Late New Year’s resolution for Florida: Keep your kids in school | Opinion

The pandemic seems like old news, but its effects on students and schools remain stubbornly durable, even in Florida. Despite being among the boldest states for school reopening in fall 2020, Florida public schools did not escape the unprecedented wave of rising chronic absenteeism seen across the nation during the pandemic. Even more troubling, however, new data from Florida’s department of education show absenteeism is not just a pandemic problem, but a post-pandemic problem — likely the biggest one facing the state’s schools.

We have known for some time that chronic absenteeism — the percentage of public school students absent for 10% or more of a school year — rose dramatically in Florida between 2019 and 2022, from 20% to 32%. However, that alarming rise, undoubtedly caused by the pandemic, left some sensible hope that attendance might return to pre-pandemic rates when COVID cases subsided. New data from the 2022-23 school year dash those optimistic hopes.

Although chronic absenteeism went down to 31% last year, a 1.4 percentage point decline isn’t nearly enough. At that rate of improvement, chronic absenteeism in Florida won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until 2031 — and Florida’s pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rates were already among the worst in the nation.

Unfortunately, there’s no clear reason to expect absenteeism will continue to improve even at the current unsatisfactory pace. The COVID threat was dramatically lower in 2023 than the previous year, but absenteeism saw only a small improvement. Looking forward, what strong reasons are there to suppose that chronic absenteeism will fall at a similar rate between 2023 and 2024 or between 2028 and 2029? Without concerted efforts, these unprecedented rates could become the post-pandemic baseline.

Chronic absenteeism, which is linked to lower test scores and social emotional well-being and higher rates of course failure and high school non-completion, was a major problem even before the pandemic, but it is now a much bigger problem. Recovering from substantial pandemic learning loss is a tall task, one that will be much taller still for the 987,000 Florida students who were chronically absent in 2023.

At rates this high, chronic absenteeism makes learning worse for all students. Chronically absent students are not only more likely to have academic and behavioral problems, they also force teachers to spend more time on missed material and make-up assignments, at other students’ expense.

District rates varied widely, from 14% in Sarasota to a whopping 55% in Putnam County. The state average wasn’t driven by outsized rates in the big districts. Compared to the state average, Miami-Dade had a slightly lower rate of chronic absenteeism (29%). Broward’s rate was slightly higher (33%).

Absenteeism is also a much larger problem for Florida’s Hispanic and Black students, who federal data from 2022 show had absenteeism rates that, respectively, were 3 and 7 points above the state average.

Although Florida’s absenteeism rates are higher than the national average, the pattern of pandemic spikes and tepid improvement is evident across the nation. The real question now is whether this situation will improve, and how.

This crisis demands an all hands on deck response, and that needs to start at the top. Gov. DeSantis and Education Secretary Manny Diaz should make absenteeism their most frequent talking point on education. So too should district superintendents.

To fight chronic absenteeism, Florida will need to use carrots — social supports, communications campaigns and positive reinforcements — and sticks — truancy officers and action from district staff. Teachers will need to be involved. Florida teachers have their hands full, but they have the closest relationships with students and teachers. If they are not enlisted in the fight against chronic absenteeism, progress will be all the harder to come by and their jobs will be all the harder to do. Finally, this year Florida’s parents and students will have to shake off pandemic habits, and fulfill their moral and legal obligations to attend school regularly.