On this episode of 5 Things: With schools starting in-person, teachers and community leaders are on an unprecedented quest to find missing students who stopped attending school due to the pandemic.
USA TODAY reporters Erin Richards and Alia Wong talk with 5 Things host Shannon Rae Green about how educators are reconnecting with students to ensure they stay in school. Read Erin’s story here and Alia’s story here.
Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Shannon Rae Green :
Hi, I’m Shannon Rae Green. And this is 5 Things. It’s Sunday, August 22nd. These Sunday episodes are special. We’re bringing you more from in-depth stories you may have already heard. Kids in Los Angeles went back to school this week in person. When this week started, teachers weren’t exactly sure how many students would show up. The pandemic caused kids to miss huge chunks of class time last year. And some of them didn’t log in or go in person for more than 10% of the year. Those students are considered chronically absent and research indicates that they are at risk of dropping out of school all together. On today’s episode, we’ll talk with USA Today education reporters about the many factors that go into whether a student can show up virtually or in the building for class. This past school year, there’ve been thousands of students who disappeared altogether. USA Today requested records from LA school districts and found that between June 2019 and June, 2021 enrollment fell by nearly 25,000 students in elementary schools.
Shannon Rae Green :
And by over 6,000 students in middle schools. Over the next few weeks, most of the country school districts will open for fully in-person instruction. Right now, educators and leaders throughout America are on an unprecedented and high stakes quest, find and then re-engage students in formal education before any of them get too far off track. That’s the question that drove my colleagues reporting. Where are the thousands of missing kids who aren’t enrolled in school? What disparities are at play? And what are teachers doing to catch students up on what they’ve missed? And beyond that, how can communities eliminate barriers in order for them to stay in school? I’m joined by education, enterprise reporter, Erin Richards, and inequities and education reporter Alia Wong. Thank you all for being here.
Erin Richards :
Thanks.
Alia Wong :
Thank you.
Shannon Rae Green :
Erin, your story focused on the LA Unified School District. Some parents across the country, haven’t seen anyone from their child’s school face to face in the last 17 to 18 months. Can you talk about the impact that’s had on families? And can you explain the barriers that are making it harder for families to get their kids to school right now, too?
Erin Richards :
Sure. So what we’re seeing is a lot of struggles in some of our countries larger school districts. Many of those districts didn’t open at all last year, or they just didn’t open for very much instruction. So for example, in LA unified middle schools and high schools never opened for in-person instruction. Elementary schools did, but for a few hours a day. Same thing in New York City, there were more schools that were open, but usually for a limited amount of time. And many parents were not conditioned to send their children because they had either gotten accustomed to learning at home, or their kids had picked up jobs or needed to pick up childcare duties. And so it was easier for that family to stay at home. And in addition to that, many families were afraid of health and safety concerns or had health and safety concerns related to the virus and how their children would be protected in schools.
Erin Richards :
So when we’ve been talking to school staff and teachers that have gone door to door around the country, looking for families, a lot of them are saying that these families have questions beyond just, is my child going to be safe? They’re worried about their kids falling behind in algebra. They haven’t really talked to anyone face to face and schools are saying, look, it’s harder for us to get information to families. We used to send stuff home in kids’ backpacks, but now we’re trying to reach people that may have moved in the past year, might be living with other family that we don’t know about. So there’s just a lot that districts don’t know about their families, especially in the larger districts that have been sort of disproportionately affected by the pandemic in terms of where their families live and sort of trying to re-establish those communication channels has been difficult.
Shannon Rae Green :
Yeah. And that’s exactly what this whole project is focused on, right? Just the lack of information. And when schools don’t have this information, it can be really hard to catch them up, right? So Alia, that was really, I think the main thesis of your story. Can you talk first about how high the stakes are for students who miss long periods of class time? I know in your story, you talked about research that shows the impact can last a really long time, like throughout their lives.
Alia Wong :
Right. So let me start by defining what researchers and educators refer to as chronic absenteeism. That’s when students miss at least 10% of the school year. So in a typical school year, which is 180 days, a student who’s absent for at least 15 days and that’s whether the absences are excused or unexcused is considered chronically absent. A growing body of research really shows that attendance is a key predictor of academic success. In the early grades, it can hinder a child’s ability to read by the third grade. And eventually it can lead to dropping out. If I’m chronically absent at any point between eighth and 12th grade, I am seven times more likely to drop out than my peers who had good attendance. And that’s according to a study on students in Utah. In fact, other studies suggest that attendance can be an even greater predictor of graduations than things like GPA or course performance. Obviously dropping out can have major implications for adulthood. And so that’s why they call it chronic absenteeism. The effects of chronic absenteeism truly last a lifetime.
