Chalkbeat

Bill would make kindergarten mandatory for Michigan children

2024-03-12T22:22:12+00:00

Lawmakers want to make kindergarten attendance mandatory in Michigan to improve academic achievement — and the head of the state’s largest district says such a requirement could also help address chronic absenteeism.

Sen. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat from Livonia who introduced a bill to make kindergarten mandatory, said it’s necessary “if we’re serious about improving academics.”

Students in the state currently don’t have to attend school until first grade, though many do attend kindergarten and most districts offer it.

Detroit school Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, who supports the legislation, said Tuesday during a legislative hearing that requiring kindergarten will improve attendance and student academic outcomes.

Vitti said more than 70% of the kindergarten students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District last year were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days in the school year. The rates, he said, were lower for first, second, and third grades.

“We want to start as early as possible, creating a culture and an expectation that school is important every day,” Vitti said.

The district has long struggled with chronic absenteeism. During the 2021-22 school year, 77% of the students were chronically absent, in part because of quarantining rules during the pandemic. That rate improved to 66% during the 2022-23 school year.

Vitti pointed out that at the beginning of the school year, about 6% of kindergarten students typically perform at or above grade level on district tests. That number soars to 58% by the end of the year.

“We actually believe that the 58% number would be higher if kindergarten was mandatory. It just sets the stage and the expectations the right way.”

Polehanki, who chairs the education committee, said the impetus of her bill had been to create a continuum from preschool through postsecondary education. She said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s push to provide free preschool for all, regardless of income, is an important initiative. But she said in order to do that, kindergarten must not be optional.

After hearing from Vitti, she said the bill would address academic achievement, but also “do quite a bit to remedy” chronic absenteeism in kindergarten. She said she wants lawmakers to have a broader discussion about addressing chronic absenteeism. Nearly a third of the students in the state were considered chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year.

Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat from Bay City, said the kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate in Detroit “is the most compelling case to say this is the right thing to do.”

Sheryl Kennedy, legislative liaison for the Michigan Department of Education, said the MDE supports making kindergarten mandatory. But she said the department would like to see some changes, such as funding to help districts that might see increased costs from the requirement. She said 17 states and the District of Columbia already have mandatory kindergarten laws.

There was also a back-and-forth between Kennedy and Sen. John Damoose, a Republican from Harbor Springs over language in a slide that accompanied her presentation that said “Demonstrated enrollment in private, parochial, charter, or home school meets the requirements of this bill.”

Damoose questioned the home school language, asking “Can you describe what demonstrated enrollment looks like especially if we’re talking about home schools?”

In Michigan, home-schooled children aren’t required to register with the state, so officials have no idea how many kids are being educated at home. There has been considerable debate recently because State Superintendent Michael Rice and some lawmakers have called on changing the law to require parents who home-school their children to register with the state.

Polehanki said the intent of the legislation is not to demonstrate enrollment among home-schoolers.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

In their words: The students, teachers, and advocates we heard from in 2023

2023-12-19T21:22:56+00:00

At Chalkbeat Detroit, we take seriously our mission to inform readers about efforts to improve public education in Michigan and explain how inequities create barriers to learning.

Crucial to our work is ensuring that the voices of the people who have the most at stake — students, parents, advocates, teachers, and other school staff — are front and center.

That’s part of our regular reporting. But we also elevate these voices with special features, such as first-person essays, How I Teach features, interview Q&As, and other formats.

As we wrap up 2023, we’re looking back at some of the voices we showcased over the last 12 months. Below, you’ll see highlights of those pieces.

And as always, if you have a story you’d like to share, or know of a voice that deserves to be heard, please reach out to us at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Confronting racial violence with tenderness

I am required to teach Abraham Lincoln and how he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but not about the felony disenfranchisement that keeps many of my students’ families from experiencing true freedom.
N’Kengé Robertson

Detroit teacher N’Kengé Robertson tackled issues of racial violence and identity in this first-person piece. She explains that learning materials often leave out “critical conversations of race, gender, religion, language, and sexuality,” and fail to capture the lived experiences of students they’re supposed to reach. To address that, she said, she worked with her high school students to “improve the situation by compiling new resources, reshaping our lessons, and moving away from Eurocentric narratives in our classroom.”

Detroit students shed light on the need for self-love, inner peace

The pandemic has done a number on me. I don’t and can’t go anywhere, can’t sleep some nights, always see the negative before the positive, and I doubt almost everything and everyone around me.
TaMyra Smith

Detroit teen TaMyra Smith wrote about mental health and depression as part of Local Circles, a nonprofit that works with youth to research issues that are important to them.

In February, we published excerpts of student-written pieces about mental health that shed light on some of the post-pandemic struggles students are facing. The writing was part of a project of an organization called Local Circles. The participants included one student who said she struggled with depression, and another who urged students to seek help when they need it. For the most part, they agreed that self-love and inner peace are important for their healing. There is still widespread concern about the mental health challenges of students who are grappling with the after-effects of the pandemic. Adults trying to address this must listen to what young people are saying they need.

A Detroit man’s passion for getting kids to school every day

It was heartbreaking to me to see these children squandering an opportunity that later in life they’ll have to pay to get.
Larry Simmons

Chronic absenteeism has been a major storyline for Chalkbeat Detroit for more than a year. We’ve given readers a close-up view of one Detroit school’s efforts to get students to school regularly, the role community agencies have played, and barriers to improving attendance, such as spotty transportation and a state policy that punishes the parents of chronically absent students. In this interview Q&A, retired pastor Larry Simmons talked about what drove his years-long effort to help get kids in school regularly, and what it felt like to see children walking around his neighborhood when they should have been in school.

Looking at the world through a similar lens at Michigan camp

Detroit teen Torrance Johnson wrote a first-person essay about attending a Michigan camp for children with muscular dystrophy.

I rejoice in thoughts that my lost friends are running around happy and alive in the afterlife; at the same time, my heart aches, because they are no longer by my side.
Torrance Johnson

Detroit teen Torrance Johnson wrote a first-person piece, a version of which was initially published by the Detroit Writing Room, about how a camp in Lexington, Michigan, for children with muscular dystrophy changed his life. Going to this camp each year gave him an opportunity to be around other children like him who have muscular dystrophy. He wrote of the joys that brought, but also the sadness of losing friends.

Adults failed her when she was a kid. Now she is a watchdog for children.

No adults ever took the time to ask what was behind my surface-level behavioral issues … despite best practices and what research tells us about kids who “act up.”
Hannah Dellinger

Chalkbeat Detroit reporter Hannah Dellinger wrote a first-person essay about overcoming childhood trauma.

Chalkbeat Detroit reporter Hannah Dellinger, who joined our team in June, wrote an intensely personal essay about her experiences overcoming trauma. The sexual abuse she suffered as a young child led to behavior problems in school — signs of the trauma that adults ignored. Hannah’s piece illustrates not only the importance of having school staff trained to meet the needs of students struggling with trauma, but also how important it is for adults to be able to act on telltale signs that a student isn’t just acting out, but perhaps exhibiting the effects of trauma.

This Detroit teacher’s mission: Bring back school libraries

I really need to impress and stress how important going to school is and the work that students do there, not only because they’re young and they’re learning, but also because it has long-term ramifications for their life. The absence of libraries is an atrocity.
Josie Silver

Josie Silver teaches early elementary grades in the Detroit school district, and one thing she’s passionate about is equipping her children with books that will fuel their love of learning. Chalkbeat highlighted Silver as part of its regular How I Teach column, in part because the educator had been named a Michigan Collaborative Teacher Leader. Silver talked about the need for school libraries, and the challenges she has faced teaching students who are still struggling to rebound academically from the pandemic.

Detroit student who fought for ‘right to literacy’ is still in the fight

We obligate children to go to schools, but we don’t obligate schools to teach.
Jamarria Hall

Jamarria Hall was the lead plaintiff in the historic lawsuit that claimed state officials had deprived Detroit students of a right to literacy.

Jamarria Hall was the face of the historic 2016 “right to read” lawsuit that argued state officials failed to provide a basic reading education when they oversaw the Detroit school district between 2009 and 2016 under emergency management. Hall was a high school student when that lawsuit was filed, and became the lead plaintiff. Now 23, he told Chalkbeat in this interview that he sees the $94 million the state allocated this year to the district — part of a 2021 settlement of the case — as a way for young people to have a say in their future.

Michigan’s History Teacher of the Year helps educators combat racist myths

The world is such a fascinating place. Each student has passion and curiosity inside them, and I am so honored whenever I can play a small part in igniting these things.
Matt Vriesman

Teacher Matt Vriesman was named Michigan History Teacher of the Year.

In 2020, as the nation was undergoing a racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, an administrator asked social studies teacher Matt Vriesman to share resources with other teachers. Vriesman had already adapted his own classroom lessons after realizing that state standards don’t always provide an accurate view of race, slavery, and injustice. That request turned into something bigger than his East Kentwood High School building. Vriesman, whom Chalkbeat featured in a How I Teach piece after he was named Michigan History Teacher of the Year, created a website that provides antiracism resources for Advanced Placement teachers across the nation. This work is important to Vriesman, who teaches at one of the most diverse schools in the state. “We are always looking for new ways to bring in the knowledge and experience of our students into the classroom,” he said. “It makes world history so much more ‘real’ for students.”

Michigan’s top teacher wants more focus on mental health, learning recovery

Many children are dealing with mental health issues themselves or dealing with the mental health issue of a parent or caregiver. In Michigan, we need to put as much time, resources, and funding into meeting the students’ mental needs as we do their physical and educational needs.
Candice Jackson

Detroit educator Candice Jackson was named Michigan Teacher of the Year.

Soon after being named Michigan’s Teacher of the Year, Candice Jackson used her new platform to push for schools to address the academic and mental health needs that have lingered as schools attempt to help students recover from the pandemic. Williams, the first Detroit district teacher to be recognized as the state’s top teacher since the 2006-07 school year, told Chalkbeat that students need counseling services and social-emotional learning programs to get back on track. That will pay off academically, she said, because stronger mental health “enhances academic performance, supports overall well-being, enables early interventions, and has short-term and long-term positive outcomes for students.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

How Detroit community groups are helping schools chip away at chronic absenteeism

2023-11-29T00:44:26+00:00

Sixth grader Ke’Von Thomas and a group of classmates at Detroit’s Durfee Elementary-Middle School sat around a cafeteria table one day last month, running through a list of 10 back-to-school tips and vying to see who had completed the most.

“Early to bed, early to rise,” was the first tip. Others included “establish a routine,” “organize your backpack,” and “limit screen time.”

Ke’Von, 11, said he had accomplished three tips since the school year started, and surveyed the others. “I did No. 1. You did No. 2,” he told one of the other boys. “Who else did No. 2?”

Across from him, seventh grader Miguel Perkins said he had followed five of the tips.

The list and the exercise came from The Konnection, a community group that’s working with Detroit schools to help motivate students to show up for school and “move the needle” on chronic absenteeism. Founder Sharnese Marshall uses the lesson early in the school year to reinforce positive attendance and academic habits with 20 middle school students who participate in a biweekly after-school program at Durfee.

In a city with sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism — meaning students who miss 18 school days a year or more — community groups like The Konnection have taken on some of the work of trying to improve student attendance. Churches, after-school programs, health centers, and other groups have provided services such as driving students to and from school, conducting home visits and phone calls, and building connections with families.

These groups don’t necessarily have the resources to attack what experts agree is the root cause of chronic absenteeism: Detroit’s widespread poverty, whose ripple effects include health problems, housing instability, and job barriers. So it’s hard to determine what impact they’re having on the broader problem.

Nonetheless, they have become an essential complement to the efforts by school officials and education advocates to improve attendance. With initiatives targeted at specific schools, neighborhoods, or family needs, they’re chipping away at a problem that has long undermined efforts to improve student achievement. And school leaders and district officials are embracing some of their efforts and strategies as part of their approach to reducing chronic absenteeism citywide.

Sarah Lenhoff, a Wayne State University education professor whose research includes studies of student attendance, says there’s room for still more community groups and local agencies to get involved at the root-cause level.

“Poverty alleviation, employment, job training, housing stability — these are major factors in whether kids can get to school,” Lenhoff said. “Outside organizations that are working on those issues, even if it’s not connected to the school system, could also make a difference.”

Ke’Von Thomas, 11, center, raises his hand during a wrap-up session during Konnection Klub at Detroit's Durfee Elementary-Middle School on Oct. 19.

DPSCD attendance plan evolves

Community groups have been working with Detroit school communities on absenteeism for more than a decade. But the Detroit Public Schools Community District formalized and standardized their role in attendance interventions beginning in 2018-19, a couple of years after the district emerged from state control.

