As chronic absenteeism rises in schools, officials search for ways to entice students to stay in the classroom

It’s not by the power of the pen or a symbolic sword that Highlands School District administrators are fighting chronic student absenteeism but rather a Golden Spatula.

The trinket is awarded each month during the RAMS Roundup rewards party, where behavior expectations are reviewed and student successes are acknowledged. To be eligible for the Golden Spatula and other rewards, students have come to school.

“Our building has made substantial gains over the past few years with regards to average daily attendance and the decrease of habitually truant students,” Principal Stan Whiteman said.

Missing school has become a real problem statewide and, in particular, at several schools in Western Pennsylvania. The issue, mostly seen in middle and high schools, has prompted districts to take an active approach in combating the trend.

Burrell School District hired an attendance specialist. Pittsburgh Public Schools implemented the EveryDay Labs attendance intervention program. Greensburg Salem offers a Positive Behavior Incentive Program.

Statewide, habitual truancy rates — students with six or more unexcused absences per year, according to state guidelines — doubled from 9.2% in the 2019-20 school year to 18.5% in 2020-21, with the highest spikes at the middle and high school levels, according to data from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

Covid-19 hit Western Pennsylvania in March 2020, prompting widespread online or hybrid learning in 2020-21. Despite schools returning to in-person learning in 2021-22, the number of habitually truant students increased to 19.4% during that school year.

U.S. Department of Education classifies students as “chronically absent” after missing 10% of school days or more per year. That would mean a student had 18 unexcused absences in a 180-day school year.

“The pandemic caused all kinds of changes in how people learn or how people want to learn and the services that can be provided,” said Jeffrey Fuller, deputy secretary for elementary and second education at the state Department of Education. “The pandemic had a huge impact on truancy rates.”

Truancy rates at some local schools doubled or more from the 2019-20 school year to 2021-22, according to the state Department of Education. Among the most notable: New Kensington-Arnold moved from 25.57% to 54%, Allegheny Valley from 11% to 26.4%, Deer Lakes from 7.27% to 23.3% and Greensburg Salem from 7.01% to 17.5%.

Andrew Christ, managing director of government affairs for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said some of the increase is due to how schools were told to measure attendance during the pandemic.

“Theoretically, a student could have joined the online course for the day and forgot to submit their assignment, and the student would have been considered absent,” he said. “The expectation and hope is that truancy rates will come down as students and parents and everyone get acclimated back to in-person instruction.”

Absenteeism impact

Absenteeism goes beyond empty seats in a classroom.

Absences lead to learning loss, lower reading levels, poor transition to middle and high school, and lower graduation rates, according to education experts.

“Being absent, you’re missing out on the whole learning environment,” New Kensington-Arnold Superintendent Chris Sefcheck said. “Our battle is not just fighting attendance. It’s the learning loss that accompanies it that is the biggest issue.”

“We’ve certainly seen that students being in school is key to their instruction and their educational program,” Fuller said.

Habitual truancy is so pervasive in Western Pennsylvania that, in late 2022, the Richard King Mellon Foundation established a $2 million grant to address the root causes of truancy.

Studies show absenteeism can lead to crime and less overall positive life circumstances, said Sam Reiman, the foundation’s director.

With $775,000 from the Mellon Foundation, Communities in Schools of Pittsburgh-Allegheny County is expanding into Westmoreland County.

The program is launching a five-year initiative in Burrell, Greensburg Salem and New Kensington-Arnold. The initiative has included hiring attendance specialists who work at schools and contact parents and students directly, said Bryan McCarthy, an implementation manager.

Making connections

A key to combating truancy is establishing meaningful connections with students and even their parents, experts said.

When she started as an attendance implementation specialist at Burrell High School in December, Angela Schwartz said she found many students with mental health concerns and unresolved trauma.

“A lot of kids experience trauma in life. Unfortunately, that may not be talked about at home or it may be denied of even being present and occurring,” she said. “Exposure to trauma impacts a person negatively.”

Schwartz, hired as part of the Mellon Foundation program, said she will send students good morning text messages asking how they are doing and check in with them weekly.

“My specific job is to be aware of these students and be supportive of them and help them figure out ways and goals together,” she said. “Each day, you have a chance to make a positive change. Every day is a new day. You make the choice.”

Schwartz is considering offering incentives, such as gift cards, so students see their efforts to improve attendance are being rewarded.

“I feel like if you’re pressing the negatives, that takes away from the motivation of having a good day,” she said. “A lot of these children are hearing the negatives.”

The Mellon Foundation funding will be instrumental in Greensburg Salem’s efforts to build relationships with students and families, Superintendent Kenneth Bissell said.

“Students not being connected to the school is a quickly growing trend,” said David Zilli, Greensburg Salem High School principal. “To combat this, we are now holding new student meetings to share and connect with students as well as ‘student voice’ meetings so we can hear their concerns and make connections to help them.”

The district has a Truancy Elimination Process that stresses the importance of being in class to students and parents and includes recognition of students who improve in that regard, but Zilli said it’s not consistently successful when parents don’t engage.

