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New Jersey schools students absenteeism is soaring post-COVID

Trend could have academic, mental and social impacts on young people

By: Mary Ann Kuruth
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... While COVID-19 may be in there rear-view mirror for many New Jerseyans, school districts across the state are battling a lingering, dangerous outcome of the pandemic: spiking rates of chronic absenteeism among K-12 students.
..... The number of chronically absent public school students -those who miss at least 18 days of a 180-day school year, or 10% of class days - shot up when schools went to remote learning. but even after districts returned to in-person learning, absenteeism has remained high.
..... The trend has educators worried, because chronic absenteeism is linked to a higher chance of dropping out, which can lead to weaker job prospects, poor overall health, and a higher risk of involvement in the criminal justice system, experts say.
..... "Chronic absenteeism is likely public schools' greatest post-pandemic challenge" because of its potential to hamper other priorities - getting kids back on track academically, mentally and socially, said Nate Malkus,a K-12 expert at the American enterprise Institute, a conservative tank.
..... A NorthJersey.com analysis of state date on absenteeism in the 2018-2019 academic school year and the 2022-2023 school year, self-reported by New Jersey's 640 school districts, found that:
* Chronic absenteeism hovers around 40% in some districts, including Trenton, Paterson, Camden and Seaside Heights.
* Large urban districts that had already had a significant absenteeism problem before the pandemic saw the problem worse in the 2022-2023 academic school year, the first full year back in-person and the most recent years data available.
* Some charter school had alarming high absenteeism rate in 2022-202: TEAM Academy Charter school in Newark was at 48.1%, followed by Newark's Roseville Community Charter School and Camden's KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy at 44%.
* The problem is not limited to urban districts. The absenteeism rate in the Teaneck school district jumbled from 8.9% before the pandemic to 22.5% in 2022-2023. Bloomingdale rose from 3.9% to 15.4%. Montclair went from 6.4% to 10.4%, Ridgewood rose from 3.7% to 6.2% and Morris Hills Regional went from 4.1% to 9.3%. Franklin Lakes rose from 3.7% to 9.1%.
* 194 New Jersey districts exceeded the state's limit for chronic absenteeism in 2018-2019. that jumped to 252 districts in 2022-2023 - when the target, based on the state average, was even easier to achieve.
..... New Jersey schools aren't only seeing increased chronic absenteeism after COVID-19, but a related problem - lower attendance rates among students overall.

School could have become afterthought for student

..... For 13-year-old student Shamar Boone from Paterson, school easily could have become an afterthought when his father became disabled, leaving his family on the verge of homelessness.
..... A recurring mass in the brain left Octavius Boone, a father of four, unemployed and unable to drive or care for himself. Sharmar's mother Jazzmechah Parson, 36, became Boone's full-time caregiver as he underwent several brain surgeries.
..... Then, in March 2023, the family was evicted by its Paterson landlord. Shamar's dad paid for a hotel until his funds ran out, Parson said. She turned to the state, which put the family up temporarily in Clifton, Paterson and later Wayne.
..... Parson applied for federal rent subsidies through the Department of Community Affairs' Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program.
..... Shamar and his tree siblings, ages 5 to 14, shared a single room at a Days Inn in Wayne with their mother and ailing father for six months.
..... Yet the seventh grader was determined to make it to class. A school district van dropped the siblings at their schools in the morning.
..... Getting back home was harder, because Shamar had begun working a few hours at a local car wash to make some extra cash. That meant taking a public bus after work back home to the Days Inn in Wayne.
..... A reserved child who breaks into a bright grin and dimples when his teachers pull his leg. Shamar seems to sense that school is closest shot to finding a way out.
..... "Being in school is important for me," he said. "I like to deal with cars, and I want to run my own business. And to work in the car wash, you got to learn, to read, to know math.
..... "You never know - in school you could have opportunities and you can take it step by step form there," he said.
..... Shamar switched from his Paterson public middle school to College Achieve Paterson Charter School last September. [2023] His new school learned about his family situation only in late November, [2023] months after their difficulties began. A series of tardy days in October [2023] was a read flag for basketball coach Lorenzo Williams. He checked in with Shamar and learned his family's story.
..... "We would never had known," said school counselor Qunisha Statum. "He was always in school with a smile on his face."