Related: Detroit community groups have a long record of attendance work

That year, DPSCD outlined a plan that called for a holistic approach to improving attendance through wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnerships with community organizations. The plan fell in line with growing consensus among advocates and national experts that districts should collaborate with local partners to support school-based attendance interventions.

Partly as a result of that plan, DPSCD reduced its chronic absenteeism rate to 62% at the end of 2018-19, from 70% the previous year.

The pandemic not only erased that progress, but raised the urgency of improving attendance: If students didn’t show up for class, they would struggle to recover what they lost academically during a year or more of online schooling.

And the effects of excessive absenteeism linger for years, research shows. Students who miss a lot of school are likely to struggle to stay on top of classwork, perform worse on standardized tests, and are more likely to drop out. Chronically absent students are also likely to miss out on high-dosage tutoring and other interventions school systems have prioritized in recent years to counter learning loss.

A 2022 study by the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research found that the district’s 2018-19 attendance plan, while showing early success, “only partially addressed chronic absenteeism as an ecological issue, implicitly downplaying structural and material barriers that families faced.”

It’s those systemic issues, Lenhoff said, that require better coordination between the district and city agencies and social services organizations, such as welfare and employment programs, and housing organizations.

She points to FosterEd Arizona, a child welfare program that coordinated with schools to improve attendance among foster youth, as well as a multiyear attendance effort in New York City that collaborated with city social service agencies. In both cases, school attendance data guided the implementation of interventions.

“There’s potential to really make a difference if we got more groups involved in the community development space who are working on housing, poverty, and unemployment, to be thinking about how might we track the attendance of the families that we’re working with and demonstrate that work like this could be beneficial,” Lenhoff said.

DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said that because of federal education privacy laws, the district has to work within some limits on how much information it can share with outside social service groups. It does share attendance data with some community groups that provide programming for students, such as City Year and Communities in Schools, he said.

But that’s not possible for all groups without getting permission from individual families or through clearance. It is unclear how the Arizona and New York programs have been able to share attendance data with social service agencies.

“We could envision our district portal system providing access to partners so they can respond to negative attendance trends,” Vitti said. “However, this would take signoff from families and significant upgrades to the system we are building now. This would be impossible without a robust technology system. You cannot rely on spreadsheets to make this work.”

Middle school students make bracelets after completing their homework during Konnection Klub at Detroit's Durfee Elementary-Middle School.

Since the start of the pandemic, DPSCD officials have rapidly expanded their wraparound services for some of the most marginalized families, embracing the kinds of projects that community groups have been tackling in specific communities.

With the help of $4.5 million in philanthropic donations, DPSCD is launching 12 school-based health hubs across the city over the next several years to address the lack of student access to health care, a major barrier to consistent attendance.

At the health hubs, students, families, and community members can get physical, mental, and dental health services through current partnerships with Henry Ford Health and Ascension. They also have access to food pantry items and legal support.

One of the first few health hubs opening this year is at Durfee and Central High School, which share a building in the city’s Dexter-Linwood neighborhood. At the sites that are already open, families have been making health appointments and picking up health essentials like toilet paper, soap, and toothbrushes.

“We believe in whole child commitment,” Alycia Meriweather, DPSCD deputy superintendent of external partnerships and innovation, said at a recent community meeting on the new initiative.

The Konnection responds to lack of basic supplies

Durfee and Central have among the highest absenteeism rates within DPSCD: 82% at Durfee last year, and 91% at Central. It’s why Marshall and The Konnection began working there as far back as 2020.

Some students told Marshall they were not showing up to school because they didn’t have personal hygiene products or clean clothes. Others said school is boring, or they’re behind on work and don’t have the support to catch up.

On top of those challenges, in-school factors such as student-teacher relationships, bullying and safety concerns also create barriers to attendance.

Marshall responded to those needs by throwing quarterly attendance celebrations at Durfee, and setting up a school-based resource closet at Central, stocked with supplies students need to feel comfortable coming to school.

In the past year, the program’s closet served 275 high school students.

“Bullying is a real thing,” Marshall said. “Kids are bullied every single day because they don’t have the nicest clothes, or because they don’t smell the freshest.”

Enrichment programs help students stay motivated

They also launched the after-school Konnection Klub at Durfee, with enrichment programs that make coming to school more engaging. Several studies find that student participation in out-of-school programs can improve regular school attendance, encouraging students to show up to class.

This year, The Konnection is collaborating with local entrepreneurs and colleges to help students explore career opportunities in culinary arts, podcasting, fashion design, and transit services. Students in the after-school program also receive mentoring from community volunteers, practice social-emotional learning activities, and attend field trips to city sports and holiday events.

Mikaela Pugh, left, and The Konnection founder and CEO Sharnese Marshall work through a budget activity put on by Laurie Rivetto of Michigan State University Extension at Durfee.

“Schools may be supporting (students) academically,” Marshall said, “but enrichment programs can help you mentally and emotionally. They can help you in other ways that other partners can’t.”

Marshall worked with Durfee’s attendance agent and teachers to select participants who could most benefit from the program’s offering. They sought a mix of students who are chronically absent and those who are not.

“We want the students who are not there to feel supported by the leaders of the school who are showing up and who do understand the assignments,” she said. “We try to find a couple in each grade who are great students and do have support at home so that they’re able to pull the other kids up.”

Ke’Von (pronounced “kay-vaughn”), one of the students with strong grades and near-perfect attendance, had been eager to join the program since last year, when he was in fifth grade.

Leona Wright, an eighth grader at Durfee, was one of the students who needed the added support. She has routinely missed school on Mondays and Fridays this year, days her mother, Shavonne Jones, has to work late.

Jones works as a cook in a nursing home in Bloomfield Hills, about a 30-minute drive from Durfee. She says that between her and her fiancé's work schedules, it has been difficult to consistently get Leona to school on days they are both working.

“On Mondays, I have to be at work at 6 in the morning,” she said. “Then on Fridays, I go to work at 10:30, so I can take her to school but I won’t be able to pick her back up from school.”

Jones added: “There’s just a lot of difficulties with that. My job is understanding sometimes, but most jobs don’t want you to leave like that during the day.”

The family lives outside of the school’s boundary for yellow bus transportation as well, and Jones isn’t comfortable with her daughter riding the city bus.

One week in November, Leona was sick with the flu, prompting Jones to stay home from work to take care of her.

Marshall has sought out different solutions to some students’ transportation barriers, offering families Uber gift cards, asking volunteers to offer rides, or directing families to resources already available via the district, such as free bus passes.

Running the after-school program until 5:30, she added, provides some flexibility to families who can’t make the regular afternoon pickup time.

Eight grader Leona Wright, 13, works on a computer program during Konnection Klub at Durfee.

“It definitely helps the parents who are working, because a lot of times the kids are going home by themselves or they’re just hanging out in school,” Marshall said.

Leona says she’d rather be at school than at home. Prior to this year, she was homeschooled for four years and missed connecting with other students in person. Back at Durfee, she’s excited about trying out for the school’s cheer team and studying math, science, and social studies.

And she was eager to join The Konnection. “I wanted to make friends and experience my life and go on field trips,” she said.

The Konnection hopes to extend its reach

With a small team, Marshall has leaned on the support of roughly 150 volunteers in the past year to operate the resource closet, mentor students, and host attendance celebrations. She’s hoping The Konnection’s efforts can make more of a difference at Durfee. Last year’s chronic absenteeism rate was down 12 percentage points from the previous year, mirroring a decline across the district as quarantine restrictions eased.

“It’s still very high, but we’re making strides to be able to get that down,” she said.

She wants to see the program reengage younger students who may already feel disenchanted with school, or who might have lacked access to the resources, instruction, and extracurriculars the program provides.

In addition to attendance rates, The Konnection also tracks grade improvements, personal confidence, and “students’ desire to want to come to school.”

In a survey at the end of 2022-23, she added, 95% of club participants said they felt more motivated to attend school after being in the program.

This year, Marshall’s team is looking to reach at least 1,000 students across all its programs. They’re in the process of setting up a second resource closet at Durfee, and strengthening their relationships with community members outside the school.

The ultimate goal is still the same, she said: that “100% of our students will be on track in terms of attendance.”

“We’re trying to just bridge the gap where we can,” she said. “Until the policies are changed in order to ensure that our kids and our families are really taken care of and they’re not left out, the same issues will continue to perpetuate.”

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit community groups have a long record of attendance work

2023-11-28T23:30:00+00:00

Community groups have been working with Detroit school communities on absenteeism for more than a decade. Despite their limited staff and budgets, they help fill gaps in the strategies schools and the district use to improve student attendance, focusing on specific barriers, such as inconsistent transportation, food insecurity, and lack of clean clothes.

Every School Day Counts, a coalition of community organizations and schools across the city, has been at it since 2012. Early on, Rev. Larry Simmons and other church leaders involved in the group volunteered to drive students to and from school.

Lawrence Hood partnered with the group on transportation services when he was principal at Detroit Innovation Academy, a charter school on the city’s west side.

“We had scholars that were missing 10 days before the second quarter even began,” Hood recalled. Later on, he added, the school recruited workers from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to provide medical and dental services to families who regularly missed school for appointments.

From 2012 to 2014, when Hood ran Detroit Innovation Academy, the chronic absenteeism rate declined by about five percentage points, to 51.5%.

Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, a nonprofit based in Southwest Detroit, partnered with area schools to offer a range of after-school programs, including gymnastics, cooking, gardening, and art classes, said Alejandra Gomez, an education director at UNI. The group is now part of Every School Day Counts.

UNI spent years tracking attendance data across its after-school and youth employment programs and now has a team of 10 AmeriCorps members mentoring chronically absent students and assisting families in finding resources.

“Many of the parents have shared that it’s really difficult for them to pick up their kids right after school since they’re working, and so being able to have the opportunity to be able to pick them up a little bit later has been good for them,” Gomez said.

John Broad, founder of Helping Kids Go To School, sought out volunteers from Detroit-area churches to work as “attendance coaches,” mentoring families struggling to get their kids to school. The strategy, he said, drew inspiration from a similar concept in Hawaii.

From 2019 to 2021, the mentoring program helped Mackenzie Elementary-Middle School reduce its chronic absenteeism rate from 70% to 47.7%.

The following year, though, the rate surged to 84%, amid strict quarantine requirements. Broad said the group is eager to dig deeper into its work at Mackenzie and other schools, but has struggled recently to scale its volunteer staff.

“We may end up having to pay coaches a small stipend to help and maybe shorten hours to eight hours a week,” he said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Chronic absenteeism in Michigan schools drops, but still exceeds pre-pandemic levels

2023-10-10T20:01:34+00:00

Chronic absenteeism in Michigan schools is declining, but new data released Tuesday show nearly a third of students in public schools are missing too much school, and the rate is still higher than it was before the pandemic.

During the 2022-23 school year, 30.8% of Michigan students were chronically absent, down from 38.5% the previous year.

Before the pandemic, the rate was 19.7%.

“We’re moving in the right direction, but we’re not where we need to be,” Judy Pritchett, a member of the State Board of Education, said during a presentation on the data at a meeting Tuesday. “I’m not sure we were where we needed to be prior to the pandemic.”

Michigan had one of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in 2021-22.

Pamela Pugh, the board president, said Michigan’s rank is tied to many systemic issues.

“We can’t look at that statistic without looking at our statistics around Michigan being at the bottom of the 50 states in how our schools are funded equitably in the state, but also our building infrastructure,” she said. “Would you want to go to a home where roofs are leaking, where there are rodents in the schools, where they don’t have heat in the winter and air in the summer?”

The Detroit Public Schools Community District, which has long struggled with high rates of chronic absenteeism, saw its percentage improve to 66.11%, from 76.73%. The improvement was better than what the district reported in July. In the 2018-19 school year, the rate was 62.1%.

In Michigan, a student is chronically absent if they miss 18 days during the 180-day school year.

Chronic absenteeism rates among certain demographic groups were significantly higher than the statewide average of 30.8%, including students experiencing homelessness, at 60.1%; students from families considered to be “economically disadvantaged,” at 41.8%; students with disabilities, at 39.5%; and Black students at 53.1%.

State Superintendent Michael Rice pointed out during the presentation that for most of these vulnerable student groups, the disparities narrowed during the 2022-23 school year from the previous year.

The chronic absenteeism rate among students experiencing homelessness, for example, was down from 66.8% in 2021-22, a nearly 7-point drop. Similarly, the rate among students from economically disadvantaged families decreased by 8.6 points. Rates for students with disabilities and Black students also significantly decreased.

