States across the country are reporting a significant decline in the number of students enrolled in public schools because of the coronavirus pandemic, leaving experts and educators concerned about the trend and its possible long-term consequences.
A notable number of students seem to have simply left the grid, failing to attend online or face-to-face instruction, their whereabouts unknown to school officials.
Given the chaos caused by the pandemic and the lack of data, it is difficult to really determine the exact magnitude of the problem, which appears to be disproportionately affecting populations of already vulnerable students – including homeless students, children with disabilities, children of immigrants, children in orphanages and children of color.
A recent study by Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit organization that focuses on underserved communities, estimates that approximately 3 million of the “most educationally marginalized students in the country” may have missed school since March 2020, when the pandemic forced the closure of schools. The group said it reached the figure by calculating a “likely percentage of at-risk groups who do not attend school, based on media reports and available data”.
ABC News contacted officials from education departments in all 50 states and found that the problem appears to be nationwide.
While some states report that they do not track this information, many others said they saw a significant decline in enrollment and still others reported that they have thousands of students missing.
Thousands ‘missing’
In Michigan, primary and secondary school enrollments declined this fall by about 53,000 students out of about 1.5 million students. In an opinion piece in December, state superintendent Michael Rice said that much of the decline is due to factors such as an annual decline in enrollment over the past 10 years, parents choosing to prevent their children from attending kindergarten and an increase in number of homes. students with little education, totaling approximately 40,000 of these students.
However, he said, “a significant concern” are the approximately 13,000 students who have gone missing.
“Granular work to find children must be done at the local level,” wrote Rice. “Every child is important. Losing one is too much. “
In Dallas, Texas, where approximately 153,000 students lived last year, there are about 9,000 high school students, 2,000 high school students and 1,000 elementary students missing, Robyn Harris, a representative for the Dallas Independent School District, told ABC Notícias.
And in Florida, authorities are trying to determine the whereabouts of nearly 88,000 students who were expected for the academic year 2020-21 and did not show up in the fall. Last year, state enrollment reached 2.8 million, but that number has dropped to 2.7 million since then.
In a February 11 letter to school district leaders, Florida Mayor Chris Sprowls called this drop “alarming,” saying the figure represents more than 3 percent of the state’s total student population. Posting his letter on Twitter, Sprowls urged the districts to use all available resources “to locate these missing children. We have a moral obligation not to allow any of these children to escape through the cracks in the system.”
Miami-Dade County, home to the country’s fourth largest school system, with almost 335,000 students, the district opened this year with more than 10,000 fewer students than in 2019, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told ABC News.
After several steps were taken to locate these students, most were located. However, the district says that there are still about 1,000 students who are considered “really missing”, which Carvalho calls “deeply worrying”.
“We believe that these were students who were in crisis before the COVID-19 crisis. They were probably poor students, probably English language learners, students who may have a disability, may have had domestic insecurity, food insecurity and may have a fragile immigration situation, ”said Carvalho.
Miami-Dade school officials continue to seek out these students, while dealing with more than 13,000 families whose children have chosen remote education, but appear to be “severely regressing” or disconnected from the school.
Why are the children missing?
Across the country, in many public school districts, enrollment in kindergarten is declining. Although kindergarten is not mandatory in any of the following states, Minneapolis has declined by 16%, Los Angeles has declined by 14% and Colorado has declined by 9% in its annual kindergarten enrollments.
Many students also do not have access to essential technological resources, such as wi-fi or computers, to participate in distance learning.
A digital equity report from the National Education Association (NEA) found that about 25% of school-age children do not have access to broadband or a web-enabled device, such as a computer or tablet.
Since the start of the pandemic, there were about 17 million students who were not properly connected to the internet, said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit bipartisan network of state and district education leaders across the country.
“From a learning perspective, this was potentially catastrophic,” explained Magee. “What we’ve learned over the past 12 months is that, from both a learning and a health perspective, there are millions of students for whom virtual learning is simply not working.” In addition, he said, “there is a subset of students who are completely disconnected from their school systems at the moment.”
“They disconnected. They don’t feel connected enough with their own learning to connect every day, “he added.
According to the NEA report, the majority of children without appropriate technology are from low-income and minority families, with “this inequality is systematically related to the historical divisions of race, socioeconomic status and geography”.
Another major problem affecting education for low-income families is the economy. Millions of low-income families have been impacted by the economic crisis, and many have suddenly been faced with unemployment and housing insecurity, making these children more at risk of losing school.
“Many of our students live in multigenerational families, where the mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles live in the same space. And many of them experienced COVID in a real way, where, unfortunately, death affected their family. Some of them are not comfortable with the piece face to face. They are just trying to maintain daily survival, ”explained Harris.
In addition, with persistent job losses or wages in the country amidst the coronavirus, some of these teenagers are choosing to work instead of going back to school to help their families survive or care for younger siblings while their parents work. .
“At the moment, it’s not in their minds to be at the top of their schooling, because it’s really about ensuring that your family unit is maintained,” said Harris.
Absenteeism
The pandemic has also led to a dramatic increase in the number of students absent on a typical school day, regardless of whether or not there is remote learning.
Chronic absenteeism, which is defined by the U.S. Department of Education as an absence of at least 15 school days, has increased substantially, especially among vulnerable populations and students of color, according to Hedy Chang, who directs Care Jobs, an initiative aimed at chronic absenteeism.
In some districts, student absences doubled during the onset of the pandemic.
“In Connecticut, for example, chronic absence increased from 12% in the 2019-20 academic year to 21% in the first half of 2020-21. For English students, the rate has doubled from 17 to 35%; and for students eligible for free meals, it is about 20 to 35%, ”said Cheng.
What schools are doing
Across the country, teachers and school staff are doing their best to connect with students who are missing or chronically absent.
Dr. Chad Gestson, superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District and a member of the Chiefs for Change, created a program to reach out to all students every day, making adults call the more than 30,000 students in Phoenix to check how they are.
Likewise, in Dallas, the “Operation Comeback” campaign seeks to recapture missing students. Teachers and volunteers have been reaching students, said Harris, with postcards or e-mails, asking “where are you, we will miss you when you get back. There is still time.”
Door-to-door home visits began earlier this month, but were interrupted due to the cold winter that hit Texas last month.
Miami-Dade, Florida, is using a “multilayered approach, using all of our resources collectively to be able to reach these families,” Carvalho told ABC News, as door-to-door visits by school officials, in collaboration with police, assistants county entities, tracking students in subsidized housing through the county’s housing authority.
The district is working with community-based organizations to reach, in particular, migrant communities, while transmitting information through mass media and social media.
The authorities want to “sensitize our community to the situation of these families,” said Carvalho, including contacting the friends of the missing students to see if they knew where they were. “So, it is a practical approach to determining where the students are.”
The ‘catastrophic’ consequences of learning loss
The long-term consequences for these “missing” students “are catastrophic,” say experts.
“You will have a whole generation of children who are not well prepared for college and their careers. You will experience significant increases in mental, social and emotional well-being with children, ”said Magee.
It can also be difficult for a student who has left school for a while to reenter the educational system and adapt.
However, there is hope, as “disruption of schooling is a challenge that can be faced,” said Chang.
Students are resilient and, if provided with adequate academic and social support, and offered “engaging, supportive and powerful educational experiences that offer paths to a better future”, they will be able to make up for the learning opportunities missed due to the pandemic, she added.
“We need to appropriate the resources necessary to bring these students to the standard equivalent to their age, at this point, as quickly as possible,” agrees Carvalho, or America as a whole will lose its position on the world stage.