Shannon Rae Green :
Thanks for explaining that. You requested records from several school districts, including some of the largest in America and found that many of them couldn’t provide data on which students had been absent. So what happened here?
Alia Wong :
Yeah. So with the help of some reporters throughout the USA Today network, I sent requests to a sampling of districts asking for detailed and chronic absenteeism data from the last three years. We ended up reaching out to 18 districts total, including the 10 largest, as well as various others spread throughout the country where we had network reporters based. And the goal is to just ascertain which kinds of students were most likely to have miss school during the pandemic? So we asked the districts to not only provide general attendance and absenteeism statistics. We asked them to break that data down by student characteristics, such as race, gender, disability status, a range of characteristics. And this is data that districts are supposed to track for the federal government. At least it was during normal times. Ultimately just three of those 18 districts provided the kind of data we were looking for.
Alia Wong :
And those districts were Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and surrounding cities in Nevada, Palm Beach County in Florida and Nashville and Tennessee. Some schools sent attendance statistics or absenteeism statistics, but didn’t break down the data by those detailed student characteristics or didn’t provide the data for all three years. Some said they could fulfill the request, but would charge us upwards of a thousand dollars each. And that, to me indicated that they weren’t already tracking that data. And others said that they needed an extension and that was several months ago and they still have yet to get back to me. Again, these emissions are noteworthy because at least pre COVID, this was data that wasn’t hard to get. States are required to include detailed chronic absenteeism data in their annual report cards. And most states actually hold themselves accountable for this data. So districts know to collect it, but the pandemic really through all this data collection into disarray. According to one of our report, just nine states included chronic absenteeism data and their 2019, 2020 report cards.
Shannon Rae Green :
And so that just makes this all that much harder. And this has already been an enormously tough year. I know that both of you have been covering how educators and how students have been impacted for the last year and a half. Erin, let me ask you how much further behind are these students and what do schools do when they just don’t have the data?
Erin Richards :
There’ve been a number of different organizations that have tried to track learning loss or a common term is unfinished learning of students over the past year and a half. One of the more recent ones came out at the end of July from McKinsey & Company, which does a lot of global management consulting. And they’ve been following a lot of this stuff pretty closely. And what we know is that on average kids are about five months behind in math and about four months behind where they would be in reading. Now, those are just averages, right? We talk to parents all the time, particularly upper income parents who kids have been able to adjust, right? I mean, they might be missing out on some social stuff. They might be struggling a little bit, but for the most part, upper income families have found ways to get tutors to supplement their kids’ education.
Erin Richards :
Many of them will continue with some kind of virtual option this year because it’s working well for them, but that’s not the case for a lot of really low income students. Some of them still don’t have consistent broadband internet in their houses to do the kind of, sort of logged on work, continuously stay logged on to do high quality work. And we know that same McKinsey study showed that for kids in the lowest income schools, these are families that make $25,000 a year or less. Those kids on average are seven months behind in both subjects, which is, I mean, that’s a lot of learning to make up for. Right. And I think what’s even more devastating about those figures is that those are only for the kids that had enough contact with the school system to actually be tested.
Erin Richards :
All of those kids that are in Alia’s reporting that were chronically absent for a long time, likely chronically absent when tests were administered may have disappeared for large chunks of the year or not stayed logged on. Many schools didn’t test kids if they didn’t have them in person at all. So we don’t even know how far behind the kids are, who have sort of been off the grid in the past year. And we’re not going to know until those kids are back in school consistently, or until we figure out some way to find them and test them virtually, which I don’t see happening anytime soon, maybe Alia feels differently. But I think it’s really not going to be until those kids are back in school consistently for a number of months, that we’re going to get some kind of accurate picture of where, for example, this third grade class is this year compared to a third grade class in the fall of say 2019.
Shannon Rae Green :
Yeah. And that information that you just shared really gets at the disparities that are at play here. Alia, can you talk about these differences and these gaps that have to do with income and race, whether students have disabilities.