Chronic absence rarely boils down to a student’s choice to skip school, experts say. Far more often, it reflects economic challenges such as a lack of access to health care, employment opportunities, affordable housing, reliable transportation, or child care. The problem is especially acute in Detroit and other cities with high child poverty rates.

Many districts saw a surge in chronic absenteeism during the pandemic, in part because quarantine rules required students who had COVID or contact with someone with COVID to miss multiple days of school.

“As the pandemic waned, attendance rates improved, and chronic absenteeism declined significantly,” Rice said in a statement. “That said, we have a great deal of work still to do in our local schools on this important, multi-faceted issue.”

Republican board member Nikki Snyder agreed that the progress hasn’t been enough, and pointed to the high cost of absenteeism. “The most important factor in dropping out is absenteeism,” she said. “So, it’s not even just GPA. We lose these kids altogether.”

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

How chronic absenteeism became part of this Detroit pastor’s mission

2023-09-22T19:17:32+00:00

Larry Simmons was troubled by what he saw outside the Detroit church where he was a pastor: School-age children were strolling the streets of the city’s Brightmoor neighborhood at times when they should have been in school.

That was over a decade ago, and it opened Simmons’ eyes to a problem that was already massive in Detroit: the epidemic of student absenteeism. In the 2012-13 school year, 68% of students in the Detroit school district were flagged as chronically absent, which at the time meant that they missed 10 or more days in a year.

The sight of youth skipping school was “heartbreaking” for the longtime pastor and community advocate, who saw the pattern of absences as a barrier to greater social and economic mobility for Black Detroiters.

Simmons had already been a familiar figure in Brightmoor and Detroit, having served as a political director for Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young, and a pastor of Baber Memorial A.M.E. Church.

But in the next decade, Simmons made encouraging school attendance one of his biggest priorities. He became a founding member of Every School Day Counts Detroit, a coalition of community organizations and schools across the city focused on chronic absenteeism. His work has allowed him to become heavily involved in the attendance efforts at Gompers Elementary-Middle School and other schools in the Brightmoor and Cody Rouge areas.

Larry Simmons has long been a familiar figure in Brightmoor and Detroit as a pastor and former political director for the city’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young.

He retired from Baber last fall but still leads Brightmoor Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses on revitalization efforts in the neighborhood.

Years after the initial encounter outside his church, student absenteeism remains at crisis levels, and not just in Detroit. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, chronic absenteeism — which is now nationally defined as missing 10% of school days or more — has skyrocketed in numerous states, with high-poverty school districts seeing higher rates.

In 2021-22, Michigan had one of the highest absenteeism rates in the nation: nearly 39%, compared with 19% in 2018-19, the last full school year before the pandemic struck.

The pandemic also derailed the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s progress in reducing absenteeism. After easing to 54% in 2019-20, chronic absenteeism rocketed to 77% in 2021-22. The rate was down to 68% last year, as the district stepped up its attendance efforts, but that still means more than two-thirds of DPSCD students missed 18 or more days of school.

“The schools alone cannot solve chronic absence,” Simmons said in an interview with Chalkbeat.

“It is measured in school. It is counted in school,” he said, but “it does not start and will not be solved alone in school.”

Simmons talked about the challenges and successes of his early grassroots efforts to address chronic absenteeism, the systemic issues that impede student attendance, and where he wants more help to solve the issue.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you first recognize student absenteeism as a problem in Detroit?

I didn’t become aware of attendance really as a challenge until I was a pastor at Baber, and we would see kids during the day who’d be out of school. They would just be walking around in the neighborhood. And I remember at community meetings, folks would talk about “Why are there kids all out on the street like this?” That’s what led us to pay attention to school attendance.

We eventually learned about chronic absenteeism through our research with (Detroit education advocacy group) 482Forward. We learned about this from Hedy Chang at Attendance Works and Robert Balfanz from Johns Hopkins University.

And we began to organize around this. And ultimately, Every School Days Counts emerged as a coalition out of that work with 482Forward. This would have been like 2012. And over the course of this time, we got a partnership with Wayne State University and we just began learning. We tried different things.

What was it about seeing kids skipping school that made you want to do something?

It was heartbreaking to me to see these children squandering an opportunity that later in life they’ll have to pay to get. I’ve basically spent my life working for the proper treatment of African Americans, and while it is absolutely essential that we get others to recognize our intrinsic value, it’s also true that we’ve got to do our part.

Why are young people standing in front of my church two blocks away in the middle of the afternoon? They’re passing up one of the biggest free investments available to help them achieve the life that I know they want for themselves. I know they want it, because when I talk to these young people, they have all these high aspirations. They want to live in these great houses, drive these great cars.

Well, if they happen to be 7 feet tall, and can play, and don’t get hurt, maybe they don’t need to go to school. If they can run as fast as Deion Sanders, maybe they don’t. But the truth of the matter is this landscape is littered with great talented people who didn’t get the training to manage their gifts.

The entrance to Baber Memorial A.M.E. Church in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood. Larry Simmons recalls standing outside the church and seeing school-age children walking around the neighborhood when they should have been in school.

From there, how did you get involved in grassroots efforts around chronic absenteeism? What were some of the early strategies you employed to address student absence?

We mounted this campaign called “‘Present’ in Brightmoor: Our School Attendance Movement” and began to organize around getting parents and churches engaged in this work. And we formed what we call the “Principal’s Table,” made up of principals of all the schools that were in Brightmoor at the time and in Cody Rouge.

When we first got started, we had about seven or eight churches that organized with us. And so we said, we’re going to each adopt a school. And we’re going to take the kids who are absent that the principals tell us about and we’re going to pick them up from home, and we’re going to take them to school, and pick them up and take them home in the afternoon.

We blew out two church buses and my car transmission carrying kids back and forth from school every day. So we realized it was just an unsustainable model. First of all, how many kids are going to fit in your car?

Then when we started to get the numbers back and realized just how many students were absent, it was clear between our burnt-out vans and my burnt-out transmission that we were not going to get anywhere.

So how did things evolve after that point?

Well one of the first things we realized is the data the Detroit Public Schools was passing out didn’t make sense. Back in those days, the statistic being used was average daily attendance.

“All of us were stunned when we first learned that just missing two days a month can make a child chronically absent.” — Larry Simmons

Average daily attendance tells me out of a group of students on any given day, what percentage of them are going to be present in the classroom or in the school. The problem with that is, different students may make up that percentage at any given time. So what you get is this patchwork of attendance. So in seeking to get accurate data, we got online and discovered Attendance Works.

We brought in Hedy Chang to Detroit for a conference of students, parents, and teachers. And over the course of about three weeks is when we learned about chronic absence.

All of us were stunned when we first learned that just missing two days a month can make a child chronically absent, and being chronically absent can lead to them not graduating on time, be more likely to get in trouble, and get excluded from school.

It changed our language and changed our way of thinking. And it turned out that nationally, the U.S. Department of Education had just issued a report on the problem of chronic absenteeism. And so we began to advocate and agitate to have this statistic used in Detroit and Michigan.

We evolved our strategies to try and focus on schools and messaging about chronic absence. We discovered that people didn’t even know what chronic absence was, and some would change their attendance behavior by learning that two times a month would be too often.

When the community first got started promoting this idea, the school system resisted. They didn’t like it, because the chronic absenteeism numbers were so appalling, they just wanted to count average daily attendance, and many of them still do.

It took probably about four or five years for us to win that fight, but ultimately, the state and the city began to use chronic absence as a statistic to evaluate student attendance.

What were some of the lessons you took away from that campaign?

We learned over time that this problem was way bigger than just having people pay attention to the statistics. People may not have known what chronic absence was, but they did know their children are supposed to be in school. There are other things that are operating in the ecosystem.

And we clearly understand that we have to have an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving this problem. The schools alone cannot solve chronic absence.

How do you feel about the recent rise in absenteeism rates?

The disappointing thing is before COVID, all of our work together had started bringing chronic absence rates down. Not transformatively, but significantly, and they were real drops. Not just blips.

COVID has blown all of that work up. We’re actually starting below where we started before. We’re worse off now than we were before. It’s not like we’re back to zero. We’re minus five.

How do you contrast the role of the school versus the role of community partners in addressing chronic absenteeism?

Schools have to be willing to acknowledge that the solution to this problem is beyond their scope of control, and therefore they need other partners to come to the table and bring resources and policy.

I would contend that a school-based challenge is to create the kind of school culture that makes school attractive. Part of our work at Every School Day Counts Detroit is to encourage schools to engage in these kinds of experiences. We had a big event with the Detroit Pistons this past school year where they brought Cade Cunningham and the other athletes to Gompers (Elementary-Middle School). Everybody got a new coat, everybody got a basketball, everybody got a backpack with the Detroit Pistons swag in it.

It creates a connectedness and creates a sense of belonging, and it creates an inviting atmosphere. It doesn’t substitute for rigorous academics, but it does help students want to put up with rigorous academics, because of all the other goodies, benefits, and joys of being present in school.

What sort of discussions or partnerships would you like to see with other organizations in the city?

We have a great partnership with the Detroit Pistons, who have devoted enormous resources and help to address this problem at several schools. DTE Energy also has been a great partner of late. They don’t have anything to do directly with education, but we certainly want somebody like that to be at the table.

We would want labor unions. We would want teachers. We would want the (United Auto Workers). We would want the companies that employ them at the table.

You often hear parents complain that their work schedules don’t permit them to be as attentive to their children’s attendance as they want to be. Changing work schedules or creating flexible work hours is beyond what the school can effect. But maybe the community could effect it.

Maybe labor unions could be brought to the table to say, ‘While you’re negotiating for everything, we need you to ask the companies, be they auto or other, how can we give parents more flexibility in their work schedules? And how can the school create more flexibility in its schedule so students can in fact get to school on time?’ I think it will take both.

We’ve got to come up with some serious structural, systemic solutions that really face the problem that we are confronting. It’s got to take all of us working together to do this — private sector, public sector, philanthropic, clergy sector. It is our responsibility and power to address some of the issues and challenges that cause chronic absence.

What role do you think the city of Detroit can and should play in addressing chronic absenteeism?

We’ve analytically gotten to a place where we really understand chronic absence in Detroit far, far better than we did. It comes from a lot of external drivers that result in children being chronically absent, and the clearest one is poverty.

“One of the things the city could do is to actually plan bus routes around school opening and closing. That’s completely within the city’s scope of power to be able to do now.” — Larry Simmons

Poverty creates certain life conditions. People who are very poor have less stable access to reliable transportation. They have less stable networks to compensate for things like sudden illness or any of the little disruptions that happen in everybody’s life every day when you don’t have as much as folks in higher income categories.

In the case of Detroit, most of its citizens are low-income. So the city should take that into account and either implement or advocate for policies that can address that poverty.

One of the things the city could do is to actually plan bus routes around school opening and closing. That’s completely within the city’s scope of power to be able to do now. That will cause some dislocation, it will cause some struggle, but there’s no solution we’re going to find that doesn’t do that.

Larry Simmons said his organization’s efforts made meaningful progress in reducing chronic absenteeism in Detroit, but “COVID has blown all of that work up.”

You’ve worn many hats over the years: from being a pastor over the past two decades to working under Mayor Coleman Young as a political director. How do you see all those roles intersecting into the work you do now?

We’re always talking about the same people. The person who comes to my church is the same person whose child should be in school down the street, is the same person who should go to vote for the leadership of our country.

We’re just pretending like we can deal with them separately, like I can abstract you as an object of education, and pretend that’s not connected to your spiritual life, your emotional well being, your political sense, or your economic aspirations. All these things are integrated, they’re interrelated, and so my focus most of my life has been on policy change, the policies that affect our community.

But as I grew older, I understood I couldn’t just talk about the policies that other people make. I’ve got to talk about the policies that we create inside our own houses. If my child gets up and tells me she’s not feeling good, the policy in our house may be that she doesn’t have to go to school. That’s a policy. It doesn’t affect anybody outside the four walls of our house, but nonetheless, it’s a policy.

What keeps you going in this movement?

Even though I now understand that the fight is more complex than I recognized when I first saw this, it’s still just as important.

And unfortunately, as a community, understanding where we are and what it is going to take to get to where we want to be is something we still don’t fully grasp. … We have to break that. And one of the essential ways to break it is to acquire the skill sets to compete in the 21st century economy. And you can get that for free down the street until you’re 18. After that, you have to pay.

So it’s just this fire in my belly that I have for the freedom of my people.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

How this Detroit attendance agent connects with families to get kids in school

2023-09-01T12:00:00+00:00

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Effie Harris can’t walk down a hallway at Gompers Elementary-Middle School without having to stop several times for a hug, a high five, or a promise of a crayon drawing.

