Too many kids are missing school in Fort Worth. District says it has a plan
Five years after the end of pandemic-related campus closures, school officials in Fort Worth and nationwide are still struggling to get students to show up for class every day.
The number of students in the Fort Worth Independent School District who racked up too many absences ticked up last year, despite efforts to improve attendance. District leaders say they’re expanding those efforts this year, including a messaging campaign designed to get parents to understand the importance of getting their kids to school every day.
Since the pandemic, attendance has been a persistent issue in school districts nationwide. Recent research suggests that the number of students missing too many school days has come down over the past five years, but it still remains well above pre-pandemic norms.
“This is a long-haul problem,” said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Fort Worth ISD faces attendance challenges
Chronic absenteeism, generally defined as when a student misses 10% or more of the school days in a given year, can lead to major challenges for students. Those who miss too many school days are less likely to read on grade level by third grade and more likely to drop out of school before graduating.
Like most districts nationwide, Fort Worth faced serious challenges with attendance during and immediately after the pandemic. During the 2021-22 school year, about a third of the district’s students missed more than 10% of all school days, according to figures released by the district. Those numbers only include students who were enrolled for 80 days or more, meaning they don’t account for students who enrolled in Fort Worth, then switched to homeschooling or transferred to another school a short time later.
During the 2023-24 school year, that number dropped to about 21% — a rate that district officials said was still too high, even if it represented considerable improvement. But instead of continuing to improve, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate ticked back up during the last school year, climbing to about 25%.
The picture is worse at some individual campuses. During a school board meeting last month, Superintendent Karen Molinar noted that at two of the seven campuses the district designated as resource campuses — Western Hills Elementary School and Western Hills Primary School — about a third of students were chronically absent.
High rates of absenteeism represented a common thread among all seven campuses on the list of schools the district is targeting for extra support and resources. In order for performance at those campuses to improve, the district needs to find a solution to that problem, she said. It’s difficult for students to learn when they aren’t in school, she said.
Researchers say a 20% chronic absenteeism rate is a critical threshold for campuses to try to stay below. When one in five students are chronically absent, it begins to affect academic progress for all students, including those with good attendance. That’s because beyond that threshold, teachers are essentially dealing with a new set of students each day. That leaves them with the choice of going back to reteach material they covered in previous class sessions for students who missed it, or moving on and asking students who were absent to get notes from a classmate.
Fort Worth ISD plans messaging campaign on attendance
Priscila Dilley, Fort Worth ISD’s chief of schools, told the Star-Telegram that district leaders plan to launch a campaign around improving attendance in the coming months. The campaign, called Attendance Matters, will include social media videos and other messaging from Molinar and other district leaders about why it’s important for students to be in school every day, she said.
In addition to the messaging campaign, district officials have also set specific campus-level goals for overall attendance and chronic absenteeism rates, Dilley said. Each campus is expected to increase its overall attendance rate by 3 percentage points over last year and reduce its chronic absenteeism rate by 1 point.
District leaders are working with campus principals on ways to make sure students feel welcomed at school and involved in the issue of attendance, Dilley said. In some cases, that means encouraging students to set attendance goals for themselves, she said.
But while district leaders can offer support, she said the largest part of the work will be done by campus administrators and staff. Some campuses have family engagement specialists, special staffers who are tasked with reaching out to families of students who are absent to see what factors are keeping kids out of school. At other campuses, other staffers like data analysts or counselors handle those duties.
The reasons for the uptick in chronic absenteeism are complex and differ from one family to the next. Although it’s been years since school shutdowns ended, the switch to remote learning broke habits and routines that some families have struggled to rebuild, Dilley said. Many families are also still dealing with economic instability that started during the pandemic but hasn’t improved since then, she said. Some families also have transportation issues that make it hard for them to get their kids to school.
School closures also left some families with the impression that attendance was optional, Dilley said. One of the messages that district leaders hope to convey during the campaign is that students will miss out if they aren’t at school every day, she said. Even if families pull their kids out of school for a single day to do something educational, it can still disrupt their progress in class, she said, because they’ll miss material that acts as the building blocks for concepts the class will cover later on. Especially in math, where every new skill builds on all the lessons that came before it, a few absences can add up to a major disruption, she said.
Over the past decade, there’s been a shift in schools nationwide away from treating truancy as a crime to be punished and toward treating it as a problem to be solved. In 2015, Texas lawmakers passed a bill decriminalizing truancy and encouraging districts to adopt policies designed to help families overcome whatever challenges were keeping kids out of school.
