• Educators blame culture, poverty and the pandemic for why Michigan kids miss so much school
• As Lansing considers a solution, educators scramble to send letters and meet with parents
• The key: making parents care. ‘Action doesn’t happen until we connect,’ one principal says

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Lawrence Public Schools Superintendent Ryan Williamson isn’t waiting for Michigan lawmakers to solve the attendance crisis. In his tiny, low-income district in west Michigan, he knocks on doors of homes where students have missed too many days. Recently, he’s been picking up a student at his home and driving him to school because the student has no other way to get to class.

When he walks the hallways of the district, he often sees teachers talking to students individually and in small groups about the challenges they face at home, many of which are harder than the math and English lessons they tackle in class.

The efforts may be having an impact: the share of students who are deemed chronically absent is lower than the state average, 19%, compared to Michigan’s overall rate of 28%.

“It’s all hands on deck,” Williamson told Bridge Michigan. “We are trying to fill the gaps students have, from social-emotional to behavioral to grades, all things that lead to them not wanting to come to school.”

Michigan students are learning less than their peers in most other states, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called “the nation’s report card.” 

One likely cause: students attend school less regularly than in most states.

Related:

• Michigan K-12 crisis: State slow to respond as kids miss school, scores fall
• Alpena schools get tough on absenteeism. Parents don’t make it easy
• Michigan absenteeism FAQ: Who’s to blame? What are penalties to schools, kids?

Michigan’s chronic absenteeism rate is the highest in the Midwest and among the worst in the nation. School leaders are scrambling to address an issue that threatens to hobble the long-term growth of the state. 

It’s not easy. Educators say the underlying issues causing chronic absenteeism overwhelmingly occur outside classroom walls.

At Central Park Elementary School in Midland, leaders aim to build a culture where students want to attend school. The school has staff to watch the playground before school starts, students get shoutouts on the morning announcements and there’s a rotating attendance trophy that classrooms can earn.

Still, some parents can be hard to reach, principal Chelsea Sauve acknowledged. 

“Action doesn’t happen until we connect,” said Sauve. “We have to find a way to connect.” 

“In order to improve attendance, you (have) to know why kids are not showing up in the first place,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a research and policy group focused on chronic absenteeism. 

Warnings to parents

At East Lansing High School, the school sends a letter to the parent when a student has missed 15 periods, roughly the equivalent of three school days. 

There’s another letter after 30 periods missed and a call from the school counselor.  School staff are also holding weekly meetings to look over student attendance trends.

“We were finding that we were not intervening early enough sometimes,” said Principal Ashley Schwarzbek.

In Lansing, Everett High School staff call parents after students miss three days without a reason. They also visit students homes to talk to parents and try to understand why a student isn’t coming to school.

“If we don’t know where the student is, there’s a 100% chance we’re going to check on them,” said Billy Hastings, community engagement specialist. 

Sometimes, parents think their children have met a lot less school than they actually have, said graduation specialist Tia Bell. 

“Parents often don’t know how much school their child’s missed or how much that matters,” said University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education professor Michael Gottfried, who studies attendance. 

No easy answers 

School leaders acknowledge the connection between poverty and attendance: economically disadvantaged students have more than double the absenteeism rate as their peers. 

At Mount Pleasant Public Schools, Superintendent Jennifer Verleger said the district’s 28.6% chronic absenteeism rate is “alarming, but not surprising.” 

“There are some statistics that show that Isabella County is one of the most impoverished counties in the state of Michigan. And so as they have these other stressors, it’s almost as though there are more important things for the family than getting their child to school on a regular basis.”

Verleger said the “school’s role in the family is different” than before, with schools providing more nutrition support for students and their families. 

In Detroit Public Schools Community District, where 60.9% of students were chronically absent last year, two school board members want the district to explore parent accountability for students who do not regularly show up to school, Chalkbeat Detroit reports. For now, though, the district is focused on carrots rather than sticks — providing city bus passes and piloting yellow bus transportation for two high schools.

Michigan does not require schools to provide transportation to students. Some rural districts spend large shares of their budget on busing each year. The state put $125 million toward school transportation in the state budget. 

Courts an answer?

By law, school districts or intermediate districts are to designate an attendance officer. But districts vary on when to involve the court system with student absenteeism problems. 

At Gratiot-Isabella Regional Education Service District, attendance systems and support coach Scott Hemker is re-working attendance protocols so that local districts have a standardized process of how to respond when students repeatedly miss school. 

The draft process includes how to use student attendance data, when and how to reach parents, how to create an attendance improvement plan, when to involve Hemker and when Hemker should involve the courts system.

Hemker, a former teacher, said he knows courts have other issues taking up their time but he hopes if he refines the process, courts will take them seriously when a case is brought before them because the schools have exhausted all other options. He also wants to see the courts put in more diversion programs.

State mulling approach

While several school leaders told Bridge they included student absenteeism goals in their continuous improvement plans, they varied on what could make a difference on a state level. 

Verleger, the Mount Pleasant superintendent, said the state could provide targeted funding to help local districts address absenteeism, similar to how the state has specific mental health and school safety funding.

Michigan could more frequently collect attendance data from schools like Indiana and other states, but University of Michigan-Flint assistant professor Jeremy Singer said the data is only as good as the response to the data. 

“Instead of waiting until kids are missing school, take the list of kids who missed a lot of school the previous year and start proactively reaching out to those children and their families,” said Singer, co-author of a recent book on school attendance issues, “Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism.”

Corinne Edwards, director of the Office of Educational Supports at the Michigan Department of Education declined to say whether she believed Michigan should require more frequent attendance reporting from schools.

Senate Education Committee Chair Dayna Polehanki, D-Livonia, told Bridge she intends to make attacking high absenteeism a policy priority but isn’t yet sure what legislation would look like. 

“The numbers don’t lie. Some of the numbers are unacceptable and I think it (leads) to the (lower) scores,” she said.

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