Her pauses have to be quick, though. She has places to go and students to see.

By 8:04 on a cold February morning, she had already been at school for an hour, greeting students at a side entrance for middle school latecomers. After a quick stop in her office to drop off her coat and sanitize her hands, she began her morning rounds.

First stop: Room A115.

“I was just checking to see if she was here,” Harris called out. The teacher inside knew who Harris was talking about: a struggling second-grader who was absent as often as present. On that day, the child was present.

The spot checks only begin to explain the expansive role Harris plays as Gompers’ attendance agent. Unlike the stereotypical truant officers of yore, who might round up troubled youth and drag them back to school, Harris must often serve as investigator to find out why children aren’t coming to school, visiting homes and keeping track of data on barriers to attendance. She is a counselor who listens to families and helps them find resources they need to get their kids to school.

She is the school’s spirit leader for good attendance, showing up in classrooms with prizes — pencil cases, Hot Wheels cars, bubbles — for students who make it two weeks without missing a day. She plans pizza parties for classes with the best attendance, and helps teachers plan fun activities that children won’t want to miss.

And sometimes, she must play bad cop, warning parents of children who are severely chronically absent that they could face legal or financial consequences.

Effie Harris, the attendance agent at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, talks to students during her morning rounds when she visits classes.

After the stop in A115, Harris moved on toward another classroom, greeting everyone in the halls as she breezed past — by name if she knew it, or if she didn’t, with a “Mornin’, sunshine!” or a “Good morning, sweetie!” One elementary school child wrapped her arms around Harris’s legs, and soon she was surrounded by others who wanted her attention, too.

Harris’s goals that day were to check in with nearly two dozen middle school students who were approaching 18 absences, attend a school leadership meeting, call a few parents of chronically absent children, fill in for an absent teacher as a lunchroom monitor, and make a banner reminding kids to show up on Feb. 8 — one of two “count days” during the year when attendance is used to determine how much state funding a school gets.

She walked around the school with a large binder that she uses to track absences and excuses, and interactions with families. Every month, she must provide a report to the district.

“I’ve never been able to get through the volume of work that I’ve wanted to,” she said.

Why aren’t Brightmoor students getting to school?

When a parent shows up, Harris drops everything to listen.

A day earlier, she said, an exasperated mother showed up in her office to tearfully explain why her three children had each missed about 20 days.

“I said, ‘I’m going to get you a tissue, and I’m going to get me a box, because I might be crying, too, today.’”

Harris had reached out to the mother before and even tried to make home visits, but no one ever answered the door. This time was different.

“When she came in, she was at a breaking point,” Harris said. “It was a different conversation. It didn’t seem like she was on the defense. It seemed like she was open” to explaining her struggles and working on a plan.

“We want to find out the whys to offer solutions, to find out how can we help,” Harris said. “That’s the big thing. It’s not doing anybody any good just to stir things up and not to have a solution.”

A portrait of attendance agent Effie Harris at Samuel Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, February 3, 2023. Emily Elconin for Chalkbeat

Gompers serves some of the neediest children in Detroit, a city challenged by high levels of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and crime. Most live in Brightmoor, a 4-square-mile area that’s impoverished even by Detroit standards. It’s the kind of neighborhood where 1 out of 5 homes is abandoned, and a local diner has 3-inch bulletproof glass separating the serving counter from the dining room.

Some parents keep their children home from school for fear of what they may encounter on the way, especially in winter when it’s still dark out. School starts at 7:30 a.m.

“I can’t blame them,” Harris said. “Parents don’t want to walk them to bus stops in dangerous areas. … I tell the parents, you guys have to get them to the bus stop. This is just your reality. You’ve got to do that.”

About a third of Gompers’ 838 students come from other neighborhoods. Those students have their own attendance challenges. When the family car breaks down, they stop showing up.

Other students don’t come to school because they have to babysit younger siblings while parents work, or they live part-time with another parent in a different area. One mother last year kept her three children home because they were in hiding from her abusive partner.

Harris listens with an empathetic ear as parents explain the barriers standing between their child and the classroom — whether it’s homelessness, lack of clothing or transportation, bullying at school, inability to get up on time, or child care challenges.

Then she steps in. Sometimes she calls parents who’ve overslept to wake them up. Other times, she picks up children from their homes and drives them to school herself.

“We want to make sure we actually have practical solutions, and the other side of that is that parents have to be willing to follow those recommendations,” Harris said in an interview in her office.

A few minutes later she was on the phone with a parent whose three children hadn’t shown up to school.

The oldest child had a sore throat. She had a 9:15 a.m. doctors appointment, the mom said. But it was already 9:07, and they were still home. Harris began to wonder.

“Bring in documentation after she has her doctor visit, OK?” Harris asked.

The mother didn’t answer. She hung up on Harris.

It didn’t seem to bother her.

“Something more is going on,” Harris said, noting that she’d talk to the oldest child when she returned to school. “Elementary kids, I say, ‘OK, where were you?’ and then they’ll start to tell me.”

“It takes time to investigate, to find out what’s going on,” Harris told Chalkbeat in a later interview. “Sometimes it takes time for them to even warm up to you to talk about what’s going on.”

For now, there were other children to check up on.

Personal outreach to students: ‘I’m glad you’re here’

Harris headed upstairs and asked the teacher in Room A230 if she could have a word with a student. A few moments later, a boy emerged from the room.

“Good morning,” she said to him. “I’m glad you’re here. You doing OK?”

After a moment, she sent him back to class.

Next she headed to the classroom next door to check on his brother, who spoke quietly and rubbed his face on the sleeve of his hoodie.

Hours later, she was still thinking about him.

“He really looked tired,” she said, and the last time she saw the brothers they also looked exhausted. “But lately they have been here. They have been here, so that’s good.”

Before the start of last school year, Gompers Principal Akeya Murphy moved the attendance agent’s office into the main office, as a way to highlight the importance of student attendance to families as they walked into the building.

A sign that reads attendance matter behind the curtain in the lunchroom at Samuel Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, February 3, 2023. Emily Elconin for Chalkbeat

Once the school day begins, though, Harris doesn’t spend much time in her office.

“I like moving around in the building, going to the kids,” she said. “I like seeing them. I like interacting with them.”

Her next stop took her to the other end of the building. On the way she ran into a middle school student and greeted her by name.

“How many times am I going to see you next week?” Harris asks.

“I really don’t know,” the girl says.

“What do you mean you don’t know? What’s wrong?” she asks. “I want to see you every day.”

“OK. All right,” the girl responded, as if she meant it.

Help is on the way from the district

Being an attendance officer is a tough job in a district where year after year, more than half the students are chronically absent.

Harris’ role got even more challenging during the pandemic, when Gompers and many schools nationwide experienced a surge in chronic absenteeism. There have been days over the years when the sheer number of students who needed to be reached has been overwhelming.

“I had to get past that,” Harris said. “So many need to be helped. You can’t do everything. You can’t make it to everybody.”

Attendance agent Effie Harris holds a binder with protocols for attendance intervention plans at Samuel Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, February 3, 2023. Emily Elconin for Chalkbeat

Harris is getting more help this school year. A new district strategy involves assigning a second attendance agent to schools like Gompers with high rates of chronic absenteeism.

Harris empathizes with the families who are struggling. But she wants them to understand the consequences of their children not attending school.

“At the end of the day, this is who’s being hurt, and it’s your child. At the end of the day, this is who’s not being given the opportunity they deserve.”

Getting that message across successfully is one of the rewards of a tough job, she said. Take Gloria Vanhoosier, whose three children are “smart as a whip” but were absent for nearly half of the 2021-22 school year. After repeated calls home, Harris convinced Vanhoosier to come in for a talk about her struggles at home, and the importance of bringing the kids to school.

By the end of 2022-23, the children were doing much better with attendance. They still missed days, but not nearly as much as they had the year before. More importantly, they were doing better at school.

“Gloria is a fighter. And now we’re seeing the results. We’re seeing the benefits. She’s the one who sat in my office one time and said, ‘I tell my kids … it’s OK to struggle, but it’s not OK to give up.’ You are absolutely right. Because we all have struggles. We just don’t want to give up.”

Vanhoosier told Chalkbeat that talking to Harris was like talking to a therapist. Hearing that, Harris was full of emotion.

“Oh, I love it!” she said.

Tracie Mauriello covered state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach the team at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

One Detroit school’s multilayered effort to get absent students back to school

2023-08-31T13:06:56+00:00

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After missing four days of classes last fall at Gompers Elementary-Middle School, Jay’Sean Hull was called into the cafeteria with 100 other students with similar attendance records.

The group was introduced to attendance agent Effie Harris, a key figure in the school’s efforts to improve on a dismal statistic. The previous school year, a staggering 82% of students in the northwest Detroit school were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days.

Harris explained that the students had been selected for a relatively new program pairing students at risk of becoming chronically absent with 20 adult mentors in the building.

Jay’Sean’s mentor: Harris herself. Over the next few weeks, she would greet the sixth-grader at a side entrance designated for middle schoolers, visit him in his classrooms on days that he arrived late, and regularly check in with his family.

This high-touch, relationship-based investment was part of a multipronged approach at Gompers last school year to tackle a problem with tragic consequences: Chronically absent students are more likely to become disengaged from school and more likely to drop out, research shows. Frequent absences also make it harder to get students on track academically, a pressing need coming off pandemic-fueled declines in academic achievement.

Gompers Principal Akeya Murphy, a veteran educator, tapped just about every staff member to help with the effort. Along with the mentorship program, the school dispatched staff to students’ homes to help families solve problems contributing to absenteeism, used data to track attendance patterns, and offered incentives ranging from field trips to the local movie theater for students to grocery store gift cards for parents.

Students eat lunch at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. In 2021-22, a staggering 82% of the school’s students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more school days.

Murphy, Harris, and other leaders at Gompers set an ambitious goal for last school year: to shave 20 percentage points off the school’s chronic absenteeism rate.

To get there, they would need to reach students like 13-year-old Jay’Sean, and dozens of other students whose absences put them at risk of missing out on their education.

“By the time they’re 16, they’re already thinking about going to work or exiting out of the educational system, because it is rigorous,” Murphy said. “We know the curriculum is rigorous, and so we want to prepare them, and the way we do that is by them being at school every single day, so that they’re not missing anything.”

Attendance struggles reflect Brightmoor’s economic challenges

Across the Detroit Public Schools Community District, 77% of students were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year, when COVID-19 cases in Michigan reached their peak. But even before the pandemic caused a spike in absenteeism in school districts across the country, students in Detroit district and charter schools were missing school at crisis numbers.

The reasons for that vary, but they’re largely rooted in the economic challenges that accompany Detroit’s high poverty rates — transportation hurdles, health problems, family and housing instability.

Brightmoor, where Gompers is located, is one of the most economically challenged areas in the city, with a high concentration of housing instability, poverty, and transportation challenges. They contribute to a high level of transiency among the school’s student population, school officials say.

At Gompers, 91% of students come from low-income homes. The list of reasons for missed school days ranges widely at Gompers, from inflexible parent work schedules to student illnesses and bullying.

By January 2023, Haydin Griggs had missed about 50 days of the school year, primarily because her mother, Shetaya Griggs, had health problems that often prevented her from walking her daughter to school, and she didn’t want the sixth-grader walking to school on her own in their rough neighborhood.

Many parents “don’t have a bunch of money, they don’t have a whole bunch of resources,” said Harris, the attendance agent. “They’re thinking about just surviving.”

The Detroit school district’s strategies to reduce absenteeism have increasingly focused on these economic challenges. The district’s Family Resource Distribution Center regularly offers toiletries, dry goods, school supplies and winter coats.

The district is also set to launch 12 school-based health hubs in the next three years to provide medical resources and services that families would need to keep students attending school regularly.

Students wait in line in the main hallway at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. The reasons for missed school days range widely at Gompers, from inflexible parent work schedules to student illnesses and bullying.

One issue that came up at Gompers ahead of the school year was how many parents were holding their children back from school because they did not have a uniform or clean clothes. Murphy said she sent out a back-to-school letter encouraging parents to send their kids to school regardless of what they had to wear.

“We would prefer them to be at school and just have them wear their regular clothes versus feeling like they can’t come to school because of a uniform,” she said.

When Murphy became principal at Gompers at the start of 2022-23, she made sure to move the attendance agent’s office into the main office, a decision she hoped would amplify the importance of student attendance to families as they walked into the building.