Alia Wong :
Right. So many of the disparities I noticed existed pre COVID. Generally speaking, white students tended to have the best attendance or better attendance while children of color and poor children tended to have some of the worst. But a lot of those gaps grew and I noticed some new or distinct trends in the data that I was able to collect from those three districts. I should highlight for example, that there was a sharp increase in absences among English learners, which historically actually tended to have better attendance than their peers. In Clark County, for example and again, that’s the district that includes Las Vegas, the rate of chronic absenteeism among both English learners and Hispanic students, nearly doubled, close to 40% of students in both of those groups are chronically absent this past year. And that was up from less than 20%, two years prior. In Palm Beach, the district’s data show an uptake in absences among black and Hispanic students between the 2018-19 school year and the 2019-20 school year.
Alia Wong :
While interestingly for white students, attendance actually improved. So their attendance, again, at least on paper actually improved during the pandemic. Another trend I noticed was interestingly, a widening gap between boys and girls. I saw this in all three districts actually, but particularly in Palm Beach and Nashville. Nashville, for example, both for boys and girls, the chronic absenteeism rate in 2018-19 was 16%. And two years later, that rate shot up to 31% for boys in 27% for girls.
Alia Wong :
Generally speaking, looking at all these disparities, those groups already tended to underperform academically compared with their peers. And by missing school, these students are bound to fall further behind. And again, back to my earlier point, when there’s a lack of data, this trend is particularly problematic because you can’t figure out who’s missing school. And those students who are already falling behind are just going to be swept up and lost in recovery efforts. As Hedy Chang, who’s the executive director of Attendance Works told me when you aren’t taking this information on daily basis and in an accurate way, you’re not going to be able to act in time and the issues will compound.
Shannon Rae Green :
Alia, I have a follow-up question about the white students who attended more frequently, was that in-person attendance or online attendance, or was it both?
Alia Wong :
So for Palm Beach County, they didn’t break down the data by in-person versus virtual students. But I will say that there was a separate report that came out focused on five large school districts, unnamed school districts. They didn’t reveal what districts they were, but they also actually found a really noticeable increase in perfect attendance rates in these districts throughout the pandemic. And one of the researchers who helped with the report said that it was white affluent students driving much of that trend. And that could be because of what you kind of alluded to earlier in that white students just face fewer barriers and so, or affluent students. So when they’re learning from home, they’re not going to necessarily have to deal with lack of connectivity, or responsibilities, or trauma. Even if they’re like, say they have a cold, they’re able to still log on. So the barriers in many cases for these students actually declined.
Alia Wong :
I will also say that with each of these districts and particularly Palm Beach Counties, we have to take the data with a huge grain of salt. I mean, data collection, as I noted, really fell by the wayside and especially early on in the pandemic. The process of collecting this data was just really messy. And so they’re not necessarily reliable. And particularly in a place like Palm Beach County, where Florida was one of two states that didn’t provide any guidance to its districts on how to collect attendance. The data does come with lots of caveats.
Shannon Rae Green :
And as was mentioned in both of your stories, these barriers already existed before the pandemic. So it’s even harder now. Correct. So what our leaders and communities across the country trying to do to find solutions for these major issues and gaps?
Erin Richards :
So what I’m seeing, and this actually plays into my next story, is a real desire to approach some things differently in education, which there’ve always been people on the fringes of education that had been the innovators that really want to push a different style of school. Let’s blow up the schedule. Why do kids have to attend from eight to three? Right. And those are all relevant questions, but there’s never been a great urgency to shake up the system before now. Now the system has been shaken up. And so lots of people are saying, why are we going to go back to this if it wasn’t serving these kids before? So for example, there are a number of communities talking about how important it’s going to be to go re-engage some of these teenage students that have taken jobs during the pandemic, and maybe less inclined to come back to school because they’re making a salary now and they’re contributing to their families.
Erin Richards :
So some schools are talking about reinstating consistent night school for students so that they can attend after work or online options that are not only better and sort of by better, I mean, more relevant, more tied into what students are interested in doing as a career, but also more easy to access. And also that are going to give them sort of relevant skills to continue. I’m following another school in Denver that has for a while now incorporated both a bike shop and a coffee shop into a lot of the curriculum components of the school. And they’ve always been these kinds of hands-on charter schools or experiential schools. But I really think they stand to take a second look in terms of how we can expand them. There’s more money on the table to do this kind of innovative work.
