These specialists keep Fort Worth kids in school. But what happens when money runs out?

A little before noon on Tuesday, Saira Olivo scanned a list of the names of parents she needed to call, picked up her phone and dialed the number of the one at the top. The mother picked up on the second ring.

“Hello, I’m calling from Cesar Chavez Elementary,” Olivo said. “The reason I’m calling is that we noticed your daughter wasn’t in school today. Is she doing OK?”

“Yes, she just wasn’t feeling well today,” the mother said. “She should be back tomorrow.”

Olivo thanked the mom and reminded her to send a note with her daughter the next day so the school could mark the absence as excused. Then, she hung up and looked through her list of students. This was the girl’s first absence of the year, so it wasn’t a cause for concern, Olivo said. But if a student misses several days in a row, or consistently misses a day or two a week, Olivo talks with the parent about what’s keeping the student out of school.

Olivo isn’t a truant officer, and those conversations are never punitive, she said. They generally start with the assumption that there’s a problem to be solved, and she works with parents and students to find a solution. For example, sometimes, students miss school because they don’t have a school uniform, or because their uniform isn’t clean. Other times, students are having a hard time getting themselves to school because their parents are at work.

Olivo is the family engagement specialist for Cesar Chavez Elementary School. The specialists work with families to make sure students are in school, and help connect them with resources students need to succeed in school, or anything else the family needs to thrive.

Like many school districts nationwide, the Fort Worth Independent School District struggled with a sharp uptick in chronic absences beginning at the start of the pandemic. So last year, Fort Worth ISD used federal COVID relief money to hire about 100 family engagement specialists at schools in the district.

District officials can point to signs that the program is working. Since the program began, specialists have helped thousands of students reduce the number of absences they log, and the warm, personal calls families receive from specialists have proven more effective than the automated attendance calls parents got before the program began. But because the program is funded with one-time federal money, it’s unclear what its future will be once that money is gone.

Cesar Chavez Principal Monica Ordaz said Olivo has been a huge benefit to the school, taking extra responsibilities off other support staff members’ plates and engaging with parents in ways the school never could before. Olivo also hosts parent classes and family events, which Ordaz said helps to rebuild important connections between parents and the school that were severed during school shutdowns. But as helpful as Olivo has been, Ordaz said she isn’t sure she’ll be able to keep her on staff once the federal money dries up.

“I see the benefit of the position and I would love to fund it myself,” she said. “However, our funds are stretched thin at the campus level. So unless I receive an additional allotment, I might not be able to afford it.”

Cesar Chavez families have wide-ranging needs

Olivo said she works with a wide range of families at the school, some advantaged, and some disadvantaged. The school is close to an apartment complex that is home to a large number of refugee families. Those families generally have no experience with the American education system, so they need someone to walk them through the enrollment process and help them find school uniforms, she said.

Some families also need help with things like applying for food stamps or finding work — things that don’t directly relate to the school district, but have a big impact on how students do in school, she said. In some cases, Olivo can offer help herself. But when she can’t, she connects them with the appropriate organization or agency. When that’s the case, she tries to make sure there’s a personal hand-off rather than just giving them a number to call or a website to visit.

Often, there’s a language barrier, she said. A native of Mexico, Olivo is fluent in both Spanish and English. But many parents she works with, especially those who arrived recently as refugees, speak neither. Recently, she worked with a family in which the parents spoke nothing but Farsi. She managed to walk them through what they needed with a lot of pointing, gestures and help from Google Translate, she said. When all else fails, the district has a language line that staff members can call and request an over-the-phone interpreter in any language. It’s a complicated situation, she said, but she’s patient, and the parents usually are, as well.

In most cases, the parents she works with want to do what’s best for their children, Olivo said. She recently worked with the father of a student who had behavior problems that resulted in him being sent to the principal’s office over and over.

“So he said, ‘You tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it. I do not know how to read, but I’ll do everything that my child needs,’” she said.

From there, Olivo connected the father with the district’s Family Resource Center, which connected him with a psychiatrist. After seeing the doctor and getting his prescriptions adjusted, the student is doing much better this year, she said. His grades and his behavior have improved dramatically.

Ordaz, the principal, said Olivo worked with the family for an entire year to get the issue worked out. It was a hard problem to solve, she said, but at the end of it, the boy saw how much his father loved and supported him.

“It’s very time consuming, but it’s so worthwhile,” Ordaz said. “And we have somebody assigned to that, and it’s a godsend.”

Before the family engagement specialist position existed, those duties were divided up among the school counselor, the front office, Ordaz herself and anyone else who happened to have a free moment when a parent called or came in with questions or concerns, Ordaz said. With Olivo handling those responsibilities, everyone else at the school can focus on their actual duties, she said.

