When a student starts missing school, things can go sideways. It can be hard for them to keep up with coursework, pass classes, and even graduate. In Colorado, about 26% of students are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of school days.
Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat Colorado. Sherecently reported on how one Colorado school district is trying to get students back into the classroom. She spoke with KUNC’s Beau Baker.
BEAU BAKER: You reported on the Greeley-Evans district in Weld County, and specifically Northridge High School. What’s going on there with absenteeism?
ANN SCHIMKE: Yeah, so we should probably start pre-pandemic. Chronic absenteeism was around 35% in the district, which is high. The first full year of the pandemic, it went up to 40%. That's obviously a huge number of kids who are not coming to school regularly.
BAKER: In your article, you gave us a fascinating look at a world I think a lot of people don't even know exists. You have Greeley-Evans contracting with this group out of Denver, Zero Dropouts. You describe the job of these ‘attendance advocates’ as part detective work, part social work, and part paperwork. So take us through the day of someone working for Zero Dropouts. What are they doing to get students back on track?
SCHIMKE: Yeah, that's a great question. So there are several things that they're doing. For example, one of the attendance advocates I followed at Northridge High School started out her morning calling the families of kids on the no-show list. I think there were four or five dozen kids on the list. So she just kind of went down the list and called, left messages, and tried to reach people.
For the kids that they couldn't reach that way, a pair of attendance advocates from Northridge later in the day, they went and did home visits. So they would knock on doors and kind of say, ‘hey, we were expecting your child to show up at school. Where are they?’
So it was a lot of just tracking down and kind of making sure kids didn't fall through the cracks.
They would also even just do things like monitor the hallways during passing periods. So another kind of face-time exposure. Most of them went by their first name, so they generally didn't have quite the feeling of a teacher-student relationship. It was a little more casual and perhaps a bit more approachable for certain students.
BAKER: Yeah, I thought it was telling in your story that one of the advocates was talking about how just by pronouncing a student's name correctly, she was able to earn her trust and kind of move on from there. It seems like they're occupying this space as part mentor, part friend. Not quite an authority figure.
SCHIMKE: Yeah. And when I talked to students, I felt like what they were saying was ‘They're nice to me. I like talking to them. I like having a conversation with them.’ They weren't really framing it in the sense of ‘they made me come to school and they tracked me down when I was truant.’ It really seemed like they were a little bit more just feeling connected to an adult, whereas maybe they hadn't previously.
BAKER: With all of this in mind, how successful has this program been for Greeley-Evans?
SCHIMKE: I think it's hard to say. One thing that was really interesting to me is how many metrics and pieces of data they collect about kids. I mean, everything from chronic absences to who's getting D’s and F’s. So that's a kind of a red flag system for them. But I think that's a question I can't answer in terms of how successful it is. They’re in the second year of a three-year contract. It may not be clear yet what the outcomes are.
BAKER: You mention this is a three-year contract. It's being paid for with federal COVID stimulus dollars. So after three years, can the district pay for this program without that federal money?
SCHIMKE: When that money disappears I don't know that the district – like a lot of districts who are using that stimulus money for extra staff – I just don't know where they're going to find the money. I don't think they'd want to take teachers out of classrooms to fund this, even if it is very successful.
Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat Colorado. You can find her work at https://co.chalkbeat.org/
This story was produced by KUNC’s Maxine Speier.
