Beyond talking the talk: Regal Elementary staff literally walk the walk to boost attendance

Yahoo

3 days ago

May 29—During his first year as a counselor at Regal Elementary, Tony DeBari used the standard method to reach families when their kids were not in class. He called their home, which for many kids was a five-minute walk from school.
But the phone calls weren't enough to get the kids to school or build relationships with families, Debari said. Midway through last year, a thought struck him.
"After the phone calls weren't working, I was like, 'Well, let's go pick them up,' " he said, and started the school's first "walking school bus," going door to door each morning to amass a herd of students to walk to school.
The "bus" services around 40 students who live along two predetermined routes, too close to qualify for Regal's one school bus. Much like a big yellow school bus, staff and volunteers walk to each kids' address before school. Staff knock on each door with a bright, "Regal, Regal!" and wait a few beats for their pupil to emerge, usually grinning or groggy.
Each morning, two teams of staff and volunteers assume the routes, one is a longer route that crosses the four lanes of Wellesley Street; it has a crosswalk, but the flashing lights indicating a pedestrian is crossing the street are only activated by a key that staff have.
"Families were scared to cross Wellesley," DeBari said, describing foggy or dark early hours that could shroud a kid crossing a busy street in commuter traffic.
The shorter route serves students in a nearby apartment complex, which happens to be home to many refugee and immigrant families. Often, punctuality at school takes some getting used to, one of the many adjustments one makes when moving to a new country.
"A lot of it for me is taking something off the family's plate," DeBari said.
On one morning last week, a crew of three staff and three volunteers meandered through the Regal Arms apartments, a Bluetooth speaker hung on librarian Simeon Bergstedt's lanyard, playing a cover of "Three Little Birds."
He knocked on each door and waited for the kids to hop on the nonexistent bus. Wearing a foam ram head as a hat and waving blue pom poms, his presence cracks a smile from a few of his riders when they open their front door, still wiggling on their shoes or shrugging on their backpacks.
"It takes a huge pressure off families," Bergstedt said "When all you got to do is open that door and there's a reindeer hat and music playing, it makes it a lot easier to get to school on time."
DeBari started the initiative part way through his first year at the school in an effort to boost attendance in some of his most chronically absent pupils. Along the way, he saw unintended side effects like convening with families and building trust by literally meeting them where they are, he said. He saw kids grow close, building a bond "kinda like a sports team, they want to be part of it," he said.
Originally, he was the "alarm clock" for many of his students. At his knock they'd come to the door sleepily rubbing their eyes and assume the groggy march to school. But at least they'll be at school on time, he said.
Now his kids chastise him for his tardiness when he's a few moments late for pick up.
His endeavors appear to be paying off, according to Spokane Public Schools attendance data. Of current walking school bus participants who also walked last year, 88% of them increased or maintained their attendance level. A fourth of them reached what the district deems "satisfactory attendance," missing no more than 9 days of the 180-day school year.
Improving attendance has long been a goal of schools following the pandemic, when "chronic absenteeism," defined as missing 10% of the school year, or 18 days, has sharply increased and shown little signs of slowing. The proportion of chronically absent students nearly doubled around the state from 15% to 27% between the 2018-19 school year, the last full one before the pandemic, and 2023-24, the latest year with available data according to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In Spokane Public Schools' rates of chronic absenteeism jumped from 17% to 32% in those same years.
Joe Johnston, a professor of sociology at Gonzaga University, embeds the walking school bus in his courses, even publishing his research on the program in recent years. He's a regular face at Logan Elementary, where many of his students lead daily walks to school in an effort to naturally build relationships with the schoolkids merely with their consistent presence.
"The program, on its surface, is really all about improving attendance and timeliness to school, but the way that we try to do that is through building relationships and community," Johnston said. "And if we're successful in the building of relationships and community, the attendance part sort of just takes care of itself."
By embedding themselves into the kids' daily routine at such a "tender time" in their sleepy morning walk to school, Johnston hopes to teach not only the systems and structures they learn about in their lecture halls, but also that they have the ability to address them.
"A lot of our social problems, the way that we make progress on those is through communal and social responses to that," Johnston said. "So I think there's something about the walking school bus, even though it is just a walk in the morning, that can be a real tool for understanding how we shouldn't just be sad and down and depressed; we actually got to get up and keep on doing stuff and keep on engaging."
DeBari noted anecdotal observations in his walking school bus riders' attendance, having improved "big time," he said, some of his kids even trying to come to school when they're sick and contagious. Seeing them "take ownership" of their punctuality, he said, is what drives him to continue his 7:30 a.m. marches around the neighborhood.
"Rain, shine, snow, we go," he said is the bus motto.
"You can't miss a day for those families, they're depending on you."
Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.