Dilley said that approach allows school leaders to get to the root causes of absenteeism, which is almost always more effective than taking punitive measures against parents whose kids are truant.
The district’s attendance goals should be “very, very doable” at the elementary level, Dilley said, but they’re likely to be more of a challenge in middle and high schools. In the early grades, parents have considerably more control over where their kids go and what they do, she said. So a strategy of communicating with parents about why their kids need to be in school every day could go a long way toward improving attendance numbers.
But as students get older, they generally have a greater ability to decide what they do and don’t want to do. Dilley said that means campus leaders have to create school environments that students want to be part of, and help them understand why their time at school is valuable and important for their future success.
Connections can help students make it to school
There’s ample research that suggests that students are less likely to be absent when they feel connected at school. During a webinar last week organized by the education publication Education Week, Robert Balfanz, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education, said those connections can help students overcome modest challenges standing in the way of getting to school.
Balfanz gave the example of a student who wakes up on a rainy morning. That student knows they’ll be outside walking to a bus stop and waiting for their bus for part of the day. If that student doesn’t have an umbrella or a rain coat, the most reasonable thing might be for them to stay home, he said. That may seem especially true if the student doesn’t think anyone would notice if they were gone, or worries other students would make fun of them for being wet. But if that same student believes that their teacher would worry and friends would wonder where they are, or there’s an activity at school they’re excited about, they’re more likely to show up to school wet instead of staying home, he said.
By fostering those kinds of connections at school and making sure students have caring adults there to greet them each day, school leaders can make it more likely that students will decide to come to school even when that isn’t the easiest choice to make, Balfanz said.
“It won’t solve homelessness or food insecurity or really tough challenges,” he said. “But those sort of intermediate barriers, a strong sense of school connectedness helps the kids push through because they see a broader reason why.”
Chronic absences remain a challenge years after COVID
Although the picture has improved, attendance continues to be a challenge for districts across the country in the years after COVID-related school shutdowns. Before the pandemic, the number of students who were chronically absent nationwide generally hovered around 15%, according to data compiled by the American Enterprise Institute. In 2022, that number nearly doubled, climbing to 28%. By last year, it had fallen to 23.5% — a marked improvement over two years prior, but still considerably higher than pre-pandemic norms. Although the picture was worse in low-achieving districts and those with large numbers of poor students, chronic absenteeism grew across all categories of district.
Malkus, the nonprofit’s deputy director for education policy studies, said during an Aug. 21 panel discussion that although chronic absenteeism represents one of the biggest challenges facing school districts, issues with attendance don’t stop there.
Following the pandemic, the institute assembled a working group of education researchers to look at attendance data submitted by states across the country. They found that absenteeism increased after schools reopened across the attendance spectrum — students who were already chronically absent missed even more school than before, and those who had previously had good attendance began to rack up more absences.
Texas lags in school attendance reporting, new report shows
During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill that expanded the state’s list of factors placing students at risk for dropping out to include chronic absenteeism. The bill, which was Senate Bill 991, defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10% of school days or more, mirroring the definition codified in federal law.
Although school officials nationwide have called the post-pandemic uptick in chronic absenteeism a major problem, many states, including Texas, don’t have enough data to give policymakers a clear picture of the scale of the problem, according to a report released Thursday by the nonprofit advocacy group Education Trust.
Among other issues, the report notes that Texas only releases chronic absenteeism numbers every 18 months, as a part of the Texas Academic Performance Reports. School districts are only required to submit their own attendance data to the Texas Education Agency once a year. Absenteeism data for the 2023-24 school year is scheduled to be released next month.
But that’s expected to change soon. Last month, TEA sent guidance to school districts saying that the agency will begin collecting attendance data every six weeks instead of once per year. The change takes effect with the current school year, with the first round of reports due in January.
Jonathan Feinstein, state director of the advocacy group’s Texas branch, said the move to more regular data collection is an encouraging step. When the most recent data is a year and a half old, lawmakers can’t get a clear picture of the challenges districts are facing during the two-year legislative cycle in which they’re serving, he said. More regular, updated data would give legislators better insight into the situation as it currently exists, he said.
When students are absent, they can’t benefit from the instruction they’re supposed to receive at school, Feinstein said, and if they miss too many days, their academic performance will suffer because of it. But with better data, he said, education leaders and policymakers can get a clearer picture of the problem and find ways to get ahead of it.