Harris spends a portion of her days reaching out by phone and in person to parents and caregivers, trying to help them make plans to get their kids to class. It can be difficult, she said, stressing to families how two absences a month can quickly add up to a student being chronically absent. Some are unaware of how significant the absences are, and many are weary of the pandemic’s impact on their health, jobs, and households.

“The dust is still settling,” Harris said in February, during a spike in absenteeism. “Families have been affected, loved ones have been lost. There have been readjustments, people have had to adapt to whatever their new normals are and a lot of shuffling.”

A student’s absence, whether excused or unexcused, still counts toward the total number of missed school days they accumulate in a given year.

Gloria Vanhoosier’s three elementary school-age children each accumulated over 80 absences (out of 180 days) during the 2021-22 school year.

In Vanhoosier’s case, a bedbug infestation that lasted more than a year was a contributing factor. She was often too exhausted to take her children to school after spending so much time trying to rid her home of the critters, while also doing her children’s laundry nightly so they didn’t bring the bugs to school. They also missed school because of multiple of COVID infections, because of car problems, and because the children sometimes overslept.

Alarmed by the absences, Harris reached out multiple times asking Vanhoosier to meet with her at the school.

“‘I’m not superwoman,’” Vanhoosier remembers telling Harris when they finally met. “‘I got too much on my plate. I’m trying to take care of my kids and trying to take care of my family.’”

“Once I opened up to her, it’s like her whole face changed,” Vanhoosier recalled. “Now I feel that she sees my struggle and is concerned for me.”

The conversation with Harris motivated Vanhoosier to rethink her attitude about her children’s absences and its impact on their grades. Seeing her daughters happy and thriving after they began attending school more regularly has also helped. The girls participated in volleyball step dance, and after-school tutoring programs.

“I’ve gotten a lot better,” Vanhoosier said in the spring. “We still miss days, but I’m open with her now.”

Absenteeism has ripple effects on students in the classroom

Brittany Parker, who has been teaching for 10 years, wrestles with what to do when her kindergartners don’t show up for class. Absences can create lasting turmoil in a child’s education — children who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to read at grade level by the third grade.

They can also hamper the rest of the class. “The question for me is: Do I push ahead to the next lesson or do I wait for them to come back?” Parker said.

“As a district, they want us to keep going,” she said. “If it’s four kids out, I’m going to push ahead. Sometimes if it’s a larger number I’ll hold back. I’m also looking at: Are these kids who can catch up?”

An instructor works with students at Gompers Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. Children who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to read at grade level by third grade.

By May, more than half of the 50 third-graders La’Dawn Peterson taught between her morning and afternoon math classes were chronically absent. An additional nine were severely chronically absent, meaning they had missed more than 36 days of school.

One of them missed more than 60 days during the year.

“He would be so good if he came to school,” Peterson said of the boy. When he did show up, he was able to grasp the material, but she worried whether he’d retain the information.

Despite her many attempts to communicate with his family, she said she’s not entirely clear why he was absent so much.

Peterson said she’s tried exhaustively to impress upon her students and their families the importance of daily attendance, and the harmful impact of missing school. It shows up in their academic performance, she said, and explains why some students can become classroom distractions.

One day in June, when extreme heat prompted the district to shorten the school day, just nine students showed up — about half as many as usual. One of them was the boy who had missed 60 days.

On that day, while other students quickly got to work on their online multiplication and fraction exercises, he was slow to get started. He rubbed his eyes with the sleeves of his black and white Adidas tracksuit, and rested his head on one hand as he clicked through the exercises.

About 10 minutes later, he raised his hand, and a classroom tutor walked over to his desk in the back corner of the room. With a little bit of support, he seemed to grasp the lesson and began to work through the exercises.

Teachers like Peterson are cramming in four to five lessons a week, and they depend on weekly small-group lessons to catch up absent or struggling students. But if kids miss those opportunities, the challenges multiply.

“They’re missing out on so much and then, most of the ones that are absent all the time … there’s no motivation at home,” Peterson said. “So they come to school, and they’re not motivated to do anything.”

Over 18 absences: ‘You can’t bounce back from that’

Eighteen days. Thirty-six days. Fifty days. Sixty days. Eighty days of missed school. How does a student’s attendance record ever get so bad?

That’s the question that haunted Murphy and her team at Gompers, and motivated them to work on curbing absenteeism long before it becomes chronic.

Third grade teacher DeAnna Weeden, far right, instructs a group of students during an English lesson at Gompers Elementary-Middle School. Teachers depend on weekly small-group lessons to catch up absent or struggling students.

“You want to, for lack of a better word, stop the bleeding,” with students just below chronic absenteeism, Murphy said in January. “We need (families) to know that they’re on their way to being over the 18 absences … you can’t bounce back from that.”

In Jay’Sean’s case, it was four missed days of school by the end of October, too many so early in the school year. Jay’Sean blamed inconsistent school bus service that prompted him to start walking to school.

That was enough to warrant an intervention from the new mentorship program for him and the other students at risk of becoming chronically absent. The school’s mentoring program is an offshoot of a national initiative launched by the U.S. Department of Education.

The program’s premise sounded easy enough to Jay’Sean. “I just had to keep coming to school,” he recalled.

In reality, it took more effort than that from Harris and others on the team to ensure that Jay’Sean stayed on track. But it worked.

“By the beginning of the new year … he was always coming,” Harris told Chalkbeat this summer. If Jay’Sean came in late some days, she’d stop by his classroom to check in.

“He always wants to go to school,” said Shamika Hull, Jay’Sean’s mom. “He’ll go stand outside, and it’ll be raining, and he’s out there waiting for the bus.”

Hull also has an 11-year-old son at Gompers who got the message on attendance.

“The only times they have been absent from school since (the program began) has been either they were having a doctor’s appointment, or I wasn’t able to wash their clothes.”

For those whose absences are already beyond the “chronic” threshold, Murphy said she and her staff “continue to work with the family. We continue to make those calls. We continue to try to remove barriers.”

Those efforts won’t help the school improve its chronic absenteeism rate, Harris said, “but it’s still going to help the kid.”

“I tell them, ‘OK, let’s just take it a week at a time. Just five days. Four more days. Just three more days,’” she said, adding: “It’s going to make a difference for the kids and their scores.”

Attendance incentives are a ‘means to an end’

The conference room at Gompers is testament to the school leaders’ determination to make a dent in absenteeism. On all four walls are dozens of easel paper sheets, with handwriting in bright pink, green and orange marker. Each sheet details strategies Gompers staff have employed to try to make kids come to school every day.

Posters hanging in the conference room at Gompers Elementary-Middle School highlight some of the school’s strategies to combat student absenteeism.

Field trips to the local movie theater and bowling alley. Gas and grocery store gift cards for parents. Arts and crafts activities in the gymnasium. A mobile video game truck. “Gator Bucks,” named after the school’s mascot, for students who complete classroom assignments and exhibit positive behavior.

“These are the kinds of things that we’re discussing, constantly thinking and trying to be innovative about,” Murphy said. “How can we entice kids and make sure that families are consistently bringing their children to school?”

“It’s a means to an end … initially to draw them in and then to get them into the habit” of going to school, said Harris, the attendance agent.

A line of plastic trophies sit on a shelf behind Harris’ desk. Every two weeks, the awards go to the classrooms that have the most students with perfect attendance.

Gompers deploys some of these incentive programs when students are more likely to be absent, such as before and after holiday breaks or crucial days such as Count Day or state testing periods.

But while incentives are a significant part of Murphy’s vision to encourage student attendance, relationship building remains the core tenet of the school’s efforts.

“Children need to know that you care for them, that they’re in a safe space, that they have a trusted adult that they can communicate with and someone that is building a relationship with them, because that’s going to open the pathway for learning,” she said.

When absences go unexplained

For all their efforts — and progress — the sense of crisis is never far away.

On a Friday morning in early February, a handful of master teachers and administrators gathered in that same conference room for a weekly meeting to discuss academic performance, attendance, and behavior.

It had been close to a month since students and staff returned from winter break. And yet, teachers were still reporting near-empty classrooms.

“It’s that two-week break, where a lot of our students are moving,” said Shannon Harper, a fourth grade master teacher. “They may have been (evicted from) their homes. They may be living now with a relative, and there’s some friction there. And cars break down in the winter, especially here with all the potholes.”

“I just had a student that was out for 10 days,” Harper told the group. “We don’t know why, and he doesn’t either.”

Despite a barrage of robocalls going home when a child is absent, many parents don’t send their children back to the building immediately. And even when students do return, some may not have notes or reasons explaining why they missed school.

“If you never say this is your issue, we can’t help you,” said Adrian Harrell, Gompers’ parent outreach coordinator. “We can’t see what our next solution is to help you. All we know now is they are absent.”

Gompers Elementary-Middle School in the Brightmoor neighborhood is one of the Detroit district’s newer buildings. But Brightmoor is one of the most economically challenged areas in the city.

After a year of effort, Detroit students and leaders reap the rewards

On the last day of school, the grin on Jay’Sean’s face was hard to conceal, even behind the black hoodie that shrouded his head.

He was one of nine students who won a new bike in an end-of year-raffle to reward students who showed up every day over the last weeks of school.

As he took a seat on his red and black Mongoose bicycle, Jay’Sean welcomed the compliments and cheers from his friends.

The whole school had something to cheer about, too. By the end of the year, the chronic absenteeism rate declined to 64% — just shy of the 20-point decline school officials were aiming for, but down significantly.

The district experienced a similar decline, from the peak of 77% in 2021-22 to 68% last year. District officials attribute some of that to the end of quarantining requirements that forced many students to miss school.

Encouraged by the progress last year, Gompers school staff plan to continue their strategies in the new school year that began this week.

The mentoring program will remain in place, along with the range of incentives the school experimented with. But most significant for Gompers will be the addition of a second attendance agent to work alongside Harris.

Superintendent Vitti announced earlier this year that the district would shuffle its 80 attendance agents to schools in areas with the highest concentration of chronically absent students and poverty.

The added resources provide validation that attendance agents with a coordinated, hands-on approach can make a difference.

Harris said she is proud of seeing her mentees like Jay’Sean avoid chronic absenteeism. He finished the year with 13 absences, five days below the threshold.

Under Harris’ guidance, he found an accountability system that worked for him. By the end of the winter break, for all the attempts he made to get to school on time and every day, he and other students earned snacks and mini-parties every month.

With a challenging sixth grade year behind him, Jay’Sean is ready to get back to school.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Tracie Mauriello covered state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach the team at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit attendance proposal would kick students out of their chosen school for high absenteeism

2023-08-22T15:07:05+00:00

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Detroit students enrolled in schools outside their neighborhood could be sent back to their local school if they miss too many days, under a policy proposal from district officials aimed at tackling chronic absenteeism.

The policy would allow schools to seek district approval to transfer a student to their designated feeder pattern school — the one they would be assigned to based on where they live — but only after school officials took a series of steps to communicate with the student’s family about the absences.

“The transfer would only occur for the following year — not (during) the current school year,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told Chalkbeat.

As of 2022, only about 55% of Detroit Public Schools Community District students attended their assigned neighborhood school, Vitti said.

The proposal was shared with board members at a school board policy/ad hoc committee meeting Monday. The committee agreed to advance the draft policy to the next school board meeting on Sept. 12 for a first reading by the full board. All district policies must be reviewed by the board twice before they can be voted on.

DPSCD follows a protocol to notify parents or caregivers of a student’s absences. The first contact is recommended to be completed by a teacher for the first two days a student is absent. After every third unexcused absence — the third, sixth, ninth, and so on — a school’s attendance agent can use any of several intervention strategies, including home visits, daily check-ins, parent conferences, and contact with the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office.

Vitti said that with the proposed policy, schools would warn families about the possibility of a transfer if their student’s attendance does not improve, and could request a transfer for a student who ends the school year having been chronically absent, which typically means missing more than 18 days, or 10%, of the school year.

“We would ensure that there were not extenuating circumstances the student or family was dealing with,” such as an illness or death, Vitti wrote to Chalkbeat. “We would also consider the student’s previous attendance at the school, grades, and behavior record. All of this would be reviewed by the District before a transfer was implemented.”

The move is one of several steps DPSCD is taking to address its outsize rate of chronic absenteeism. During the 2022-23 school year, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate was 68% — down from 77% the previous year, but still above pre-pandemic levels.

Before the pandemic, DPSCD had committed to a multipronged reform effort to reduce absenteeism, including offering wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnering with community organizations.

By the end of 2018-19, in part because of those efforts, chronic absenteeism fell to 62%, from 70% in 2017-18.

