Hooky has become a mess in America’s public school classrooms.
A staggering 14.7 million public school children — about 30 percent of all students — were chronically absent last school year, leaving districts across the country scrambling to get students back into their buildings.
According to a study released by Attendance Works, 66% of all public school children from California to New York attended schools with high or extreme levels of chronic absenteeism last year — defined as missing at least 10 percent of the academic year.
That amounts to at least 18 days of school absences, with many blaming the difficulty of adjusting back to face-to-face learning following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When chronic absenteeism reaches high levels, the educational experience of peers, not just those who frequently miss school, is also affected,” says Attendance Works.
A total of 43% of schools had at least 30% of children chronically absent during the 2021-2022 school year — up from just 14% in 2017-2018.
Almost 15 million public school children missed at least 18 days of school during the 2021-2022 school year. SOPA/LightRocket image via Getty Images
“The long-term consequences of not going to school are very detrimental. And the outbreak really made things worse and for more students,” Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, previously said.
Soaring absenteeism, the study says, is contributing to learning loss at an alarming rate among American public school children already damaged by school closures and disrupted education during the pandemic.
In New York state, about 950,000 students across all grades were chronically absent in the 2021-2022 academic year, according to figures from Ed Data Express.
California saw 1.9 million students miss at least 18 school days, while Texas had 1.5 million.
Florida had 30 percent of children, about 950,000, chronically absent last year.
“National assessment data for 2022 show this increase in chronic absenteeism is associated with significant declines in student achievement and threatens efforts to recover from the epidemic,” the Attendance Work study asserts.
The crisis — sparked in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic — has prompted one Florida school district to add several four-day weekends to the academic calendar to help curb absenteeism.
Schools are scrambling to deal with the crisis. NurPhoto via Getty Images
“The primary objective of this modified schedule is to encourage families to take advantage of this planned time off for family travel, vacations and appointments, while ensuring that students attend school consistently during scheduled contact days,” Pasco County education officials said last week.
That sad figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of children who stopped going to school outright during COVID-19 and never re-enrolled.
Public schools have been plagued by a host of problems since the pandemic, including plummeting teacher shortages and retention rates, as well as declining enrollment.
Faced with this challenge, more than 900 public school districts across the country have introduced the 4-day school week, and the number continues to grow.
The principal of West Pensacola Elementary School in Florida, Christine Baker, said some of the reasons children miss school include illness, lack of parental support or students simply choosing not to go.
He said his staff tries to keep children in school through phone calls, meetings with parents and in some cases counseling.
He also said he makes sure to recognize students with high attendance, telling the local ABC news channel: “I know it makes kids feel good when they’re in school because they understand when they’re missing out,” Baker said.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
