When the state school report cards drop each fall, especially now in this post-COVID era, we focus heavily on test scores in reading and math. Clearly there was a fall-off in those scores as the tumult of the pandemic and the ensuing, rapid, and basically unplanned shift to remote learning had real impact.
This week though, the Landmark’s Bob Skolnik takes a hard look at another worrisome, and not unrelated, outcome from COVID on our local schools, and schools across the state. That is chronic absenteeism. Defined as missing 10% or more of school days in a year, students missing classes has just about doubled in our local elementary and high schools.
At Riverside Brookfield High School, absenteeism has leveled off over the past two years. But it has leveled off at 19%, just shy of double the rate of 11% in the pre-pandemic 2017-2018 school year.
As we hopscotch across neighborhoods covered by the Landmark, the numbers vary a bit but are, in every district, cause for concern. The school board president at Leyden Township High School recently called the levels of absenteeism “outrageous.”
Educators point to a range of causes for increased absenteeism, all of them related to COVID. Some say the two years of largely remote learning broke the habit and expectation of some families and students that attending class most every day was central to learning. A 2022 change in state law to permit students to miss up to five school sessions a year as “mental health days,” reflects the stunning anxiety levels students and adults increasingly report.
Martha Ryan-Toye, superintendent at Riverside’s District 96 elementary schools, says her district is working to overcome COVID definitions of what level of illness would keep a kid home from school. During COVID, schools urged parents to keep students home at any sign of a cold.
“We were saying [during the pandemic] no, a sniffle is not even OK, a sneeze is not OK. You know what? A sniffle and a sneeze is OK,” said Ryan-Toye. That change in messaging is a hard one to navigate, she says.
Shifting to a message that being in class just about every day is critical is what educators are working to communicate. Efforts to be more responsive to chronic absenteeism are underway. More calls to homes, more tracking by deans and other administrators to keep students from slipping away are taking hold.
The comeback may be complicated as the wider culture shifts to more remote working.
But that is not an outcome we believe most educators, parents — or students — would like to return to.