The policy proposal, Vitti said, could curb some of the transportation challenges that contribute to student absenteeism.

“On the one hand, principals of neighborhood schools have asked for greater accountability for student attendance,” he said. “They also notice families are placing additional burden on themselves by not attending the school closest to their residence. This creates a greater transportation burden than walking to school or using a District bus route.”

Vitti told board members in July that the district had planned to impose punitive measures several years ago, but held off because of the pandemic. Along with the transfer rule, Vitti said he would propose a policy that would require students to repeat a grade if they miss too much school.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit school district’s absenteeism rates declined after COVID quarantine rules ended

2023-07-12T12:00:00+00:00

The easing of COVID safety protocols helped the Detroit school district record a significant decrease in its chronic absenteeism rate this past school year, officials said, an encouraging sign for a district that has one of the highest rates in the nation.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District had seen its rate of chronic absenteeism jump to 77% in the previous year, when unvaccinated students who had possible COVID exposure were required to isolate for seven to 10 days. In October 2021, the district had more than 400 students a week in quarantine.

But this past school year, the percentage of students who were chronically absent — meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year, or 18 days — dropped to 68%, a decline DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti attributes to the end of districtwide quarantine and close-contact guidance. School administrators and educators were instead able to “focus on teaching and learning and intervention,” he said.

“Beyond anything, it was really getting back to the reform this year,” Vitti said at a school board academic committee meeting Monday. The district had projected a “two- to three-percentage point” improvement in its chronic absenteeism rate, he added.

“Our principals have become more comfortable being accountable to improving student attendance, and that meant more problem solving with families and with students, incentivizing improved attendance,” Vitti said.

Before the pandemic, DPSCD had committed to a multi-pronged reform effort to reduce absenteeism, including offering wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnering with community organizations.

By the end of 2018-19, in part because of those efforts, chronic absenteeism fell to 62%, from 70% in 2017-18.

At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Board President Angelique Peterson-Mayberry said she has heard some school principals complain that they have limited strategies and staff to address absenteeism.

“When there are vacancies with staff, it depends (solely) on the attendance agent at that location,” Peterson-Mayberry said. “Sometimes the schools feel strapped, because they feel like they can’t make children come to school.”

Vitti said he’s heard similar concerns over the years.

“A lot of our teachers, attendance agents mainly, will say: ‘What is the recourse after I do a home visit? After I make a phone call?’” he said.

For the coming school year, Vitti said Tuesday, the district may consider adding punitive measures to address absenteeism. In a preview at a finance committee meeting last month, Vitti said he would propose new policies that would penalize students who missed more than 50% of the school year, either requiring them to repeat the grade or, in the case of students who attend schools outside their neighborhood, assigning them back to their neighborhood school.

Vitti said the district had planned to institute the penalties years ago, but held off because of the pandemic. “Now that we are back and functioning on a reform agenda, I think that it’s time to do some things that we planned on doing,” he said.

Meanwhile, DPSCD plans to retain its attendance agent positions, with 20 of those agents shifting to its central office to provide districtwide attendance outreach. The remaining attendance agents will be placed in schools with the highest concentrations of poverty and chronically absent students.

The district is also set to launch 12 school-based health hubs in the next three years to provide medical resources and services that families would need to keep students attending school regularly.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

How Michigan punishes its poorest families for their students’ low attendance

2023-05-24T12:00:00+00:00

Between August and December of this school year, Shetaya Griggs’ 11-year-old daughter missed more than 50 days of school, a rate of chronic absenteeism that troubled school officials.

It also left Griggs worried that she could lose the public assistance she relies on to feed her family.

Each year, under state law, Michigan yanks a cash benefit from hundreds of poor families because their children don’t attend school regularly enough. Thousands more families who apply for the benefit are rejected because of their attendance records.

The state has enforced this policy for at least a decade — even though family poverty is a leading contributor to student absenteeism, and some research has found that punitive approaches to chronic absenteeism don’t work.

Indeed, reducing income for poor families may actually worsen attendance, with serious consequences for students. Students who are considered chronically absent — meaning they miss at least 10% of school days — are more likely to struggle academically and drop out.

“If the goal is to improve a child’s likelihood of attendance, then withholding financial support from their struggling household is the perfect way to ensure you fail at it,” said Jayesh Patel, president of Street Democracy, a nonprofit legal services agency that works with families.

To parents like Griggs, such policies ignore the often complicated set of challenges that families like hers face, and they assume parents whose children are chronically absent don’t care about their children’s education or future.

“I don’t want to lose that, because my kids need it,” said Griggs, who is a single mother of two children and who has health issues that have been a significant barrier to getting her sixth-grader to school every day.

Griggs said most of the days her daughter Haydin has missed have been because her own chronic health problems made it difficult to walk her daughter to Gompers Elementary-Middle School, and because she feared letting Haydin walk to school on her own in their tough Brightmoor neighborhood. Griggs doesn’t have a car, is unable to work, and doesn’t have a strong support system to help. So when her asthma and painful eczema, which flares up frequently, are a problem, her daughter doesn’t go to school.

Griggs knows she must do better, and so far she has. The school’s parent coordinator convinced her to volunteer at the school daily. So on most days now, you will find Griggs in the parent room at the school, and Haydin in class. But she has a message for officials who want to punish parents like her.

“They don’t understand,” Griggs said. “They’re not in the homes with these families. They don’t get the challenges. I wish they would show up at some of our parent meetings so they can understand.”

Michigan strategy relies on penalties, courts and caseworkers

Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, said her organization hasn’t studied whether other states have such a law. But she is concerned that punitive measures are increasingly being used as a way to crack down on absenteeism.

“There’s a really good study from South Carolina, where they looked at if you take kids and put them into probation, and you use legal strategies, do you get a better outcome? And they found that they got worse attendance,” Chang said.

What school and community officials need to focus on, Chang said, is strategies that address the reasons why students are missing school.

In Michigan, the penalty is one of the few state-level rules intended to reduce absenteeism, which has long been a challenge in Detroit and spiked to alarming new highs in the 2021-22 school year. Michigan law also allows for chronically absent children and their parents to face court charges. Most attendance initiatives, though, are left to school districts, which have hired attendance agents, visited students’ homes, and worked to connect families with resources to deal with homelessness, medical problems, and other issues that can drive absenteeism.

State officials contacted by Chalkbeat said they could not provide evidence that the penalty leads to improved attendance. They pointed to other measures they’re taking to help kids get to school.

“Because MDHHS believes access to public assistance is important to low-income families, the department works with families that have truancy issues to address them so that the young people can get a good education and the family can receive cash assistance to meet their basic needs,” said Bob Wheaton, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the benefit.

The department has placed 209 caseworkers in 277 schools to help families address barriers to attendance, such as transportation, child care, and health care. Last year, 546,000 students in Michigan were chronically absent across the state’s more than 3,000 public schools.

Law targets people with very low incomes

The school attendance requirement in the benefit program was written into state law by the Republican-led Legislature in 2015, though officials had been following the policy for years beforehand.

The law “preys on economically disadvantaged people by reducing access to financial assistance,” said Rep. Amos O’Neal, D-Saginaw. “The funds taken from these families could be used to help them. Education is important, but I just think that taking away the needed funds required by a family to get their kids to school isn’t the way to do it.”

The new Democratic majority hasn’t taken steps to reverse the law, but a spokesperson for House Speaker Joe Tate said his party has an interest in taking “a closer look at the impact of this statute.” A spokesperson for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer did not respond to a request for comment.

The cash benefit in question, known as the Family Independence Program, maxes out at $492 per month for a family of three, and is accompanied by work and reporting requirements. The amount hasn’t increased since the late 1990s, despite inflation that has accelerated in recent years.

Only families with extremely low incomes — roughly $7,000 per year for a family of three — qualify for the benefit, and the benefit shrinks if their incomes rise.

Most of the families who lost benefits because of student truancy were in Wayne County. Wayne is both the state’s most populous county and home to Detroit, which researchers say is a “uniquely challenging” city for school attendance given its patchy transportation system, high poverty levels, widespread housing instability, and high rates of chronic illness.

State data show a steady stream of cash-strapped families missing out on a resource that might have helped with rent or car payments.

327 16- and 17-year-olds were kicked out of the program during the 2022 fiscal year, according to MDHHS.
141 entire families lost their benefit because younger children were attending irregularly.
2,585 families applied for the benefit but were denied because of their attendance records.
37 pregnant teens lost out on the benefit because of low attendance.

Those figures are slightly higher than the comparable numbers reported in 2013, when nonpartisan analysts looked at proposals to turn the policy into law.

The state doesn’t define how many missed days constitute truancy, so decisions about cutting benefits are left to the discretion of attendance agents and caseworkers.

People who are kicked out of the program or denied benefits can reapply if the student makes it to class every school day during a 21-day period. The state doesn’t know how many actually reapply.

Some officials stress the need for accountability

Most efforts to reduce absenteeism focus on eliminating barriers to attendance and drawing attention to the costs of absenteeism. Some education leaders believe that the strategies should include punitive measures for families whose students miss too much school.

In Detroit, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said he’s not sure withholding public assistance is the solution.

“That can certainly exacerbate the family’s difficult situation and the child’s future,” Vitti told Chalkbeat in an email.

However, he does believe stronger accountability and intervention are needed, something he expressed to school board members during an April 24 meeting.

“At the PreK-8 grade level, students can miss an unlimited amount of school and still move to the next grade level,” Vitti told Chalkbeat. “As a District, we need to address this. It’s not sending the right message to our teachers and principals; our families; the community; and most importantly, to our students. As a Superintendent and School Board team we need to consider what are the right consequences, after documented intervention and outreach, for missing a lot of school.”

Mark Larson, an attendance agent in Kent County, which contains Grand Rapids, said the threat of penalties is a valuable deterrent.

“When you’re counseling a family and trying to work toward family stability, I think it’s a useful tool, especially if it’s not used as a club but as a nudge,” he said.

But for the families who actually lose this benefit — and with it a substantial part of their already small incomes — the result may be destabilizing, said Christine Bell, executive director of Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, a nonprofit that works with families in southwest Detroit.

“Chronic absenteeism is a symptom of poverty, so it makes zero sense that it would take away that you would take away something that is so necessary to be able to even function,” she said.

In Detroit, Griggs is worried about the potential loss of benefits, but she’s even more worried about the possibility of jail time if her daughter isn’t in school. And there’s an even bigger concern: that the lost time in school may put her daughter behind academically.

“I want her to have a future,” Griggs said.

Koby Levin covered K-12 schools and early childhood education for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach the team at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

How transportation problems fuel absenteeism in Detroit

2023-03-22T17:48:29+00:00

On a chilly October morning, 12th-grader Jay Johnson walked toward the bus stop in the Bagley neighborhood, where he boards a Detroit city bus each day for the 11-mile trip to Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School. At 6:18 a.m., he posted a photo on Instagram, letting his friends know that he was making his way to school.

As he waited on Seven Mile Road for the No. 7 bus, he stood under a streetlight to make sure he was visible to the bus driver. But the bus zoomed right past him. Johnson would have to wait for the next one, which, according to the Detroit transit app on his phone, wouldn’t arrive for 45 minutes.

Wait for 45 more minutes in the predawn gloom? No way, Johnson decided.

“It’s 6:30 in the morning, and it’s cold, and the bus passed me,” he recalled thinking. “I’m going home.”

He called his mom to let her know, and the school marked him absent for the day — a full day of instruction lost for a student who was up early, at the bus stop in time, and would have been at school, if only his ride had come through.

Thousands of students across Detroit are similarly vulnerable to being absent from school — and losing crucial instructional time — because of a transportation system that’s full of holes.

In the city that put America on wheels, basic transportation remains a pervasive challenge. One-third of residents don’t own cars. The Detroit Public Schools Community District provides only limited school bus service, and none at all to high school students, who instead get passes to ride city buses. Families in the city who choose charter schools, specialized “application” schools in the district, or other schools outside their neighborhoods often forgo their right to a school bus for their kids.

For large numbers of students, getting to school hinges on parents or family networks. Many more must rely on Detroit’s notoriously limited transit system, whose routes across the 143-square-mile city are designed to get people to job centers like hospitals and factories, not to school.

“Transportation is one of, if not the biggest barrier” to consistent student attendance in Detroit, said Sarah Lenhoff, a professor of education at Wayne State University and director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research, which has published numerous studies of attendance barriers in Detroit. In interviews with Lenhoff’s team of researchers, Detroit parents reported that unreliable transportation prevented them from getting their children to school.

Pennia Anderson has spent years driving seven nephews, nieces and grandchildren to charter schools around Detroit.

