FWISD is bringing chronically absent kids back to school. Here’s what’s working.
More than three years after the district brought students back to school in person, officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District say the number of students missing too many days of school has nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Although that return to normal represents a victory, it still means that nearly one in five students in the district are racking up too many absences. District leaders say they’re pushing forward with their efforts to bring more students back to school.
Nationwide, education researchers and school attendance advocates say districts have made progress in bringing down chronic absenteeism rates since schools reopened. But in most places, researchers say those rates are still higher than they were before the pandemic. And new research suggests that the large number of absent students is affecting the way teachers feel about their jobs.
Absenteeism declines in FWISD, but challenges remain
Experts say chronic absenteeism, generally defined as when students miss 10% or more of school days during an academic year, can lead to a host of other challenges. Students who miss too much school are less likely to read on grade level by third grade and more likely to drop out of school before graduating. When students miss too many school days, it can also derail school districts’ strategies for helping them close pandemic learning gaps, since much of the extra support students receive, like tutoring, happens during the school day.
At its peak during the 2021-22 school year, Fort Worth ISD’s chronic absenteeism rate stood at 36%. This year, 19% of students are chronically absent, said Marta Plata, the district’s executive director of student and family experience. Records show that rate is just two points higher than where it stood the year before the pandemic began. But it also means that nearly one in five students misses too many school days.
One of the district’s main strategies for bringing chronically absent students back to school was hiring a team of family engagement specialists, staffers who reached out to those students’ parents to try to work through whatever issues were keeping kids out of school. Those positions were originally funded with federal pandemic-era relief money, but when that money expired last September, the district built the program into its general budget.
In many cases, Plata said, families lose their housing because they can’t afford rent and have to move in with relatives in another part of the city. That means those parents then have to get their kids across town for school every morning. Teachers and school leaders don’t always know about those issues right away because students are too embarrassed to bring them up, she said. But once family engagement specialists know what the problem is, they can connect families with resources like housing assistance or help them get their kids enrolled at a school closer to where they’re staying.
Food insecurity is also a major issue keeping many kids out of school and making it hard for them to learn when they’re there, Plata said. In years past, the district had a few food pantries and distribution sites scattered throughout the city where families could come pick up food once a month. But after seeing the level of need among families, Plata said district leaders decided to find a more strategic solution. So earlier this month, the district opened 12 campus markets where families can come once or twice a week to shop for free. The markets are stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables, meat and dairy, as well as baby food, formula and diapers.
Each week, hundreds of families line up to come shop at the markets, Plata said. The level of interest the district has seen in the markets is an indication of how much financial instability families are dealing with, not only from the lingering fallout from the pandemic, but also from inflation that has driven rent and food prices upward, she said. All those pressures combined make it harder for families to get their kids to school, she said.
“Families are hurting,” she said.
Chronic absenteeism skyrocketed after COVID
Nationwide, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled after the pandemic, climbing to 28% of all students during the 2021-22 school year, according to attendance data compiled for the Associated Press by Thomas Dee, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
The trend has hit some student groups harder than others. Last week, the Associated Press released a series of stories reported in collaboration with other newsrooms showing that attendance was significantly worse among Native American students than their peers, a disparity that existed before the pandemic but has widened since.
High rates of chronic absenteeism can even affect students who come to school every day. When 20% of students at a campus are chronically absent, researchers say it begins to affect the way teachers do their jobs. Because they’re dealing with a different set of students each day, teachers are left with the choice of going back and repeating material while other students wait, or moving on without them and helping them catch up later.
That can take a toll on teachers’ job satisfaction. In a study released last month, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and The Ohio State University found that, when teachers have more students absent, they report feeling less satisfied with their jobs. That trend held true among teachers of all levels of experience.
The number of absences didn’t seem to affect how teachers felt about other aspects of their schools, such as campus climate or their own teaching ability, researchers wrote — just job satisfaction. In a news release, University of Pennsylvania researcher Michael Gottfried said it appeared that high levels of absenteeism detracted from “the satisfaction teachers get from instructing and helping their students learn and grow.”
“This has important implications for the current educational landscape,” Gottfried said. “Addressing absenteeism is critical not only for improving student outcomes, but also for bolstering the teacher workforce, which faces a host of challenges.”
States have made progress on attendance — but not enough
Nationwide, schools have made some progress toward reducing the number of students who miss too many school days, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national school attendance advocacy group. But the job isn’t finished, she said — most school districts and states still have chronic absenteeism rates that are well above pre-pandemic norms, which she says were already too high.
Chang said state departments of education and school districts will need to work together if they want to tackle the problem effectively. School districts, usually working through principals, teachers and other campus staff, offer direct support to families who are struggling to get their kids to school consistently. States can help districts use their own attendance data to see which students need extra support, and develop systems for doing outreach to those families, she said.
Some states are already adopting that strategy, Chang said. She pointed to Colorado, where the state department of education launched a program to offer training and guidance to district leaders on how to get more of their students to show up more often. Last June, the department released a guidebook for school leaders that includes talking points principals can use to get families to understand the importance of sending their kids to school every day, strategies for reaching out to families of chronically absent students and a rundown of the state’s attendance and truancy laws.
The reasons that absentee rates haven’t returned to normal in the years following pandemic school closures are myriad, Chang said. Among them is the fact that the systems districts had in place for working with absent students and their families simply weren’t up to the task after the pandemic, when large percentages of students missed too many days, she said. Before the pandemic, most principals only had a small handful of students with serious attendance issues, and they had a counselor or a school social worker reach out to their families, she said.
That approach might work when only one or two students are chronically absent, Chang said. But when one in five students are chronically absent — as was true at about 100 campuses in Fort Worth ISD during the 2022-23 school year — those staffers can’t keep up.
Chang recommends that districts adopt a tiered approach for dealing with attendance issues. The foundation of that approach needs to incorporate practices that encourage all students to show up to school consistently, she said. Those practices don’t necessarily cost anything, she said. They could be as simple as having teachers make sure students know that they were missed while they were absent. Families trust teachers more than any other school staff member to tell them about attendance issues, she said, so it’s critical that school leaders find ways to integrate those practices into everything else that goes on in the classroom every day.
For students who are at risk of missing too many school days, Chang’s organization recommends districts develop early intervention plans with strategies to head off the situation before it becomes a problem. Those strategies could include counseling programs, mentoring and plans for keeping kids with chronic illnesses engaged. Kids who have already missed more than 10% of school days may need more intensive help, like housing assistance or support from an advocate or social worker.
The worst approach that districts can take is a punitive one, Chang said. In the past, truancy was an issue districts largely handled through the court system. But that approach only works if the only reason students miss too much school is because they don’t want to be there. While that’s true for some students, Chang said it’s far more common for students to be chronically absent because of some barrier like transportation issues, housing instability or a chronic illness.
When school districts respond to chronic absenteeism by threatening families with legal action, they alienate parents and make the problem worse, she said. But when they treat the issue as a problem in need of a solution, they usually find one.
Helping families deal with those barriers often involves partnering with some outside agency or organization, Chang said, since school districts aren’t equipped to deal with issues like housing or access to health care. That means districts need to keep good data on students who are missing too much school, and be willing to share that data with partner organizations, she said.
“This isn’t just for schools alone. This is schools and community partners,” she said. “Because when you have health agencies working with you, when you have transportation agencies, when we can use our data to engage in collective problem solving, we get kids back to school.”
