John Keller, chief information officer for the Indiana Department of Education, shared absenteeism data with state lawmakers last week. (Indiana Department of Education)
Lawmakers passed a new law earlier this year that requires schools to create a truancy prevention policy and asks attendance officers to make legislative recommendations. Now, lawmakers are revisiting the topic ahead of the upcoming legislative session.
The Interim Study Committee on Education heard about the most recent school attendance data from the Indiana Department of Education and listened to testimony from schools, professors, education companies and other stakeholders last week.
“We’re just trying to add a little context and depth to the understanding of chronic absenteeism,” said IDOE Chief Information Officer John Keller. “It’s not just a rate that changes year over year, and we need to be going in the right direction. We’re trying to give a little bit of the sense of the real magnitude of some of these challenges.”
What schools are doing
Officials from Newcastle Community Schools and the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township told lawmakers how their districts combat chronic absenteeism.
Newcastle received funding to employ an attendance liaison who works with families that struggle to get their kids to school. Kathrine Smith, the liaison, told lawmakers she usually makes about 30 or 40 calls to parents every day when their children are not at school and works directly with those families to find solutions.
Sometimes, parents are just unaware that their student missed the bus after they left for work. Other times, there may be more complex barriers that make it difficult for students to go to school.
"The work I do is rooted in three components: the safety and well-being of our students, teaching students the value of their education and helping them understand that showing up matters," Smith said. "However, what you don't see from the outside looking in is the the visual of the families I support and their different stories. Most often, a student's symptom of chronic absenteeism yields from their family environment and socioeconomic status."
Smith said many of her students come from nontraditional families and may be responsible for their siblings, providing household income or finding their own transportation to and from school. Their families may also lack stable housing, a steady income and affordable health care.
Addressing some of those barriers is one component to to helping chronically absent students, but Newcastle officials said that's not the only piece of the puzzle. The other piece is motivating students to come to school.
The district also used some of its grant funding to hire three new career coaches who work closely with chronically absent students. Newcastle Superintendent Matthew Shoemaker said career coaches help those students understand the link between going to school and reaching their long-term goals.
"Our kids need to see the purpose. They need to have a vision of where they want to go in life," he said. "That helps [Smith], so they really work in tandem."
Smith said motivating students to attend school is a process that takes time.
"Once I see a student that has found dedication to coming to school, that career coach becomes such a valuable piece in helping them figure out why they want to keep returning day after day," she said.
Smith also works closely with the local prosecutor's office. She said the prosecutor helps families by utilizing community resources and almost always find solutions before truancy cases escalate to law enforcement.
James Taylor is the director of student and social services at MSD Warren Township. He said his district uses early warning software and a robust resource center to flag absentee students and aid their families.
Taylor said schools are ultimately responsible for boosting their own attendance rates, but employees need professional development to learn how to help chronically absent students.
“Give us some money so we can have training so we can certify attendance officers, counselors, parent liaisons, social workers, to be trained on how to deal with everything that’s going on,” Taylor said.
He said attendance is a much larger problem now than it was in previous generations and even before the pandemic. And Taylor urged lawmakers to use the data and information collected from schools to craft any statewide mandates they send to the General Assembly.
Taylor also encouraged lawmakers to give schools the funds to understand and implement future mandates.
Questions about data and policy
Higher education officials and many others also weighed in. Professors from Indiana University and Butler University as well as a representative from the NAACP urged lawmakers not to prioritize punitive measures to get kids back in school. They said chronic absenteeism is incredibly complex and solving the problem will take different approaches for each child, depending on their situation.
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, Butler University's dean of its Founder's College, has studied school attendance and absenteeism for about 15 years. She said schools' chronic absenteeism numbers can be misleading because absenteeism includes both excused and unexcused absences.
Gentle-Genitty also said attendance data was heavily skewed by inconsistent attendance standards and reporting by schools during the pandemic, but more students are coming back to school now. She said only 17 to 25 percent of Indiana's chronic absenteeism rate includes students who are unexcused.
"All our data is flawed, and any hat we hang on it, we're hanging on a sinking ship," Gentle-Genitty said.
READ MORE: Indiana school absenteeism rates improve. State announces new dashboard for the fall
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Gentle-Genitty encouraged lawmakers to use the correct terminology and be very clear about the issues they are addressing.
"Attendance and absenteeism are not the same thing and should not be used interchangeably," she said. "Attendance tracks only attendance and absence. That's what schools are responsible for collecting. Absenteeism is everything around the 'why' of that absence. That's where we do not have any resources at all, where schools have to go out of their way to find those resources."
Gentle-Genitty also said there are two different school funding models across the country that take attendance into account. One of those models focuses on average daily attendance and the other is based off enrollment.
Indiana uses an enrollment model, but Gentle-Genitty said there could be ways to improve Indiana's school funding without completely switching to an average daily attendance model. She encouraged lawmakers to further study the two models and find ways to improve on them.
"When you put them together, it means there's an opportunity here with this summer study to look a little bit deeper about how best to support our students beyond just numbers," Gentle-Genitty said.
Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University's School of Education, said Indiana's chronic absenteeism problem stems from a lack of school engagement.
"There's this temptation, when we try to change behavior through policy, to resort to harsher consequences and make the consequences so tough that folks want to avoid it. But one of the big lessons of psychology is punishment is a poor method for changing behavior," he said.
Skiba said schools will have to engage in harsher and harsher consequences for that method to work, which will further alienate struggling families and only worsen the problem. He said that could lead to more families pulling their students out of school completely.
He mentioned a study which shows greater disparities between minority students and their peers in schools that punish chronic absenteeism more harshly compared to schools that try to remove barriers for those students.
"The psychology of behavior change tells us that to get people to change, you want a lot of carrot and pretty judicious and limited use of the stick," Skiba said.
Skiba recommended lawmakers find the root causes of chronic absenteeism and implement changes to remove those barriers – instead enacting harsher punishments on families.
He encouraged lawmakers to look at a promising model developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council. It includes multi-tiered attendance policies, prohibiting out-of-school suspension for truancy, early warning systems, and implementing community aid and interventions for families whose students are chronically absent.
"Chronic absenteeism is getting worse. But on the other hand, we're not the worst state by any means," Skiba said. "What that means is we can allow ourselves not to be rushed into quick-fix, punitive responses that may sound appealing but ultimately may just make things worse."
Representatives from education companies EmpowerU, City Connects and Communities in Schools also spoke to lawmakers about their programs.
City Connects and Communities in Schools both utilize in-school coordinators who assist students with a variety of tasks. Those programs can cost individual school buildings between $5,000 and $10,000 per month.
So far lawmakers have said very little about their specific plans to tackle chronic absenteeism during the next legislative session.
Kirsten is our education reporter. Contact her at kadair@wfyi.org or follow her on Twitter at @kirsten_adair.
