L.A. Unified Sees ‘Major Gains' in Fight Against Chronic Absenteeism
Chronic absenteeism remains a problem for LAUSD, but the school district is making gains, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said on his last house visit of the year aimed at driving student attendance.
The district made progress this year with the tricky challenge, Carvalho said during the home visit last month, but officials could not say how much progress was made exactly in reducing chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than ten percent of the school year.
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'Our approach is we support, we're not about penalizing,' said Carvalho of the strategy being employed in getting chronically absent kids to class. 'Two years ago, we were in a different position … [but] conditions have improved dramatically.'
Carvalho said the number of chronically absent students is slowly dropping closer to pre-pandemic levels, in part because of the district's push to personalize its efforts to bring individual students to class, with well-known tactics like his house visits.
Los Angeles isn't the only place struggling with persistent attendance issues. A study from the American Enterprise Institute found that chronic absenteeism nationwide rose over 10% from 2019 to 2024, peaking in 2022 at 28% of students.
The same report said the national percentage of students with good attendance fell sharply between 2019 and 2023, compounding the problem.
More and more research, in fact, is suggesting that higher levels of chronically absent students could become the new normal.
In L.A., chronic absenteeism remains a problem. At the beginning of the school year, nearly one-third of all students in the nation's second-largest district were missing class enough to be deemed chronically absent.
That's an improvement from the years following the COVID-19 shutdowns in the district, when nearly half of all students were chronically absent, the worst the problem ever got in LA Unified's history.
Carvalho said it's gotten better because he and the district's attendance team got personal in their approach, tailoring efforts to individual families, and knocking on the doors where kids had repeatedly missed school.
Attendance counselors, school principals, and sometimes Carvalho himself have visited with thousands of families personally each school year since then, and talked to parents about why their kids are missing class.
They offer solutions, like free busing or new school uniforms, or whatever could help. The tactic is a standard tool for LAUSD, one that Carvalho and district attendance workers and officials trumpet as a reason for their success.
But chronic absenteeism has been a serious problem for years in L.A. More than 32% of L.A. Unified students were considered chronically absent for the 2023-2024 school year, the latest year for which the data exists.
That's well above the historic norms, but still an improvement from the abysmal previous years. Los Angeles Unified had 36% of students consistently missing class in 2022-2023, and just over 45% of students in 2021-22.
Fallout from COVID-19 remains the main thing parents and educators blame for the historically high numbers.
During Carvalho's last at-home visit of the year, the mother of a chronically absent student said that since the pandemic she's been confused over when to keep her sick home from class.
At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, Carvalho said annual incremental gains will be how the district digs itself out.
That plan appears to be working, he said in May, with last year seeing a dip and district officials expecting 2024 to have even lower numbers.
LAUSD officials told the LA School Report that chronic absenteeism data for the 2024-2025 school year has not been finalized, so they could not quantify the gains.
Still, Rudy Gomez, the director of iAttend, LAUSD's district-wide attendance program, said in an interview that the district has made progress fighting chronic absenteeism.
'We have had some significant gains in chronic absenteeism, although we still have a lot of work to do,' said Gomez. 'But we've seen some major gains, all across the board.'
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