Credit: Jane Meredith Adams/EdSource Today

Sky Lowe, a pupil in Oakland, said a teacher pulled him back from chronic absenteeism.

Credit: Jane Meredith Adams/EdSource Today

Heaven Lowe, a pupil in Oakland, said a teacher pulled him dorsum from chronic absenteeism.

Now that the California Department of Education has announced it volition for the beginning time collect chronic absenteeism information – an early indicator of students at risk of dropping out – advocates are pressing the State Board of Education to include that information in the accountability arrangement it is creating under the new federal education law.

The state board, which at its March 9-10 meeting will talk over the "multiple measures" of accountability it is considering nether the new Every Student Succeeds Human activity, has shown picayune enthusiasm for chronic absenteeism rates as a performance indicator in the past, arguing that a less precise indicator of attendance would take to do because that was the but data the state collected, said Hedy Chang, executive managing director of the Oakland-based national nonprofit Attendance Works.

"Now we also have chronic absenteeism," Chang said. "This is a huge, important, major development." She added, "This is a game changer."

The state will brainstorm collecting the data from districts in late jump 2017, based on attendance for the 2016-17 school year.

For years, Chang and other researchers have been working to shift the teaching discussion from paying attention to "average daily attendance," which too is used in California to determine schoolhouse funding, to students who are chronically absent-minded, divers equally missing more x per centum of schoolhouse days since the showtime of the schoolhouse yr. That's because omnipresence rates create the impression that absences are evenly distributed.

But in fact, schools that proudly display Average Daily Attendance rates of ninety or 95 percent, Chang says, often don't track students who are consistently missing school for absences that are excused, unexcused or suspensions – and missing two to four days every month, for instance, adds up to a significant loss of fourth dimension that could be spent learning to read or do math. A school with a 95 percent boilerplate daily attendance rate and an enrollment of 200 students, Chang noted, could have 60 students missing a month of school during the course of the year. Without the data, the school loses a chance to end a small problem earlier information technology becomes a bigger one, she said. Research has linked chronic absenteeism in kindergarten and 1st course to difficulty reading in tertiary form, and students who are not reading at course level in 3rd grade are four times as likely to drop out of high school.

"This is a game changer," Hedy Chang of Attendance Works said of the statewide collection of chronic absenteeism data.

Now there appears to be growing recognition of the significance of chronic absenteeism information, said Brad Strong, senior managing director of didactics policy at the nonprofit Children Now. The Every Pupil Succeeds Act, which was passed in December and takes effect in 2017-18, requires states to collect and report data on chronic absenteeism – this was the key reason California will move forwards with its data drove. The federal Office for Civil Rights just completed its first national collection of chronic absenteeism data. And in California, districts are required to set goals to reduce chronic absence in their Local Command and Accountability Plans, the upkeep and academic improvement plans that districts must write. But the cardinal starting point, said Potent, is having the statewide information collection.

"Information technology's meaningful data," Stiff said.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, who for years has called for action to adjourn chronic absenteeism and prevent futurity dropouts and offenders in the juvenile justice arrangement, estimated in a 2022 report that almost 230,000 California simple school students – near ane in 12 – missed more than ten percentage of schoolhouse in 2014-15.

She called the statewide chronic absenteeism data drove a "awe-inspiring footstep." Now Harris has introduced an online chronic absenteeism toolkit for schools that is designed to respond a unmarried question: "How should we talk to parents of unproblematic schoolhouse students virtually their children's absences?" On Friday, the White House and the U.South. Department of Education announced two new initiatives to reduce chronic absenteeism.

The statewide data collection is expected to prompt school districts to enquire their educatee data system vendors to upgrade software to start collecting and pinpointing which students are at risk of chronic absenteeism, Chang said. Attendance Works offers such data collection tools at no charge to districts and schools, only information technology is not yet compatible with every student information organisation.

Such federal and statewide prompting is necessary, Harris said. In a letter in January to Acting Education Secretary John King, Harris noted that while Local Control Accountability Plans telephone call for districts to pay attention to chronic absenteeism, "only about half of the districts reported they have the tools necessary to routinely monitor the absence patterns of private students."

Just some schools, such as Oakland's Garfield Elementary School, have both the data collection and a dedicated family unit outreach team in place. Naza'Reth Johnson is a family advocate at Garfield Elementary and at vii:45 a.yard., he starts calling parents. "She hates me," he said on a recent morning, kind of joking but not exactly, near a parent he calls every day. "It's a dear-hate thing. She knows I intendance."

The parent'south two immature children have missed more one out of every 10 days at Garfield Simple. They're kept home because of the rain, to become shopping or to help their mother, who has a health condition. Their reading skills are slipping. Johnson, who works to reduce chronic absenteeism, started his patter – e'er positive. "Hey, I'm looking forrard to seeing the girls in school today," he said.

Each calendar week Johnson and his colleague Rocio Cisneros text, meet with, write to and troubleshoot with families whose children's names appear on a sentinel list of nigh xxx students who are chronically absent or close to it. Garfield Uncomplicated has a total enrollment of nigh 600 students. On a contempo rainy day, Johnson problem-solved with the mother of the two girls. "She said it was storming and she didn't want the girls to walk in the rain and that it was all-time for them to stay home," he recalled. He told her it was wet out, but non storming, and that he would walk over and pick up the girls. The parent agreed. "I met the girls at the corner," he said. "Nosotros walked to school together."

Heaven Lowe, a inferior at Oakland High School, said he became chronically absent this past fall after a series of family problems caused him to move out of the house. Somewhen, he moved in with a family friend, he said, just money was tight and his spirits were depression. Unable to beget bus fare, he missed "about two days a calendar week" of schoolhouse for three or iv months, he said. The school was unable to reach his female parent. It wasn't until a teacher asked Lowe about his absences that things changed, he said.

His teacher got in touch with Lowe's supervisor at a paid internship. The supervisor said Lowe's pay would be docked $25 if he missed 3 or more class periods a week. The teacher also referred Lowe to the school'southward educatee wellness center, where staff referred him to a counselor he could talk with about what he's been going through. Lowe is dorsum at school.

Only he says he has friends who are out of school and unnoticed.

"I happen to be the lucky ane who was forced to get dorsum to school," he said.

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