“If something happens to the car, that kid’s not going to school,” she told Chalkbeat. “Who has money for an Uber?”

Lenhoff and other experts agree that transportation hurdles are not a root cause of chronic absenteeism. Rather, these hurdles amplify other drivers of absenteeism, such as housing instability, poverty, and chronic health problems, to make Detroit a “uniquely challenging context” for school attendance, Lenhoff’s group said in a 2019 report.

That cascade of factors helps explain why Detroit students miss school at a higher rate than their peers almost anywhere in the U.S., with grave consequences. Frequent absences interrupt classrooms, undercut school improvement efforts, and ultimately limit learning opportunities. Students who are chronically absent are more likely to struggle in school and drop out.

Families asked to fill transportation gaps

At least five states guarantee students transportation to school if they live farther than walking distance. And most K-12 students in Michigan can count on school bus service to school, although districts are not required to provide it. Even rural districts in some of the state’s poorest areas stretch their budgets to offer busing to all their students.

But in Detroit, funding shortages, closures of neighborhood schools, and expanded school choice have left fewer students with access to school buses, and shifted much of the burden of student transportation to families.

DPSCD provides school buses only to the 70% of K-8 students who live more than three-quarters of a mile from the neighborhood school they attend. Busing is not available to high schoolers, or to students who attend specialized application schools rather than their neighborhood schools.

All told, 24,000 students, more than half of students who attend district schools, are not eligible for a school bus, according to figures provided by Nikolai Vitti, DPSCD superintendent. That number doesn’t include thousands of students who are eligible for rides to their neighborhood school but who attend a different district school.

Citywide, another 47,000 students attend charter schools, which often offer little or no transportation.

Many Detroit parents go to extraordinary lengths to get their kids to class, driving long distances in some cases, spending for gasoline, and building their work schedules around dropoff and pickup times. But that may not be an option at all for families dealing with poverty or inflexible work schedules, or who don’t have a car.

For them, the options are limited. They can bike or walk, which may mean taking a dangerous route to school past abandoned homes or crossing major streets.

Or they can take the city bus, one of the nation’s least reliable and comprehensive big-city public transit systems, and hope it arrives on time.

High school students depend on limited city bus system

Brianna Davis, a 10th grader, depends on the city bus for the daily trip from her house in Garden Homes, at the northwestern edge of the city, to school at MLK, east of downtown.

And as Davis knows firsthand, the system is not designed with students’ schedules in mind.

To get to class in time for the first hour bell at 8:05 a.m., Davis leaves home by 5:55 a.m. Ideally, she catches the bus on Eight Mile Road around 6 a.m., then transfers to a second bus that’s scheduled to get her to school by 7:10 a.m. That gives her some wiggle room if a bus passes her or arrives late — both of which happen often, she says.

Driving the 12-mile trip to school would save at least a half hour each way, but her parents’ work schedules don’t allow for that.

What would she change about the bus system? “Start coming on time,” she said.

Detroit buses run late 44% of the time on weekdays, due in large part to driver shortages.

The city bus “is why my attendance is shot,” said Perriel Pace, an 11th grader at MLK. “I get up at 5 a.m., and I still get to school late.”

Southeastern High School students board a city bus after school in November 2022. The stop is located next to a liquor store parking lot a quarter mile from the school.

Even if the system did run on time, it still would pose challenges to students.

In interviews, high schoolers who use the bus said that the system does not appear to prioritize student riders through, for example, bus stop placements, route timing, and bus frequency around school release time.

At Southeastern High School, dozens of students walk a quarter mile to the bus stop, where many wait in a liquor store parking lot. Miss the bus, and students have to wait 30 minutes for the next one.

At another bus stop in Detroit, a group of students leaving an after-school tutoring program at University Preparatory Academy High School told a Chalkbeat reporter they had been waiting an hour before a bus appeared — and drove right past them.

Moreover, students say, they don’t feel safe riding a city bus with adults.

“People do drugs on the bus,” said Ashton Crist, a freshman at Cass Technical High School, as he waited for a bus in December. “It’s not a good place for kids to be.”

Mikel Oglesby, the city’s executive director of transit, said in a statement that improving service to schools is “one of the important guiding principles” of the Detroit Department of Transportation’s plan to rethink bus service across the city. “Bus stops are located in close proximity to schools where feasible and where safe paths to schools are present,” he said.

While the plan hasn’t been released yet, a recent outline of its priorities does not mention students or schools. Oglesby noted that the department will be taking feedback on its proposals in public meetings, though none will be specifically dedicated to the needs of families.

Relying on the transit system poses challenges for student attendance, but there’s no question that it saves the Detroit district money. In a typical year, the district spends about $200 on average for each high school student who uses a bus pass, including summer school students. The district’s spending for yellow buses — which includes daily transportation for K-8 students, as well as field trips, sporting events, and shuttles to vocational education centers — amounts to about $1,900 per student.

That helps explain why many other big-city districts — including New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia — shift older students to public transit and give them passes, or do away with school busing entirely.

But those cities have much more comprehensive and better-funded public transit systems than Detroit, with longer operating hours, interconnected rail and bus networks, and more frequent runs.

More school choice, less access to school buses

The Detroit Public Schools Community District offers most K-8 students transportation to their neighborhood public schools, noting that if it failed to do so, “absenteeism rates would increase and enrollment would decline.”

But in Detroit, only a fraction of students attend their neighborhood public school.

Over the last 30 years, the state has moved aggressively to give families educational choices besides their neighborhood school, including charter schools and traditional public schools outside their home district. As Michigan encouraged competition between districts, choices proliferated primarily in Detroit and other majority-Black cities, where declining enrollment, instability, and widespread school closures alienated many families.

Asked why they chose schools that required long, complex commutes, numerous students gave Chalkbeat different versions of the same answer: When the alternative is a school in their neighborhood with high teacher turnover and low academic performance, there’s not much choice at all.

In Detroit, where parents have a huge number of schools to choose from, roughly half of students attend charter schools or other districts bordering Detroit, most of which provide little or no transportation. Even within the main city district, about one-third of students go to a school outside their neighborhood, forgoing their right to transportation.

Davis is one example. When she got into MLK, her parents decided that it was worth the commute because they viewed it as a better academic option than the alternative closer to home.

Tara Fields, whose first-grader attends University Preparatory Academy Elementary School, a charter in Detroit, said fitting the 20-minute school commute around a work schedule is “a little hectic sometimes.” She says she is luckier than many parents because she has a car.

“It’s a good school, so that’s worth it,” she added.

Solutions go beyond transportation

Closing Detroit’s transit gaps wouldn’t cure its student absenteeism problem.

“It’s inaccurate to think transportation is the root cause of absenteeism or that by expanding transportation alone absenteeism will dramatically improve,” Vitti wrote in an email.

He says the root cause of absenteeism is poverty and its symptoms — housing instability, car trouble, medical problems, and a lack of support networks that help people manage small problems like medical appointments, changing work schedules, and car trouble.

Lenhoff agrees that transportation should be viewed in the context of the various factors that drive absenteeism, including parents’ work schedules.

Consider that K-8 classes in the city typically start around 8:30 a.m., and end around 3:30 p.m.

“We’ve interviewed many parents whose children miss school because they have to be at work before school starts, and they don’t have transportation for them after they leave for work,” Lenhoff wrote in an email.

A bus might help if the child could stay home alone, she said, but “another solution could be to create a before-care program at the school, so parents could drop their children off early before they go to work. It’s a transportation problem solved by child care.”

The district is piloting expanded before- and after-care programs with this kind of situation in mind. And the GOAL Line, a popular but small after-school program with a transportation component, is aiming to expand again.

Many families already fill child care gaps using private programs for school-age children, which can be costly.

Still, several Detroiters told Chalkbeat that just a school bus would go a long way.

Fields, the charter school parent, said sending her child to school by bus “would be a wonderful thing. That’s one less step” to keep track of every day.

Providing adequate busing to every student in the state would likely cost $400 million, according to a plan presented by school finance experts last year. While that package is designed to help rural schools manage their disproportionately high transportation costs, it could also help DPSCD expand its bus service.

Vitti cautioned, however, the district is also struggling with bus driver shortages, which could slow any effort to expand bus service.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Editor’s note: March 22, 2023: The story was updated to more clearly define who is eligible for school bus service in the Detroit district.

A guide to finding school transportation for your child in Detroit

2023-03-22T17:48:24+00:00

Getting students to school in Detroit can be tough. Transportation options are limited, and they vary depending on where your family lives and which school your child attends.

The lack of transportation resources helps explain why so many Detroit students frequently miss class and lose out on learning opportunities.

Here are answers to some of the common questions parents ask about school transportation in Detroit, and resources to help families get their students to school.

Why don’t most Detroit schools provide buses?

Part of the reason is that they don’t have to. Most students in Michigan don’t have a legal right to transportation to and from school. Only children with certain disabilities or some who are experiencing homelessness have a right to school transportation.

Buses, drivers and fuel are costly, so Detroit and other districts that have financial constraints limit the amount of busing they provide.

Citywide, around 20% of students this year get to school on a yellow bus.

What transportation options are available to Detroit families?

Walking or biking may be an option, though some families report safety concerns. Some kids living in Detroit do have access to free yellow buses (more on that below). DPSCD pays for transit passes for students who want or need to use city buses. The passes can be picked up at each school’s office. Some families rely on commercial ride share companies, such as Uber and Lyft, though students technically must be 18 to use those services.

Which options are available to my child?

The answer depends on where your child attends school.

Charter schools

Nearly half of Detroit charter schools offer some form of transportation, though options may be limited. For instance, the Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences runs buses from a handful of stops across the city, but stops may not be within walking distance of each student’s home.

The Detroit Schools Guide provides a list of charters that offer some transportation, but the guide hasn’t been updated since 2020.

Before enrolling, call the school or visit its website to learn more about transportation options.

Detroit Public Schools Community District

DPSCD recommends that parents and guardians use PowerSchool, the district’s online information center, to find transportation options. Once you verify your address and contact information, you should be able to see your child’s scheduled transportation route. Parents can also call their child’s school directly, or the district’s Transportation Call Center at 313-945-8600.

DPSCD parents can access bus route information through Powerschool using the student reports tab, as this screenshot shows.

No matter where your child attends school, they are eligible for yellow bus service if it’s guaranteed through their individualized education program or the McKinney Vento Act for kids who are experiencing homelessness.

K-8 neighborhood public school: You qualify for yellow bus service if you attend your neighborhood school and live at least three-quarters of a mile from the school. Find your neighborhood school by entering your address on this district webpage.

If you move into a new neighborhood and the neighborhood school is full, DPSCD provides transportation to the next closest school.

High school: High schoolers are guaranteed a free pass to ride the city bus. They can pick up the passes at their school office. High schools in areas with limited DDOT service provide door-to-door buses or shuttles to school.
Application school: Children who go to these schools do not qualify for yellow bus service.

Schools of choice (districts outside the city)

Many of these districts do not provide transportation to Detroit students. Here are transportation policies for the handful of districts outside the city that enroll the largest numbers of Detroiters.

Oak Park Public Schools offers busing to Detroit students, though they must re-register each year. Parents should fill out a transportation request form or call 248-336-7601.
River Rouge School District operates bus routes across Detroit. See this map for bus stops. For more information or to select a stop, call 313-203-1497 or email transportation@rrsd.me.
Hazel Park Schools does not offer any transportation to general education students.
Ferndale Public Schools and Redford Union Schools do not offer transportation to students who enroll from outside the district.

Preschool

Some centers in the Great Start Readiness Program, Michigan’s state-funded preschool, are eligible for free transportation, but there are strict rules about parents signing children in and out of preschool. Some schools allow an older sibling attending the school to accompany the preschooler. See this list of preschool programs in Wayne County that offer transportation.

What if my child has a disability?

If your child’s individualized education program specifies that they need transportation, they are entitled to that transportation no matter what public school they attend. A little more than 2,000 kids attending DPSCD schools get this curb-to-curb service.

What if my family is homeless?

If your family doesn’t have stable housing and you want your child to continue at the school they attended before you lost your housing, they can have access to transportation under a federal law called the McKinney-Vento Act. Families who are staying in a shelter, temporarily staying in someone else’s home, or otherwise lacking stable housing should call their district (DPSCD: 313-748-6383).

High schoolers covered under this law get DDOT bus passes, unless they wouldn’t be able to get to and from school this way. In these cases the district may also offer shuttles or gas cards.

I’m having a school transportation problem. Whom can I call?

The DPSCD transportation help hotline is 313-945-8600.