“Meetings are held and plans made, but apathy and low motivation continue to be a problem,” he said.

The Communities in Schools initiative is just getting underway, McCarthy said.

“If you put a caring adult in a child’s life, it will make a difference,” he said. “Our model is based on one-on-one case management, putting a mentor in a child’s life, someone they can trust and gravitate to and ask for advice and meet with on a daily or weekly basis and they know cares about them.”

Because of pandemic-related phobias, some parents still might be hesitant to send their mildly ill children to school. In extreme cases, kids might not have a strong support system at home.

Making strides will hinge on school officials engaging families to create trusting relationships, said Tom Ralston, director of the Forum for Western Pennsylvania School Superintendents through the University of Pittsburgh.

Citing a study by the Brookings Center for Universal Education, Ralston said that if a family is engaged with school, the child is more likely to attend.

Paige Ponsonby, Greensburg Salem Middle School dean of students, said it is essential to meet students and families “where they are right now” by providing early intervention techniques.

“One of the most important techniques is making connections and building relationships with our students,” Ponsonby said. “Especially whenever there are no reinforcements at home, students who have a connection to school and can look forward to positive interactions within their classes will be more motivated to attend school regularly.”

Ponsonby said the district has found additional success in having students and families work with a truancy diversion program called Neveah to assess the root cause of troubles.

“Data from 2021-22 versus 2022-23 shows a 35.5% decrease at the middle school in the number of students who have acquired over seven unlawful days in the first semester of school,” she said. “We are hopeful that, with consistent efforts and interventions, we will continue to see a decline post-pandemic in these numbers.”

At Highlands, the district’s attendance officer notifies parents of their legal responsibilities to send children to school and offers meetings to provide the support they need, Superintendent Mawhinney said.

Ralston said many families became disengaged when covid forced online learning. For those students, returning to in-person learning can be difficult because they have fallen into a cycle.

“Once a child misses a substantial amount of school, they fall behind in their school work, they feel disengaged from friends and adults at school, and this makes it more difficult to return to school,” Ralston said.

In some cases, students might feel they can work asynchronously — at their own pace — to get caught up. Others have adapted to completing work on their own and don’t feel that attendance has a direct correlation to success.

“When you get in certain habits that can be more lax in a sense, it’s kind of hard for a child to break those habits or recognize these habits can play a factor in them being successful later in life,” Burrell’s Schwartz said.

Kyoko Henson, a social worker in the Penn Hills School District, said the rise of online platforms where students can learn different subjects and trades — YouTube included — has impacted the value and respect for traditional schooling.

“Many are using online media to answer questions and gain knowledge,” said Henson, a 17-year veteran of the district.

Working toward a solution

Highlands and Kiski Area bucked the trend in covid-impacted years when other schools were seeing truancy increases.

Rates lowered slightly, with Highlands dipping from 39.11% to 38.72% and Kiski Area dropping from 8.29% to 7.08%. Kiski Area has since climbed back to 17%, but Highlands saw greater success. Truancy rates dropped to 9.52% in 2021-22, the lowest the district has recorded in years.

“Improving student attendance has been a focus of the Highlands School District since I arrived in 2018,” Mawhinney said. “We are working with our teachers to provide project-based learning opportunities so that students want to come to school. Principals and staff are also finding creative ways to create clubs based on students’ interests to encourage more participation.”

Still, she said there is more work to do.

A “truancy tool kit” is available to all districts from the state Department of Education, said Scott Kuren, director of the Office for Safe Schools. He said it steers schools away from punitive approaches and toward supportive ones, and to be proactive before a student is truant.

At Pittsburgh Public Schools, numerous programs are implemented to keep students coming back, said Elena Runco, director of student support services. They include virtual therapy sessions, home visits and transportation for students experiencing homelessness.

“We have EveryDay Labs that communicate with our families about all absences, including excused ones, because all absences can lead to learning loss,” Runco said.

EveryDay Labs is an attendance intervention program that has prevented more than 1.4 million absences across the country, according to its website.

“They offer a parent support team that helps families get linked to support,” Runco said.

In the second quarter of the current school year, regular attendance rates at Pittsburgh Public were at 64.9%, up from 57.4% at the same time last year.

In the Belle Vernon Area School District, middle school Principal John Grice said common time at the end of the day allows students to get teacher support and also participate in “fun activities and clubs that encourage students’ regular attendance.”

“Students that have poor attendance also find themselves on the ‘no privilege list,’ which denies them fun opportunities that the school provides like dances and field trips,” Grice said.

Middle school attendance has improved so much in the past two years that Grice said he believes it will match pre-pandemic numbers soon when habitual truancy was less than 10%.

Some experiences provided at the middle school include the Positive Behavior Incentive Program; students participating in a club of their choice; social opportunities such as dances, field trips and field days; and open house events.

“I know there was a great amount of fatigue and yearning to get back to some sense of normalcy, but we also learned that there isn’t one format for school that fits every child,” said Ralston of the Forum for Western Pennsylvania School Superintendents. “We have always known this, but it certainly was accentuated with the pandemic.

“It is imperative that we are open to considering how school can evolve and change to benefit learning for every child.”