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Cleveland Plain Dealer
Chronic absenteeism a
growing concern in Ohio schools; missing a few days a month adds up
By Patrick O'Donnell
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If your child misses school for a doctor's
appointment, it's no big deal, right?
Miss another when family visits from out of town? It happens.
Just have a crazy morning and miss the bus? No big deal. She'll make it
tomorrow.
But it all adds up more than parents realize.
If a child misses just two days a month, national and local experts on
school attendance note, that's missing 10 percent of school. It's
enough to start lagging behind classmates, multiple studies show, and
qualifies a student as chronically absent.
If it's a long-term pattern, students end up a year or more behind
others, miss crucial third-grade reading benchmarks and have higher
dropout rates.
"It's an early warning indicator," said Hedy Chang of Attendance Works,
a national organization working to educate families and schools about
the danger of absences. "As soon as kids miss two days a month, they
can be academically at-risk."
Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University professor and leading
researcher on attendance issues, said it may be obvious that students
learn more when they are in school, but many still miss too many days.
"Being there really matters," Balfanz told a summit on chronic
absenteeism hosted recently by the Cleveland school district. "The data
clearly shows that the kids who thrive are the kids who come to school
every day."
"When they miss school and when they miss so much school they miss 10
percent of school a year, which is a month, and become chronically
absent, their outcomes really suffer."
That summit, hosted at FirstEnergy Stadium last month and attended by
nearly 350 people from 18 districts -- plus multiple juvenile courts,
social servive organizations and charter schools -- is just one of
several ways that absence from school is receiving greater attention.
Here are a few key ones:
Chronic absenteeism will soon be graded
Your school and district will soon be graded on how well they are
reducing chronic absenteeism on state report cards. That effort will
become a small part of the school and district's overall grade each
year, under the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act plan proposed
this spring by State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria.
The state's goal under that plan is to cut its chronic absenteeism rate
from 16.8 percent today to 5 percent in the next 10 years.
Districts will be expected to meet that 5 percent mark -- though only
about 80 of more than 600 districts do now -- or to cut the rate each
year.
Ohio's approach to truancy is changing
-- The state is also changing how it handles truant students -- a
related, but slightly different problem -- to worry less about slapping
truants and their parents with penalties and instead try to bring
students back to school, where they can learn.
Schools will now have to work with students and parents before sending
cases to juvenile court under the House Bill 410, which passed last
year.
"I hope this will keep kids in school and help find out why they are
not in school," said State Rep. Andrew Brenner, chair of the House
Education Committee, who worked on the bill.
Former President Barack Obama's Department of Education started a
public awareness campaign in 2015 about the need to improve school
attendance. The department held a national summit on the topic last
year and started releasing national data on absences.
The Cleveland schools, which had the worst attendance in Ohio for the
2014-15 school year, launched a "Get to School. You Can Make It"
campaign in 2015 that trimmed its chronic absenteeism rate and boosted
overall attendance above four other districts, including Columbus.
Ignore the A your district or school may have on its report card, Chang
says, or its 95 percent daily attendance rate.
"Ninety-five percent tells you how many kids typically show up each
day," Chang said. "It doesn't tell you which kids over time are missing
so many school days they may be academically at risk."
Schools, she said, notice when a student quits school or doesn't show
up for weeks at a time -- the events that trigger legal interventions
for truancy. But teachers don't always pick up on students who miss a
day here and there.
And parents don't notice as well. At Cleveland's summit, Chang pointed
to a study showing that 90 percent of the parents of chronically-absent
students admit their children miss two days of school a month, but only
30 percent recognize that amounts to 10 percent of the school year.
Don't dismiss "excused" absences like days that children are
legitimately sick, either, she said.
"Just because they're sick and you understand why it's happening
doesn't make the absences OK in terms of academic performance," Chang
said. "It still affects academic achievement."
Brittany Miracle of the Ohio Department of Education seconded that
point.
"The fact that a student is not in school is what really matters," she
said.
Missing school leads to lower test scores, here in Ohio and in states
across the country, several studies have shown.
"Chronic absenteeism," the state notes in its ESSA plan, "is one of the
primary causes of low academic achievement. It also is one of the
strongest predictors that can be used to identify students who
eventually will drop out.
Miracle showed the above graph at Cleveland's summit, depicting how
Performance Index -- Ohio's composite score of test scores across all
grades and subjects -- falls as the number of chronically absent
students rises.
And Cleveland showed how its students' scores slide in both reading and
math as absences increase.
That pattern continued for Cleveland high school students, who fell
more and more off track to complete the courses and earn the test
scores they need to graduate as they missed more and more days of
school.
But while districts like Cleveland have some of the biggest issues with
chronic absenteeism, Miracle told summit attendees that the issue is
spread across Ohio.
The percentage of chronically-absent students is very different by
grade, ranging from a low of 10.4 percent for 4th and 5th grades to
more than 28 percent for 12th graders. Much of that spike may be a
"senior slide" as graduation nears, but all high school grades topped
20 percent.
State school board members noted this spring that these rates might
even be understated. Since many high school students attend
school part of the day, then leave, counting by the number of missed
classes would make the numbers even worse.
Chronic absenteeism in Ohio -- as elsewhere -- is most pronounced in
poor or urban areas. Districts that are both urban and poor had the
highest chronic absenteeism rate, with the community schools (charters)
-- which are mostly located in cities -- right behind.
The worst rate of chronic absenteeism in Ohio last school year was at
the Lake Local schools near Toledo, at more than 38 percent, though
that district disputes the total and there was likely an error.
Following close behind were Columbus, East Cleveland, Cincinnati and
Youngstown.
Cleveland, which had the worst rate in Ohio at 35.2 percent in 2014-15,
cut chronic absenteeism to 29 percent in 2015-16 with its "Get to
School" campaign -- still way too high, but bumping it to seventh-worst
in the state instead of the very bottom.
The Northeast Ohio districts with the best rates in 2015-16 included
Solon at 2.4 percent, Rocky River at 3.7 percent, Aurora at 3.8 percent
and Olmsted Falls at 4.2 percent.
Balfanz told the Cleveland summit by video that he looks at absenteeism
as a key way that poverty "taxes" and drags down student success in
school.
"When you live in poverty, it's harder to be in school every day," he
said. "There's more to overcome."
Students may have to stay home to take care of siblings or elderly
family members. They may have to work to pay bills or live in unsafe
neighborhoods that make getting to and from school harder. Students in
poor neighborhoods also see few examples of school leading to success
in life, which undercuts their will to fight through obstacles to go to
school.
Working with parents uncovers obstacles…
Read the rest of this article at The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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