School attendance rates haven’t recovered since COVID closures. Here’s why that matters

Like most school districts across the country, the Fort Worth Independent School District saw a sharp uptick in absences during the pandemic.

But now, nearly two years after the district brought all students back to school in person, officials say too many students still miss too much school. Although the district’s attendance rate has improved, it has never returned to where it was before COVID-related school shutdowns.

Fort Worth ISD isn’t alone. Experts say nationwide, an alarming number of students have still missed an excessive amount of school this year. Both in Fort Worth and across the country, experts say the pandemic is still driving that trend, even after concerns about widespread transmission of the virus have largely subsided.

“While we don’t see as many issues with COVID, we still see the result of families losing security because of COVID,” said Cherie Washington, Fort Worth ISD’s chief of student support services. “And security means academic performance, as well.”

Fort Worth school attendance hasn’t fully recovered since COVID

The number of students in the district who have missed 10 or more days declined by 30% this year, falling from 29,122 last year to 20,348 this year, according to figures provided by the district. But even with that improvement, more than a quarter of the students in the district still missed 10 or more days this year.

Washington said the district’s attendance rate improved this year as compared to last year, but still lags behind pre-pandemic levels. As of April 21, the district’s average daily attendance for the current school year was 92.5%, a two-point uptick over the previous school year. But the district’s average daily attendance for the 2018-19 school year, the year before the pandemic began, was 95.1%.

Although case counts have dropped to manageable levels in Tarrant County, families in the district are still dealing with the ramifications of the pandemic, Washington said. More families are dealing with housing and food insecurity, she said, and more students are experiencing mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Any of those factors can make it harder for kids to get to school, she said.

Persistently high rates of chronic absenteeism — generally defined as when a student misses 10% of the school year or more — are a worrisome sign, because researchers say students who miss an excessive number of school days suffer a wide range of academic consequences, including being less likely to read proficiently by third grade and being at greater risk of dropping out of school before graduating.

Attendance affects school districts from a financial standpoint, as well. In a conversation last month with the Star-Telegram’s editorial board, Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Angélica Ramsey named improving the district’s attendance rate as one thing the district can do to bring in more revenue. Texas funds its schools based on their average daily attendance, meaning districts only get state funding for the number of students who are at school on an average day, not the number who are enrolled. But Fort Worth’s post-COVID attendance rate, like those in districts nationwide, have been “atrocious,” she said.

“It’s very difficult to get parents and students to understand you have to come to school five days (a week),” she said.

FWISD outreach staff tries to re-engage families, with mixed results

Saira Olivo, a family engagement specialist at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in Fort Worth ISD, said some families never totally reengaged with school after remote learning ended. Parents felt as though they could continue not sending their kids to school, and it would be OK, she said.

Many students at Cesar Chavez are from refugee families, who generally don’t have any exposure to the American education system when they arrive. Although those families often need some help figuring out how the school system works, Olivo they’ve generally been diligent about making sure their kids are in school, or have a written excuse when they aren’t. For example, about 10 students were absent last month during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, she said, but each came back the next day with a written excuse from their imam.

But other families don’t fully grasp why it’s so important that their kids get an education, she said. She tries to reinforce the idea that, although their children are only in elementary school, they’re learning the building blocks they’ll need to succeed later on — not just to finish high school, but also to go on and get a college degree. If their kids aren’t in school, all that could be in jeopardy, she said.

Usually, those conversations happen over the phone, Olivo said. But when phone calls to parents don’t seem to do the job, she tries to visit families at home. If the family is home, she talks to them about what’s keeping the kids out of school, and tries to find a way to help them make sure their kids attend every day. She also reminds them that going to school is as important for their kids as going to work is for them.

“I do tell them, imagine if you missed so many days in your work, where are you going to end?” she said. “You’re going to go to work one day and they’re going to say ‘We don’t need you anymore.’”

Home visits can reconnect absent kids with school, study shows

A study released earlier this year by a consortium of education researchers in Connecticut suggests that home visits can be an effective strategy in re-engaging families who have lost connection to their children’s school. In the study, researchers looked at attendance data for chronically absent students in Connecticut public schools who received home visits as a part of a program the state launched to re-engage those students after the pandemic.

In most districts included in the program, attendance rates among students in the program improved by four percentage points in the first month after a family received the first visit, then continued to improve for months afterward. Nine months after the first visit, attendance rates among those students had improved by 15 to 20 percentage points, according to the study.

There was an exception: In one district, New Haven Public Schools, the program had no effect, according to the study. But New Haven school leaders didn’t initially implement the program as it was intended, researchers wrote. Instead of organizing one-on-one visits with chronically absent students and their families, the district contracted with a local nonprofit to canvass neighborhoods with high concentrations of chronically absent students. At the beginning of this school year, the district modified its efforts to more closely align with the state program.

