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More and more students in Alabama are back in classrooms, but questions of how to keep track of students who miss in-person or remote school during the pandemic remain.
Alabama does not have a statewide estimate of absenteeism or how many students have silently left classrooms at some point during the school year during the pandemic. An estimate that 9,800 fewer students enrolled in public school this fall does not capture the scale of a potential dropout, truancy or absentee problem — or lack thereof.
“In order to know how to help students after the pandemic, you have to know who is missing and why — the solution for missing kindergarteners is very different from an 18-year-old who didn’t finish high school,” said Hailly T.N. Korman, a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Group. In October, the group published a paper that estimated as many as 3 million children nationally had not received meaningful education since March 2020.
“Even after children are back in school, there are long-term consequences for those who missed extended periods, and we have to be ready to help them,” she said.
There is no reporting requirement for absentee numbers at this point in the year, but AL.com reached out to a cross-section of districts within central Alabama to see how they are tracking absences.
School leaders told AL.com that they are using various methods to track remote learners’ attendance.
Most districts told AL.com that they count all students enrolled as a remote learner as “present,” whether or not they log on to every class, which fits the letter of the 2015 state virtual school law.
Shelby County officials said fewer than one-half of 1% of its 20,000 students have missed more than seven days of school without an excuse so far this year. Jefferson County and Hoover City have not yet tallied their absences for this school year. St. Clair County said they currently have no students that have missed more than seven unexcused absences.
Some are tracking absences differently; as of Feb. 12, Birmingham City Schools, which has been remote for much of the year, has identified 2,900 students who missed 20% or more of their “learning opportunities,” which could be an online class or submission of a virtual assignment. Those students were referred to the district’s attendance officer, who then works with the student success office to offer support.
Read more: Alabama public schools missing 9,800 students this year
Jennifer Spain Williams directs the office of student success for the district. She said that while Birmingham’s school year wasn’t normal, her work remains the same.
“Our job is to serve students,” Williams told AL.com. “We are always going to work from a stance that we need to provide support.” The district enrolls roughly 20,800 students.
When a student misses school and is referred to Williams, her department sends a letter to notify families, which is sometimes the only nudge needed to get the student back to class.
In other cases, the letter helps unearth what a student might be struggling with, beyond trouble logging in to class — maybe their family lost their house, or moved to a different district, or the student is struggling with mental health or is working during the school day to help support relatives.
The district employs four attendance officers for the whole district, which means counselors and social workers must pitch in as well.
Absences from school are often the tip of the iceberg, just an indicator of something going on in the family, said Melissa Niven Sherer, who oversees the Birmingham office of the Helping Families Initiative. The organization HFI and helps find resources for students and families that might address underlying reasons for absenteeism and keep students out of truancy court and juvenile detention.
“There is so much grief and trauma this year,” Sherer said. “We are finding lots and lots of families who had lost loved ones due to COVID, and those who have experienced domestic violence.” She said families are “very, very overwhelmed.”
If a student misses seven or more days without excuse, they might be referred to truancy court, which can have long-term impacts for the student and their family. It’s hard to estimate how many children have been referred to court because of absences during remote learning periods, because truancy cases are not publicly reported and because judges have great discretion in how to handle them.
In a 2017 report, the state’s Juvenile Justice Task Force said truancy is the largest driver of complaints entering the court system, and its proportion of all complaints has nearly doubled over the last ten years to more than 30 percent, despite data showing that the truancy rate has not increased.
Conversely, the state’s annual Student Incident Report shows a decline in the number of students reported truant by school districts over the past five years:
- 2014-15: 6,990 truancies, with 4 referred to law enforcement
- 2015-16: 6,688 truancies, with 9 referred to law enforcement
- 2016-17: 6,575 truancies, with 3 referred to law enforcement
- 2017-18: 5,472 truancies, with 1 referred to law enforcement
- 2018-19: 5,346 truancies, with 5 referred to law enforcement
Keeping kids and families out of court is top priority for the Helping Families Initiative, which operates in 42 school districts in 12 counties. During the 2019-20 school year, HFI served 35,379 families.
This year, Helping Families’ team in Birmingham added a self-referral program, allowing parents and families to reach out directly and ask for help, instead of waiting for the school to give advocates a list of students who meet the absence criteria. Sherer said the self-referral option has proven effective and is something the organization plans to keep after the pandemic.
Since September, the team, with a staff of nine, has made 510 “resource referrals” to families, which could look like sending the children and mother in one family to a mental health agency that conducts an evaluation and provides counseling.
“In February, we had 115 active cases with families,” she added, “and those are rotating in and out all of the time.”
How should school officials count absences?
In the absence of a state-mandated policy on attendance in remote learning, local school boards can and should set their own policies, according to the Alabama Association of School Boards.
Schools should consider special circumstances caused by the pandemic, AASB Executive Director Sally Smith told AL.com in an email, and focus on supporting students regardless of why they are absent.
“At the proper time,” Smith wrote, “school officials will have to consider the impact and consequences of willful absences. But burdening our school administrators, under-resourced, overburdened court system, not to mention struggling families, with possible truancy cases now is at best misguided and potentially harmful.”
State education officials hope updating the state’s attendance manual, last updated in 2019, will help local districts know how to count attendance for remote learners, and better separate students who need help accessing school from students who aren’t interested in more school.
Kay Warfield leads the education department’s attendance efforts and said the group should have recommendations for the state school board to consider in the next couple of months.
“I think because it is our mindset that if a child is not in attendance, there has to be a reason why,” Warfield said. “It’s more important to us to find the reason why than be punitive and mark them and take them to court.”
“The court is the last resort.”
Updated: 4/12 1 p.m. to clarify the circumstances surrounding the 2,900 students referred to the attendance officer in Birmingham City Schools.