Too many Florida kids are skipping school. What’s being done about it?

River Frey’s dad died his freshman year in high school, sending him into depression. He went to live with his mom, who descended into dementia while he was in the 10th grade.

As he moved around, school did not top his agenda.

“I didn’t do schoolwork. I was getting into trouble,” Frey said. “I wasn’t going to school at all.”

For his junior year, he entered Pasco County’s Anclote High School with 7.5 credits — just over a year’s worth of high school — and a grade-point average barely above 1.0. Things didn’t go so well that first semester, either, recalled Kristy DePerto, a teacher assigned to help struggling students graduate on time.

“The beginning of River’s story with me begins with destruction,” DePerto said. “It ends with him overcoming adversity.”

He slowly started coming to class, encouraged by his new girlfriend. A year later, he had perfect attendance, completed his course requirements and graduated early. Now he’s contemplating whether to become a teacher.

“Going to school can make a difference,” said Frey, 18, who attends St. Petersburg College.

His story is part of a larger trend as students across Tampa Bay, Florida and the nation are missing school at alarming rates.

About 31% of Florida students were chronically absent last school year — up from 20% in 2018, according to the state Department of Education. They are kids who have missed at least 10% of their classes. And while their numbers have started to shrink slightly, educators remain worried.

The problem crosses demographic boundaries, with research from the American Enterprise Institute showing chronic absenteeism grew similarly across socioeconomic and racial groups. And it’s not easily solved.

“There is no obvious playbook,” said Nat Malkus, a fellow at the institute who has studied attendance since the pandemic.

“I wish I had the magic bullet,” he said during an institute webinar this past week. “But I don’t think there is one.”

“We told kids to … go home”

State lawmakers in Florida are among those sounding the alarm.

“In the past several years, we have put forth a lot of good policy in education. And that’s great,” said Rep. Dana Trabulsy, R-Fort Pierce, who led conversations on absenteeism as chairperson of a key education committee. “But it’s not great if children aren’t showing up and we’re not able to use the policies we put in place to create successful human beings and children and future leaders for our community.”

Lawmakers have not addressed the problem during the 2024 legislative session, which ends March 8. But many Florida school districts have taken steps to get more students in the seats.

All Hillsborough County schools, for instance, have attendance improvement plans that address five key areas, including monitoring data, engaging students and families, and providing personalized outreach, district spokesperson Tanya Arja said.

Hillsborough reported that 29% of students had missed 18 or more days of classes in the current school year, through Feb. 5. The absences were most pronounced in high schools.

Pinellas County schools have launched several initiatives aimed at rekindling students’ interest, such as expanding extracurriculars and field trips.

Pasco County Superintendent Kurt Browning started a campaign in September, urging families to prioritize daily attendance and stressing that parents play a key role in ensuring their children show up.

That type of parental involvement is important, said Malkus, the American Enterprise Institute fellow.

“A large percentage of parents are failing to do their moral and legal obligation to get their kids to school on time,” he said.

Absenteeism is a familiar challenge for Browning. He railed against it soon after becoming superintendent in 2012, and several times since.

But the numbers surged in the aftermath of COVID-19.

“Literally, we told kids to stay safe, go home,” said Hedy Chang, chief executive of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that works with schools to reduce chronic absenteeism.

Before the pandemic, about a quarter of students attended schools where 20% or more were chronically absent, Chang said. Now, two-thirds of students are in that situation, Chang said, explaining that the churn of classmates hampers children’s learning.

It’s tough for everyone in the classroom when the teacher has to meet the academic and social needs of a revolving set of students who aren’t on the same page, she explained.

Even in Florida, which reopened schools before most other states, quarantines continued to disrupt education, Chang said. Over time, some families lost their connection to schools, while others came to see attendance as optional — particularly if their children received decent grades without doing their work.

During the pandemic, schools around the state and nation eased grading requirements, adopting a “grace before grades” approach to alleviate children’s struggles.

Working from home also became normalized, making it harder for students and parents to see a need for in-person classes every day.

The ties that bound families to schools had frayed.

Reconnecting with school

Cypress Creek High senior Jillian Horn experienced it firsthand.

As a freshman during the pandemic, she struggled to focus on online courses. Yet her family didn’t want her back in classrooms because of concerns about spreading the virus.

Horn signed up for homeschooling but in reality stopped taking classes. She didn’t have many friends to encourage her otherwise. By the time junior year rolled around, she had one credit.

“I wanted to go back. It was just hard for me to stay at home all day,” said Horn, who got on track for an on-time graduation and was named her school’s turnaround student for 2024.

What changed? “I just felt motivated one day,” she said.

Still, she struggled after returning to school. New friendships and a strong bond with a teacher kept her going.

“We had to let her know that she can really do it,” said Ondinia Garrett, Cypress Creek High’s teacher assigned to help students get on track to graduation. “She needed the encouragement.”

Garrett said she tries to make her students feel like family as they spend the day in her classroom making up credits. She said all teachers should foster such a supportive environment as a way to keep children invested in their education.

“It’s all about the relationships,” she said. “You invest, they invest.”

In examining causes of chronic absenteeism, Attendance Works lists barriers such as illness and family responsibilities; aversions, such as an unwelcoming school climate; and issues of disengagement, such as a lack of interesting, meaningful instruction.

“The issue of relationships and kids not feeling a sense of belonging is the biggest thing,” said Chang, the Attendance Works CEO.

Sonia Santelises, chief executive of Baltimore city schools, said the disconnection problem has existed for years but became worse after the pandemic.

“Young people are not going to come back to this place called school unless they have a connection,” Santelises said, speaking during the American Enterprise Institute webinar. They need to know, “Will somebody even notice if I don’t come?”

Families also face issues that reach beyond the scope of what schools can do, said Aaris Johnson of Concentric Educational Solutions, a Maryland organization that visits homes to get children to return to school.

He called for agencies to collaborate and recommended preventive steps, such as talking with parents of chronically absent students over the summer to ensure the problem doesn’t repeat. Because the situation only grows more dire the longer it festers.

“Once a student is disengaged for a certain period of time, it’s very hard to get them back,” Johnson said during the webinar.

Families need to feel connected to school, too, said Angel Hernandez, who oversees Pasco’s attendance programs as a senior supervisor of student services. Florida parents have more education options than ever, Hernandez said, and schools need to give them a reason to send their children.

“If the family doesn’t see the value, the attendance campaign doesn’t matter,” he said.

That perspective captured the attention of state Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland, as lawmakers reviewed their attendance concerns. A classroom teacher in Polk County, Canady said engagement is perhaps the most important factor.

“In order for kids to feel like they need to be at school, school needs to be a place that they need to be,” she said in December. “I’m very concerned about the reality that parents and students sometimes don’t feel like they’re going to miss very much.”

Schools have to identify why attendance dropped to tailor responses to varying communities, Chang said.

Money also is a factor.

Pasco is seeing the impact as the district prepares to cut the social service coordinators who spent the past three years finding missing students and bringing them back to classrooms. The district pays the coordinators with federal pandemic relief funds that run out in the fall.

“You guys are saying attendance matters … but yet the support staff that does the job every day is being shown the door,” Brandi Geoit, a social services coordinator, told the Pasco School Board at a recent meeting.

“When you are talking about this and the budget,” she said, ”please think about the fact that we found the missing children and we continue to do this every day.”