Hedy Chang, executive director of the national nonprofit Attendance Works, said one of the key features of the Connecticut program was that it was focused on building relationships with families through repeated visits over time.

The initial visits would typically happen during the summer, said Chang, whose organization worked with Connecticut education officials to design the program. Home visitors wouldn’t even mention attendance, but would talk with families about resources like summer learning, she said. As the new school year approached, home visitors would ask families whether they knew her their child’s teacher was, and whether they needed any help getting ready for the first day of school, she said.

Districts trained home visitors on how to approach families in a way that didn’t leave them feeling as though the district was scolding them for not sending their child to school, but instead like school leaders were offering support, Chang said. As home visitors returned to check in again and again, they were able to develop trust with parents in the program and rebuild relationships between families and schools that were severed during the pandemic, she said.

Those relationships are critical to getting kids to come to school, Chang said, but the challenge of restoring them is compounded by the staffing issues that many districts across the country are facing. Students can’t build long-lasting relationships with teachers at their schools if those teachers are coming and going all the time, she said.

Federal attendance data only comes out once a year, so it’s difficult to get a complete picture of how Fort Worth schools compare to districts nationwide. But Chang said districts across the country are still struggling to get students to attend school regularly. Recent research indicates that absences are a problem for districts of all kinds. Earlier this year, NPR surveyed school officials in 21 urban, suburban and rural districts across the country, including in Texas. Officials in most of those districts told the public radio network that they still had increased levels of chronic absenteeism.

Chang said many districts are also struggling with transportation issues, largely driven by a shortage of school bus drivers, that can make it hard for some kids to get to school or to get home at the end of the day. At the beginning of the current school year, transportation issues left many Fort Worth ISD parents feeling frustrated. In one instance, a driver forced two students off a bus nearly a half a mile from their home. The students’ father later told the Star-Telegram that the girls, ages 8 and 9, were left crying by the side of the road until another parent spotted them and drove them home.

Students who miss several days of school can also fall into a cycle that leads them to miss even more, Chang said. When students are absent, they miss out on instruction, which can leave them feeling behind in class. That feeling can lead to anxiety around school, which can make it even harder for them to go back, she said.

Some parents reevaluated value of school during COVID

Joshua Childs, a professor of education leadership and policy in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, said he suspects part of the problem stems from gaps in communication during the pandemic. Schools had to shift gears repeatedly in response to COVID trends in their communities, he said. Many parents struggled to keep up when the districts announced that they would bring students back to school in person, then had to shut down again when infections spiked in their areas, and then reopened again a few days or weeks later, he said.

But Childs said he also thinks there’s been a larger reevaluation of the value of schooling. Many parents became much more aware during the pandemic of how well or poorly the public school system was serving their child’s individual needs, he said. For Black families especially, conversations about critical race theory and backlash against African-American studies courses made public schools seem like an unwelcoming environment, he said. That’s led many families to look elsewhere for their children’s education, he said, but for other families, it could mean school simply slips down their list of priorities.

As important as it is to re-engage families in school, Childs said the problem could also present an opportunity for education leaders to rethink what the school system as it exists today offers students. If families don’t see the school system as relevant in a post-pandemic world, that should prompt its leaders to ask hard questions about the way that system works, like whether schools provide a curriculum where students can see themselves represented and whether they provide the best professional development and support available for teachers.

Fort Worth kids still face pandemic-related trauma

Christopher Riddick, Fort Worth ISD’s stay in school coordinator, said the reasons students are chronically absent have stayed largely the same — problems at home, academic issues, substance abuse, mental health problems, food insecurity or some combination of all of them.

School leaders in Fort Worth and nationwide have expressed concern about what they say is an uptick in student mental health problems since the pandemic, and a lack of resources needed to deal with them. Riddick said mental health problems can play a big role in chronic absenteeism, and depression and anxiety can manifest themselves as a lack of focus and motivation. When children see news coverage of violence in schools, including the recent shooting at Lamar High School in Arlington, it can contribute to that anxiety around going to school, he said.

Even though the district is more than a year removed from school shutdowns and the height of the pandemic, Riddick said many Fort Worth students are still dealing with the mental health ramifications. Many still have a great deal of anxiety around going out in public, including to school, he said. And for those who lost one or both parents to the virus, the impact will likely follow them for the rest of their lives, he said.

“We lost a lot of lives during that period of time, and there’s a lot of fear associated with it,” Riddick said. “So I think we’re still dealing with that level of trauma from our community.”