Fewer children attend school, remotely and in person

Districts experienced a 2.3% drop in average daily attendance nationally from September to November last year, compared to the same period in 2019, according to data from PowerSchool, which tracks grades and attendance at schools. Attendance dropped in 75% of districts over the course of the year, falling by an average of 1.5% each month, the data show. The data covers 2,700 districts that include more than 2.5 million students learning in person and online.

Limited data from some states and districts show that students who learned remotely – especially black students with special needs and elementary school students – attended school less often compared to their classmates.

The data deepens the concern that the long closure of schools will increase gaps in pre-pandemic academic performance among poor students and others.

About 56% of school districts were exclusively remote on December 18, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Washington focused on improving public education in the United States. Barriers for students to learn online continue to include problems with Internet connectivity and access to devices.

At Providence Public Schools in Rhode Island, where 30% of the district’s 22,600 students chose to remain remote in the fall, students who learned remotely routinely attended classes less often, especially younger students, and received more grades. bad for incomplete jobs, said district superintendent Harrison Peters. About 85% of students in the district qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

The data supports Mr. Peters’ initial concerns that students would not be as engaged while learning remotely. The daily attendance for all students, in person and remote, is about 81%, 10 percentage points less than last year.

About 600 elementary school students in Providence, a mix of classroom and remote students, missed more than half of the school days in the month before Thanksgiving, according to Brown University’s Annenberg Institute.

The district responded by intensifying its communication with parents. He uses Kinvo, a text messaging service that lets parents know when a student has not signed up for class. It sent 3.1 million texts between September and December, triple the amount transmitted in the same period of 2019.

School officials in Providence have been visiting families of students who have not attended classes to offer help, often arriving with supplies such as laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots.

“Our commitment was not to leave that front door, that living room, until we resolved many of those challenges,” said Peters.

In California, where many districts are mostly virtual, an analysis of attendance patterns in 33 districts covering 350,000 students this fall showed that the number of children who missed 10% or more days of instruction increased among second to sixth graders. , school years during which student attendance is usually reliable, according to School Innovations & Achievement, a California-based company that monitors attendance.

The rate of chronic absence in the 33 districts analyzed more than doubled for sixth and seventh graders to 16.1% and 21.7%, respectively. In all grades, absenteeism rates increased most among black and Latino students in December, increasing to 30% and 21%, compared to 18.4% and 12.8% respectively, compared to the same period last year.

In Massachusetts, 41% of students who are physically back in school buildings full-time strongly agree that they learn a lot every day, compared to 16% of students who are exclusively remote, according to a Gallup survey of 1,000 students in the high school.

Approximately a third of students who learn entirely from a distance or in hybrid arrangements say they are falling behind this year, while 8% of students who learn personally say the same. The survey also found that students from low-income families are more likely to learn remotely full-time than students from higher-income classes.

During a series of virtual city halls in October, in an attempt to encourage children to improve their attendance, school administrators at William L. Sayre High School in Philadelphia asked students what they wanted, said Jada Warfield-Henry, the school contact. The students, who are entitled to free or reduced price lunches, answered: food and tennis.

The school started giving $ 20 gift cards to Wendy’s, Foot Locker or iTunes to students who got perfect attendance in all classes for a month. The school has spent about $ 3,000 in incentives so far this year. About 38.1% of Sayre’s students attended school during 95% of instruction days in December, compared with 29.7% in December.

Distance learning represents a challenge to measure attendance.

What used to be a fairly uniform process now varies widely by state, making it difficult to know how much children are academically involved. In Alaska, distance learning students only need to engage with the school at least once every two weeks to maintain enrollment status. California students need to show some kind of daily participation, while Connecticut students need to spend enough time in class or do homework that is equivalent to at least half of the school day.

Mr. Peters, Providence’s superintendent, believes that taking students back to face-to-face learning is the only real solution to the drop in attendance rates. The district began random testing for Covid-19 in January, its latest effort to make parents more comfortable sending their children back to school.

Write to Yoree Koh at [email protected]