DPSCD bus service for general education students is provided by the following contractors:

ABC Transportation: 313-835-2700
Trinity Transportation: 313-228-4522
DHT Transportation: 313 895-1300

DPSCD bus service for students with disabilities and homeless students is provided by the following contractors:

City Cab Company: 313-576-6344
New Detroit Cab Company: 313-633-5646
Checker Cab: 313-963-5000
Trinity Transportation: 313-228-4522
Regency Transportation: 313-615-0504

The Detroit Department of Transportation customer service phone number is 313-933-1300.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Sarah Alvarez is the editor-in-chief of Outlier Media.

Tell us: What attendance barriers does your family face in Detroit?

2022-11-07T21:23:53+00:00

Families in Detroit and across Michigan are having trouble getting their students to school.

If you know why, we want to hear your story.

Some parents have told us they’re dealing with housing insecurity, such as evictions, and moves to other parts of the city.

Other parents say the issue is transportation — inadequate bus service or car troubles.

“Right now, I have a lot on me, but it’s going to get better,” said Jennifer Garrison, who has two children attending K-12 schools in the Detroit district. She asks people for rides or borrows cars to take them to school. “I will have a car soon, and they’ll be transported the way they’re supposed to be.”

Families typically try their best to get kids to school, interviews with parents and researchers show. They know that low attendance has disastrous effects for student learning. Research shows that students who are frequently absent tend to score lower on reading and math exams and are more likely to drop out of high school.

Yet chronic absenteeism is widespread. Last year, two-thirds of students in the city of Detroit missed school at least 10% of the time. Half a million students across the state missed that much school.

What’s going on here? How can we help students get to school?

Share your story with the community as part of Chalkbeat Detroit’s reporting on the causes and solutions to absenteeism.

By explaining your barriers to attendance, you can increase public awareness of this crucial issue and get in touch with journalists who can answer your questions about available resources.

If you are having trouble viewing this form, go here.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Not ‘present,’ and paying a steep cost

2022-11-07T21:23:41+00:00

Two-thirds of Detroit students missed at least one of every 10 school days last year.

That’s one day every two weeks, or more than three weeks between the first day of school and the start of summer vacation.

That’s at least half a year of learning over five years — half a grade of instruction lost for roughly 60,000 students in Detroit’s charter schools and city district.

High levels of absenteeism are a disaster for students and schools. Low attendance sabotages pandemic recovery efforts, tanks school reforms, and disrupts entire classrooms, research shows.

As absences pile up, masses of individual students — especially students experiencing poverty — are consigned to a demoralizing cycle of academic catch-up, asked to keep up with other students while receiving fewer lessons.

“School is hard enough, but then when you have to catch up, it’s overwhelming, and they just give up,” said Janine Scott, a math teacher in the Detroit Public Schools Community District who serves on Chalkbeat’s reader advisory board.

Absenteeism across Michigan has risen to alarming new heights, driven in part by quarantine policies. Half a million students were chronically absent statewide last year. The problem is especially acute in Detroit and other cities statewide, where child poverty, unaffordable housing, and patchy transportation fuel some of the nation’s highest rates of chronic absence.

Across Detroit and the state, schools have tried to solve the problem. They’ve hired attendance agents, set up alerts for students at risk of becoming chronically absent, and created messaging campaigns about the cost of missing school. But many of these efforts are small-scale, or built on the notion that absences mostly reflect families’ motivation to attend school, rather than social barriers that research shows are the drivers of absenteeism.

At the same time, schools have gotten little help addressing a problem that is far bigger than them, experts say, one whose roots lie in society-wide failures of housing, employment, and public health.

“We can’t see it just as a schools issue,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national initiative that aims to reduce chronic absenteeism. “Some of what chronic absence reflects is economic inequities in our societies, lack of access to healthcare, flexibility in work, lack of access to decent transportation.”

The scope of missed school days

For the most part, no one was able to escape the rise in missed school days. As the pandemic closed Michigan schools and sent millions of children to learn at home, the rates of chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10% of the school year, shot up across all demographics.

But even before the pandemic, Michigan struggled to get students to come to school. Cities, in particular, had high rates of absenteeism, with Detroit’s rate topping the list of all large cities in the U.S.

The spike in absenteeism during the pandemic prompted state officials to sound alarms.

“I encourage parents and districts to work together to focus on student attendance so that they can make the best use of the time that is available to them for student instruction,” said state Superintendent Michael Rice in a statement this fall.

Before the pandemic, Detroit had committed to a multi-pronged effort to reduce absenteeism. The district’s 2018-19 attendance plan outlined a holistic approach to improving attendance through wraparound services for students, hiring attendance agents, and partnerships with community organizations. By the end of that school year, in part due to those efforts, the district reduced chronic absenteeism to 62%, down from 70% in the 2017-18 school year.

But the pandemic derailed those efforts. Last year, the rate rose to 79%.

That alarming trend held across the city and state.

Detroit charter schools had a chronic absenteeism rate of 58%. In the Lansing school district, it was 90%. In Flint, 80%. In Pontiac, 72%. In Eastpointe, 71%.

“Chronic absenteeism is now the big elephant in every room,” said Sonya Mays, a Detroit school board member, who was elected in 2016 as local control returned to the district. With staggering rates in front of school leaders across the state and country, Mays hopes it will contribute to more substantive discussions.

“I’m not super interested in a blame conversation,” she said. “I’m much more interested in unpacking the reasons that that number is so high and using data as much as we can. I do think that there still is a bit more anecdotal decision making than I would care for, not just in our district but broadly in all school districts.”

Misconceptions

Absenteeism, with its obvious consequences for learning, has troubled educators for as long as there have been schools in the United States.

Yet public understanding of the issue is rife with misconceptions that undermine solutions.

Take this seemingly simple question: Who is responsible for children’s attendance at school?

American popular culture, from Huckleberry Finn to Ferris Bueller, gives a simple answer: students and their parents. In turn, some efforts to improve school attendance in Michigan treat absenteeism as a choice that can be influenced with carrots or sticks.

But absences seldom boil down to a decision to skip school, experts say. Interviews with parents and researchers show that families generally understand the importance of regular attendance and do their best to get their children to class.

Instead, absences often result from painful but rational choices between a family’s basic well-being and attending school. Problems with housing, health, work, or transportation can quickly spiral into a crisis for a family that lacks money or a social support system. Even if attendance is a top priority, it does not trump the need for shelter, food, safety, and reliable child care.

“They go to school every day unless it’s impossible,” said Jasmine Person, whose three children attend Bow Elementary-Middle School in Detroit. Transportation is a challenge for Person, who lives far enough from Bow that her children aren’t eligible to be picked up by the school bus, and who sometimes struggles to cover the cost of fuel.

“If I don’t have gas money, it’s hard to get them to school and also get to work,” she said.

Parents who can’t bring their children to school because of car problems, an eviction, or a health crisis likely won’t change their behavior simply by changing their minds, said Larry Simmons, director of the Brightmoor Alliance.

“This level of chronic absence has a systemic root,” Simmons said. “It’s poverty and the consequences of poverty. When the car breaks down, that crisis isn’t easily accommodated because families’ resources are so thin.”

Simmons leads an attendance initiative called Every School Day Counts, which is backed by major philanthropies and nonprofits in Detroit.

In 2019, the group embarked on a messaging campaign designed to convince parents of the importance of attendance.

It didn’t work.

“Parents actually were resentful of the campaign because they felt like we were blaming them,” Simmons said.

The initiative has pivoted, Simmons said, to working directly with five Detroit schools. They are helping the schools pilot new programs to improve attendance with the goal of sharing their most promising findings with educators across the city.

Simmons is particularly optimistic about a plan to expand after-school programming, which encourages attendance for working families who can’t pick their children up from school until after 5 p.m.

Falling behind

For years, absenteeism got little attention from researchers and policymakers, perhaps because they assumed that regular school attendance — a legal requirement in every state — was the norm.

In fact, absenteeism is widespread. In Michigan, hundreds of thousands of students miss at least 18 school days every year.

All those absences have catastrophic results.

Students who are frequently absent tend to score lower on reading and math exams, get lower grades, and struggle more in college.

They are far more likely to drop out of high school.

One Baltimore-based study found that students who were otherwise similar — in the quality of their teacher, prior academic achievement, behavior, effort, and demographics — were less likely to close test score gaps in math if they were chronically absent.

A 2008 study in Chicago found that eighth graders’ absences predicted their success in the next school year eight times better than their test scores.

“We can’t educate children the way we want to and we can’t see the student achievement that we want to see if students aren’t consistently in school,” said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of Detroit Public Schools Community District, Michigan’s largest school district.

In the Detroit district, Vitti said, students perform significantly better against grade-level standards when they miss fewer days.

Widespread absenteeism isn’t just a problem for the absent students, but also for their classmates, research shows.

In classrooms where students are frequently absent, teachers must make tough decisions about whether to slow their instruction down for students who missed class.

“We’ve got some kids who still come to school every day, we have some kids who are doing everything that we’ve asked them to do,” Scott said. “And it’s not fair (to them) to hold up our lessons.”

Why absenteeism is so difficult to solve

Reducing chronic absenteeism in Michigan can seem like a steep uphill climb.

Think of the powerful Detroiters — emergency managers, celebrities, superintendents, philanthropists — who set out over the last decade to get more kids to class but barely put a dent in the problem.

Think of the consensus among researchers that absenteeism is driven by social problems that have outlasted decades of reform efforts in Michigan.

“Chronic absenteeism is a complex problem with no one solution,” said Sarah Lenhoff, a professor of education at Wayne State University and director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research, which has published numerous studies of attendance in Detroit.

PEER studies point out that Detroit is a “uniquely challenging context” for absenteeism because the conditions that researchers have linked statistically with absenteeism — things like asthma prevalence, poverty, and residential vacancies — are all present to an unusually high degree in the city.

“Reducing absenteeism in Detroit, with some of the most challenging structural conditions to attendance, requires more from schools, communities, the state, and other agencies,” Lenhoff said.

While she focuses on Detroit, many of the same headwinds show up in high-absenteeism communities across Michigan.

If nothing is done, half a million frequently absent students in Michigan will have “unequal opportunities to learn,” as one researcher put it. These students will struggle to make normal progress, much less make up for falling behind during the pandemic.

Chang, the Attendance Works leader who has worked extensively in Detroit, argues that responsibility for lackluster attendance needs to be as broad as the problem.

“It takes all of us,” she said.

Getting at the root of the problem

A long list of root causes underlies high rates of chronic absenteeism.

The list of potential solutions is long, too.

Some are already being put into practice as the Detroit district expands efforts to increase attendance. DPSCD has begun to work to strengthen relationships with families and help them navigate barriers to attendance. Officials are helping parents manage evictions and pay power bills, and a new district office distributes dry goods and school supplies.

The district has also begun to increase its focus on after-school programming, which has been shown to improve school day attendance over the past two decades.

But to some, the school district’s range of solutions can only do so much. Detroit Superintendent Vitti, while touting DPSCD’s recent efforts, believes chronic absenteeism warrants greater enforcement of truancy laws.

“Our role is to create an environment where students want to come,” he said. “But there is a point where there has to be more accountability and I think that is a city, really, a county function at the prosecutor’s level.”

A revamp of Detroit’s school transportation policies, too, could have great ramifications for student attendance. DPSCD currently provides yellow bus service to students who are attending their neighborhood school and live a certain distance away from the school.

The district also pays the city to provide free rides on DDOT buses to all high school students. While parents rely on that solution, DDOT’s bus routes and schedule are often misaligned with families’ transportation needs. Again, student ridership of city buses isn’t tracked. And bus routes don’t seem to account for families’ preferences or school locations.

Improving health services — both mental and physical — for students can also improve absenteeism, Lenhoff said. The same goes for reducing suspensions, which keep students out of school and are included in absenteeism statistics.

Child poverty, which is intertwined with absenteeism, is itself a solvable problem. During the pandemic, increased Child Tax Credit payments from the federal government sent hundreds of extra dollars a month to families, leading child poverty rates to decline even as much of the economy ground to a halt. In other words, giving people money helps, experts say. But the increased payments have stopped, and Congress hasn’t moved to renew them.

“I would argue that the best attendance policy that could possibly be passed would be for the federal government to reinstate the federal Child Tax Credit,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, a researcher at Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan think tank.

To better understand the problems driving absenteeism, experts say we need data that show why students are absent. For instance, we know that chronic absence was up in 2021-22, but not how much of that increase is due to illness or quarantines.

“We just need to, in my opinion, quantify as best as possible what those drivers (of chronic absenteeism) are, so we can really develop a plan to improve school attendance,” Mays said.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.