Erin Richards :
And so I think some of that is really going to take kind of blowing up the system for more kids in terms of allowing them to attend school in non-traditional hours, re-engaging them with community groups that already have deep ties in low-income communities and really explaining to their families the importance of returning. And then making it really easy for them with a lot of these kind of non traditional methods of attending school that may not look exactly like sitting at a desk for six hours in high school anymore.
Shannon Rae Green :
I like that you say making it easy, because I think that these barriers just require that sort of thinking and innovation. Erin, I know you spoke with community organizers to spread the word about these requirements that are different this year for students to get back to school in person. What was that approach and what has the response been?
Erin Richards :
Yeah. So for example, Los Angeles is a district that’s requiring all students to be tested regularly for COVID-19, whether they’re vaccinated or not. A lot of parents in LA, they knew that the start of school was this past week, but they didn’t necessarily know that their child needed to arrive with a negative COVID test. And so there was some concern that a bunch of kids would show up on day one and not be able to actually enter their classrooms. The district said, no, no, we’ve got it handled. We’ll have a way to test kids the day of, hopefully it will be rapid, or they won’t be out of school for too long because of this. But again, these are typically the families that are less plugged into the nuts and bolts of what’s required for schooling to start, are typically the families that have a lot of other challenges in their lives.
Erin Richards :
They might be low income. They might be juggling lots of different jobs. They might not speak English. They may not be getting consistent communication from school. So it’s really been on the backs of a lot of community agencies to send out people to community centers, to stand outside bodegas with flyers in multiple languages to explain to parents what the requirements are for kids to return. And what school will look like and what safety protocols are in place, which is really another thing that parents have wanted to know. How is my child going to be safe? Yes. Many districts are requiring masks. Some aren’t. What’s going to be the kind of the routine of the school day? What’s it going to look like?
Erin Richards :
So that’s been really the center of the outreach efforts that we’ve been following. I imagine that there’s going to be a need for more of those, because I have a feeling here in a week or two districts are going to take stock of just how many kids have not come back to school or re-engaged in some way that’s consistent. And so it’s going to be another round of going out into the community and really trying to track down these families.
Shannon Rae Green :
Erin, I think in your story, you called it an unprecedented quest to re-engage students in formal education.
Erin Richards :
Yeah. We’ve used the word unprecedented so many times now in education, pandemic education reporting. We probably should come up with a different qualifier, but it just fits so aptly.
Shannon Rae Green :
So what questions didn’t I ask you that I should have? What I’m most interested in is just the difficult process that educators, and parents, and students themselves are dealing with to really get engaged when there’s so many things that are pulling them away from their education.
Erin Richards :
Well, I think some of the questions that we don’t have are the ones that we’re still pursuing, I’m really curious about what kids education is looking like in some of these districts that have gone into quarantine a week or a day or two after school has started. Is virtual education any better? What are the requirements? Presumably they might only be out for two weeks, but we saw lots of kids in so many different quarantines last year that they barely got much in-person instruction. So what is that going to look like? Well, I mean, we have some idea of what that might look like for affluent students. We really don’t know what that’s going to look like for low income students, although we could venture to guess based on disengagement that we saw in the last year. And I don’t know, what else are you looking at Alia?
Alia Wong :
Well, I’m really interested in the solution side of things, right? Like in districts that have managed to re-engage significant percentages of the school population, what are they doing right? For districts that have managed to close those gaps in attendance, what are they doing? Again, not to sound like a broken record. We need that data because that’s just the foundation off of which any district can really start to think through solutions. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. That’s really the main question I’m thinking about right now.
Shannon Rae Green :
Yeah. And I think that both of your stories do go into how educators can realistically, find the time to make this happen when there’s just already so much on their plate. Erin and Alia. Thank you so much for being here and for your reporting.
Erin Richards :
Thanks for having us.
Alia Wong :
Yeah. Thank you.
Shannon Rae Green :
You can find their stories on usatoday.com. I put a direct link in today’s show notes. And we want to hear from you. You can always tweet us @usatoday. If you like this episode of 5 Things, write us a review on Apple podcasts, letting us know what you liked. When you write us a review, we’ll give you a shout out on the show. A big welcome to our listeners on Spotify. If you’re listening on your daily drive, we’re glad you’re here. Thank you so much for listening. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow with five things you need to know for Monday. I’m Shannon Rae Green. You can follow me on Twitter @Shannon R-A-E Green. I want to hear how back to school has been going for you and your family. Catch you soon on another episode of 5 Things.
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