Student absenteeism in CPS improves, but not meeting state standard of 90% attendance
Columbia Public Schools students miss a lot of school.
Not as much as last year, when omicron was surging through schools, but still a lot.
It's not just a problem in CPS, but also is being seen statewide and nationwide. A University of Missouri researcher has studied its causes in eighth, ninth and 11th graders.
Meeting and missing the state attendance standard
The state standard for student attendance is 90% of students attending school 90% of the school year.
With a school year of 174 days, students could miss 17 days of school and meet the standard.
Just five elementary schools in CPS met the standard in 2022-23. No middle schools or high schools did.
The elementary schools are Midway Heights, 93.6%; Beulah Ralph, 92.8%; Russell Boulevard, 92.7%; Cedar Ridge, 90.8%; and Paxton Keeley, 90.1%,
For reference, the worst attendance numbers at the elementary level were 71% at West Boulevard Elementary. For middle schools, Lange Middle School was the lowest at 60.6% with John Warner Middle School the highest at 85.9%. Among traditional high schools, Rock Bridge had the highest attendance at 81.9%, with Battle the lowest at 64.5%
District officials on Monday celebrated, because the district average reached 80%, qualifying for points in the state's Annual Performance Report.
"I am super excited about this," CPS Chief Equity Officer Carla London said Monday about the improvement.
In 2021-22 district attendance was 73.5%, resulting in no points on the state APR. The 80.3% rate in 2022-23 gets partial points for the district. Statewide the rate was just under 81%, with an average of 33 school days missed.
Springfield, a district to which CPS sometimes compares itself, had an attendance rate of 75.3% in 2021-22.
Among other Boone County school districts, only Southern Boone School District in Ashland hit the 90% attendance rate in 2021-22. The others are Centralia, 85.8%; Hallsville, 88.5%; Harrisburg, 87.2%; and Sturgeon, 81.2%,
Causes, potential solutions
"Last year, we still had a large number of absences related to COVID illness, specifically the omicron strand," said CPS spokeswoman Michelle Baumstark in an email. "This year, illness numbers look better, but we are struggling in other areas."
She also doesn't think the term chronic absenteeism fits, she said.
"Chronic absenteeism and widespread absenteeism are two different things," Baumstark wrote. "Our biggest issue in CPS is more of an increase in overall absenteeism than chronic absenteeism. More kids missing more often versus the same children never attending."
Online access during the pandemic seems to be providing an excuse for some students, she wrote.
"Perceptually, it feels like a change in attitude about the importance of attending school to receive direct instruction," Baumstark wrote. "The pandemic increased our access and reliability on technology to access coursework and materials. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, some are now taking advantage of this over actually participating in instructional time at school. However, access to technology doesn’t change the importance of attending school to receive instruction. For each day missed, it actually equates to three days of lost instruction – the day you missed, the day to make up the work, and the lesson after the day you missed that isn’t effective because you missed the necessary content day before."
There are other issues, she wrote.
"We also always see a drop around holidays, breaks, and toward the end of the school year," she wrote.
During the pandemic, some things that were paused have been reinstituted, London said during Monday's school board meeting.
"Your home-school communicators have been focused on making home visits," she said. "Parents are getting constant reminders from teachers and letters home."
Some parents say they can't get their child to come to school, she said.
MU Research
The U.S. Department of Education defines chronic absenteeism as missing 15 days of school in an academic year. That's the measure used by Knoo Lee used in his research. He's a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Missouri School of Nursing.
His study, "Using data-driven analytics and ecological systems theory to identify risk and protective factors for school absenteeism among secondary students" was published in the Journal of School Psychology.
In the U.S., more than seven million school-age children, 16% of the student population, miss 15 or more days of school a year, according to federal data.
Lee examined data from 126,868 Minnesota students in grades eight, nine and 11 from 2016, well before the pandemic.
It found 18 attributes affecting student absenteeism among those students. All related to the students' microsystem and mesosystem, that is their personal experience or factors and people in their immediate environment, including family, Lee said.
They include:
Tobacco product use
Friends' approval of substance use
Substance use
Marijuana use in the past year
Staying home due to illness
Teacher-student relationship
Adversarial childhood experience
“The first step toward solving a problem is getting a better understanding of the problem in the first place and that is what we are trying to dig into with this research," Lee said. "We want to ultimately develop more tailored interventions that improve student engagement, which lead to better long-term life outcomes.”
He hopes the study's results can be used by policymakers tackling student absenteeism, he said.
Student absenteeism can lead to negative consequences for the individuals in their adult lives, other research has shown. Those include involvement in crime, negative effects on physical and mental health and increased rates of substance abuse.
"It's presented in a multitude of papers," Lee said of the potential negative effects.
Roger McKinney is the Tribune's education reporter. You can reach him at rmckinney@columbiatribune.com or 573-815-1719. He's on Twitter at @rmckinney9.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Student attendance, tackling absenteeism, a continued focus for CPS