If Cesar Chavez isn’t able to keep its family engagement specialist position after the federal money ends, things will go back to the way they were before, with school counselors, front office assistants and Ordaz herself handling those responsibilities, Ordaz said. The school won’t be able to meet as many needs, and they won’t be able to have the same kinds of outreach events that Olivo has organized, she said. That would be a big loss, Ordaz said, because that kind of outreach goes a long way toward making school a welcoming place not only for students, but for their entire families. Many Cesar Chavez families need that kind of support, she said. Other people at the school pitch in as much as possible, she said, but they all have other responsibilities.

“If I could carve out maybe a day that that’s all I did, I would do it gladly,” she said. “But, you know, I have to run the school.”

Specialists serve as face of Fort Worth campuses

Marta Plata, the district’s executive director for parent partnerships, said the goal is for family engagement specialists to be the face of their schools in the community. In the past, when parents needed something from their children’s school, they would often stop by before or after school and try to talk to the principal. But if they didn’t happen to come in at a time when the principal had a free moment, there was often no one else to talk to. Now, family engagement specialists can either give parents a quick answer to their questions or connect them directly with someone who can, she said.

Although the positions might have been helpful before the pandemic, Plata said she thinks the disruptions that school shutdowns brought to students and their families made them even more necessary. When families were forced to isolate during the early days of the pandemic, lines of communication and the sense of community that had existed at schools before were broken, she said. When students returned to school in person, those lines of communication didn’t come back automatically, she said. Part of the work of the family engagement specialists Is to restore those relationships between parents and schools.

Congress appropriated COVID relief money for schools in three packages. Texas used the first package, roughly $1 billion, to offset cuts in state funding. The second and third packages flowed directly to school districts. Districts must spend the money they received under the second package by September 2023. The third package must be spent by September 2024. When those deadlines arrive, district officials plan to review programs funded by federal dollars, and possibly build successful programs into the district’s budget.

The family engagement specialist positions have themselves been a source of revenue for the district: the cost of those positions last year was $3.21 million. During a school board meeting on Aug. 23, Deputy Superintendent Karen Molinar told the board the district received $18.25 million in additional state funding last year because the district’s average daily attendance grew. District officials attribute that growth at least in part to the work of the specialists. Family engagement specialists helped nearly 3,000 students improve their attendance last year, Plata said.

Absences skyrocketed nationwide, national nonprofit reports

Schools nationwide have reported a greater number of students being chronically absent since the beginning of the pandemic. The number of Texas students who were chronically absent grew by 27% from the 2018-19 school year to the 2020-21 school year, according to the national nonprofit Attendance Works. States define chronic absenteeism differently, but the generally accepted definition is missing 10% or more of the days in a school year for any reason — excused absences, unexcused absences, suspensions or quarantines.

Any increase in chronic absenteeism is a worrisome sign, because researchers say students who miss an excessive number of school days are less likely to be able to read proficiently by third grade, achieve in middle school or graduate from high school on time.

Although most states, including Texas, haven’t released attendance numbers for the 2021-22 school year, Attendance Works director Hedy Chang said the nonprofit estimates that twice as many students were chronically absent last year as before the pandemic began. That projection is based on the handful of states — Connecticut, Ohio, Virginia and California — that have released those numbers, she said.

There were a few major factors that made absenteeism an even bigger challenge last year, she said. At the beginning of the school year, many students were returning to school in person for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. Many of those students were no longer used to being around other students, and those who didn’t have good access to virtual learning during school shutdowns might have felt like they were behind academically, she said.

The timing of the delta and omicron variants didn’t help matters, Chang said. Both variants struck as students were returning to school at the beginning of a semester, meaning many students either got sick or had to quarantine for several days in the first weeks of school.

Those early days of a semester are a key predictor of how students will do for the rest of the semester, Chang said. Students who miss several days in the first few weeks are more likely to rack up excessive absences later on, she said. That’s because students establish their routines and relationships with teachers and classmates in the first month of school, she said. Also, in subjects like math and science, each lesson is based on material students covered in the units that came before it. So if a student misses several days in the first month of school, they can end up feeling lost and hopeless, making them more likely to miss school later in the semester, she said.

Chang said the problem-solving approach to chronic absenteeism that the family engagement specialists use has the potential to be more effective than a more punitive approach. Traditionally, American school districts have dealt with students who are chronically absent by threatening to take the families to court. That was never effective, Chang said, because it didn’t acknowledge the problems that kept students out of school in the first place.

“Chronic absence is connected to trauma. And when you have trauma, the worst thing you can do is to say ‘What’s wrong with you?’” she said. “The most important thing you can do is say, ‘What happened? How can I help?’”