The percentage of Illinois students who are “chronically absent” -- meaning they miss more than 10% of the school year -- skyrocketed during the early pandemic. It’s fallen a bit since, but rates are still far higher than pre-COVID.
Sonia Navarro is asking students where they’re supposed to be, while walking down the hallway at Constance Lane Elementary School in Rockford.
It’s her job to make sure kids are getting to class. It’s her first year as an attendance specialist. This year, for the first time, every Rockford school has one.
So, as much time as she spends with the kids, getting students to school means working with their parents -- and helping them understand how attendance affects their child’s success.
“When a child has such poor attendance," she said, "it makes it difficult to provide them with the interventions and the resources here."
Navarro calls it a snowball effect: kids miss school, they fall behind on assignments, they get frustrated, they start acting out and then don’t want to come to school.
It can be difficult to break that cycle, but she says helping students often starts with helping their parents. They’ve got a Google Map that shows all of the community resources in the area like laundromats and food pantries. They can get some families gas cards. But, for most parents, she says the biggest challenge is transportation.
“They're working two to three jobs," said Navarro, "and those hours between getting them on the bus or getting them to school. I mean, the job is the priority, which, as a parent, I can understand."
So, they’ve started a tutoring program before school, which provides transportation. So far, they’ve had over 100 students get involved. And they’ve connected families with after-school programs, which she says has helped a lot too.
She also tries to motivate her students.
“If we're tardy all the time," she said, "how about we try to get on that bus so we're not tardy. We'll work that week. We could try to do McDonald's, if they like McDonald's."
It seems to be working. RPS chief of schools Morgan Gallagher says they’ve seen chronic absence rates fall significantly across the district, particularly at elementary schools.
“Constance Lane," he said, "went from this time last year being 48% to 21% as of this week."
It’s a bit more complicated at the high schools, where attendance can be less within a parent’s control.
Back in 2022, at its worst, about 61% of RPS students were chronically absent. They cut it down to 46% last year. But it’s still persistently higher than pre-COVID levels.
Gallagher says that impacts academic achievement too.
“We're making the right gains," he said, "but chronic absenteeism is the ceiling."
He says you can only improve graduation rates or literacy levels so much if a large portion of the district is chronically not going to school. That’s one of the reasons they added attendance specialists at every school.
This is not just a Rockford problem. At all kinds of districts, chronic absenteeism has settled from the highest COVID peaks to a new normal that’s still much higher than before.
Where Rockford has 27,000 students, the Steward Elementary School District has 56.
Nearly 20% of those students were chronically absent last year. In 2018, it was under 2%. Now, either way, with a school that small, those changes represent just a few students.
And their solutions are going to be much different than in a district like Rockford.
Steven Simpson is Steward’s superintendent. He feels like part of it is that families are choosing to keep their kids at home longer when they’re sick. But, that’s not all. As COVID-era upheaval caused stress and anxiety for many teachers and students. They adopted a social emotional learning curriculum for the first time in the district's history.
“We wanted to give our faculty and our students a common language for talking about feelings," said Simpson. "And we wanted to give our faculty and our students a common language for talking about relational issues like conflict and conflict resolution.”
He hopes it helps make school feel more welcoming, so students are less likely to avoid it.
Steve Wilder is the Superintendent at Sycamore, a middle-sized district between Steward and Rockford. He says they’ve committed to mental health support as well, and that the pandemic opened their eyes to the real anxiety many of their students face.
Wilder says, even though they’re on the right track, chronic absenteeism isn’t a problem that’s going away any time soon.
“My gut is that that drop, that decline, might take a little bit longer than we'd like," he said. "It might be much more gradual, but I don't know that we'll ever get back to the rates that we were at pre-COVID.”
Back at Constance Lane, Navarro says they’re taking more time to show families they can help, and also connect with them in fun ways. She says they just held a family dance for Valentine’s Day, complete with pizza and a DJ.
And schools everywhere will keep trying to convey the importance of attendance, and how if you’re not in school, it makes it pretty hard to learn.
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