How a California school district is solving chronic absenteeism
As a school nurse in a rural district in Livingston, California, Lori Morgan's job usually involves scraped knees and vision tests.
But she couldn't help putting one more task on her to-do list: attendance.
"In a perfect world, the first time they didn't come to school, we would go out and meet the parent or call the parent," Morgan said.
Morgan said she calls the parents, and if they don't answer, she visits families at home, encouraging them to reach out to her personally with questions about stomachaches or anxiety.
"When somebody will say, 'Lori, what are you doing calling me at 7 at night?' Well, which kid do I give 50% to? I gotta give each one of them 100%," Morgan said.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of chronically absent students more than doubled to a peak of 31% in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the Department of Education. The most recent data shows 28% of students were chronically absent in the 2022-2023 school year, meaning they missed 10% or more of school days.
Because of the pandemic, many younger children never got the chance to attend day care and build good habits. In California, one in three kindergartners are chronically absent, according to state data.
At the beginning of the year, Karolina Garcia's 5-year-old daughter Selene was missing at least one day a week on average.
"Am I a bad mom for leaving her when she's crying or am I a bad mom because she doesn't wanna go and I'm still taking her?" Garcia said.
Garcia said it was often hard to convince her daughter to go to school because she would tell her mom she was getting bullied or getting in trouble.
Missing one day of school at that age is more like missing three, with students needing two days to catch up, educators in the district say. Only 17% of kids chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade were able to read proficiently in third grade, according to the nonprofit Attendance Works.
"We don't stop. We keep going. If you miss some of the foundational skills, we don't stop and go back necessarily," Morgan said.
Morgan has helped make her district, the Livingston Union School District, an outlier, dropping its chronic absentee rate from 19% to 14%, according to the California Department of Education.
The school focuses on connection and rewards good attendance with extra recess to teach kids from a young age that they are wanted at school — and giving parents such as single mom Garcia any extra support they might need.
"Sometimes you gotta fix what's going on with the adults in the house before you can have a healthy kid," Morgan said.
"I know how important it is for a child to get a really good education," Morgan continued. "You start off bagging kindergarten, it all really does matter."
She's living the lesson she wants to teach parents and students: It's simply showing up that matters most.
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