able to reestablish a baseline."

In 2020-21, the district reported a chronic absentee rate of about 36 percent compared to the state average of 29 percent.

Ybarra said the state Public Education Department was "lax" that year when it came to compliance with the Attendance for Success Act.

In the years before 2020, only unexcused absences contributed to chronic absentee rates, so it's difficult to make long-term comparisons.

"You get in a predicament where you can't really compare apples to apples," Ybarra said.

A tiered attendance checklist used by the district in 2021-22 as part of the law requires teachers to mark attendance in the online platform PowerSchool. It will be used again this year, Ybarra said.

If a student is gone for three days, the school must contact the child's guardians via phone, email or text. After five days, teachers are expected to make a phone call before a principal is notified.

The actions escalate from there. Once a student is identified as "excessively absent," having missed 20 percent of the days passed so far that year, the school is directed to make a referral to the state Children, Youth and Families Department or the Juvenile Probation Office.

Between 2017 and 2021, CYFD recorded 707 allegations of educational neglect in Santa Fe County, according to data from the agency.

A quarter of those were recorded in 2021, while just 12.8 percent were logged in 2020.

Ybarra said the lower number in 2020 is likely due to "asynchronous" remote learning during the pandemic, which doesn't involve a set class time.

Ybarra, who spent much of the era of online learning organizing home visits to track down disengaged students while the district saw enrollment drops, wonders how the state's new attendance law would have panned out in a more "normal" time.

"I absolutely see how this law moved to really increase [outreach] efforts," she said. "You see flaws with it, too."

Earlier this month, the Public Education Department announced a plan to hire an "attendance improvement coordinator" to work with districts to lower the number of chronically absent students.

The department is expecting more students to be in school now that it has relaxed and removed quarantine and isolation rules related to COVID-19.

"We know the pandemic was largely responsible for the high absenteeism rate, but that shouldn't be a big factor this year," Anne Marlow-Geter, interim director of the department's Safe and Healthy Schools Bureau, said in a recent news release.

Meanwhile, Ybarra said the district is working to fully staff school-based attendance teams that will analyze attendance data and engage students. The district also has increased staff trainings on attendance reporting to make sure all teachers do so accurately.

"When we come out of this year, we're going to have a very strong sense of where our attendance and chronic absentee rates are," she said.