State's schools face lower average attendance overall

..... New Jersey schools aren't seeing only increased chronic absenteeism, but also slightly lower attendance rates among students overall.
..... The pandemic weakened "the culture of attendance" in schools generally, said the American Enterprise institute's Malkus. His "Return to Learn" tracker looks at state-by-state trends in schools absenteeism.
..... the average rate of attendance in New Jersey's public schools in the years between 2016 and 2019 remained steady at about 95%. That drooped to 93% in the 2022-2023 academic year, Malkus said.
..... "average attendance dropped substantially, to about 28% more absences on an average day in 2023 than ti was pre-pandemic," Malkus said.
..... This matter because average daily attendance rates reflect the behavior of all students, unlike chronic absenteeism rates, which represent a smaller group.
.... Fluid attendance polices and closed school during the pandemic led to an unprecedented spike in the number of chronically absent students say some experts, eroding the habit of attendance.
..... Others say students and parents are also more likely to stay home when they are ill, a practice that began during the pandemic.
..... "We're still trying to pinpoint why absenteeism rates are going up," said Michael Gottfried, an expert on education policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. "Schools w4re facing disengagement prior to COVID, and remote work could factor into parents keeping their kids home more often, so we can't yet identify why kids are truly missing school at such high rates."
..... New Jersey State Board of education member Joseph Ricca, who is also superintendent of the White Plains school district in New York, said he thinks there are multiple reasons behind the trend.
..... "A waker culture of attendance may certainly be part of it in some households, especially those where it was already weak before the pandemic," he said.
..... "But people are much more conscious of symptomatic illness in the public space today than in 2019."
..... COVID-19 pandemic attendance policies that kept kids out of school during outbreaks, of if they were exposed to the virus, changed how parents and students through about attendance.
..... "What we have done is really sort of rewired the public consciousness in many ways around attendance," said Paula White, head of JerseyCan, a local K-12 advocacy group. "Not being present doesn't feel necessarily as consequential."

Chronic absenteeism 'multi-layered problem in impoverished districts'

..... In March of this year, [2024] Jazzmeckah Parson moved with her family into a three-bedroom rent-subsidized apartment, a short walk to Shamar's charter school, after the state approved her application for Section 8 assistance.
..... In mid-June, [2024] Shamar's father transfered form St. Joseph's hospital in Paterson to Mount Sinai in New York where he underwent another emergency brain surgery, followed by physical therapy and rehabilitation.
..... Parson says there isn't a diagnosis yet - except that the growth wasn't malignant.
..... "It's a little easy now," Parson said, referring to the absent of Shamer's father from home, "but also a little hard because I have to manage my kids and try to go to see him."
..... "I'm trying to make a way,: she said. "I try. I'm only 36 years old. I'm one person."
..... Seated in their living room, Parson described struggling from childhood.
..... She was 12 when her mother, Cassandra Parson, was killed on Halloween in Paterson in 2004. Parson was asleep downstairs. "My mother use dot do drugs," she said. "A man killed her in my house. He went upstairs at five in the morning and strangled her with a pillow while we were all downstairs sleeping."
..... "My kids never knew a grandmother," she said.
..... Gemer Mills, a Paterson native and the head of College Achieve Paterson Charter School, said that "chronic absenteeism is a multi-layered problem in impoverished districts."
..... "Some students are with parents or grandparents, some are homeless, some are from other countries and don't necessarily understand the law here requires a compulsory education," Mills said. "What we do know is that many of the students suffer form many of the same types of things."
..... The intergenerational poverty Parson has faced is one of these multi-layered problems.
..... Hispanic immigrants sometimes leave school midyear to visit their home countries, while Black student are more prone to homelessness, Mills said.
..... Shamar Boone is an exception provided "he stays the course," said Mills.
..... "We saw this across the nation, said Malkus. "Districts that had higher chronic absenteeism pre-pandemic had big increases. It may not be that those districts saw larger increase compared to districts that did not have an absenteeism problem, but in absolute numbers the number of affected children would be very high."
..... Poor students tend to be worse off than their wealthier peers, Malkus said, and this is worse for minority students in disadvantage areas, especially Black and Hispanic students.

Some districts taking steps to reduce absenteeism

..... Identifying the root cause behind stubborn absenteeism rates is a priority for the state, said Kathy Ehling, an assistant commissioner at the state Department of Education, during an April [2024] State Board of Education meeting.
..... Districts with more than a 10.1% chronic absenteeism rate must develop corrective action plans, using state guidance to help schools tackle root causes. In 2023, more than 70% of school districts had a chronic absenteeism rate of 10% or higher, compared to only 32% of schools in 2018-2019. but the onus is on school districts, state officials have said.
..... Kevin Dehmer, acting commissioner of the state Department of Education told the board it was taking the problem "very seriously," even though he said New Jersey's absenteeism numbers are among the lowest nationally.
..... The national average for chronic absenteeism was about 31% in 2021-2022, compared with 18% in New Jersey. with a 16.6% statewide average in 2022-2023, New Jersey has fared better than most other states. But its proportional increase is similar, said Malkus, the absenteeism researcher.
..... "New Jersey has lower rates than most other states, that's true, but they had lower rates before the pandemic as well," he said. "So their growth has been the same in proportional terms. Six percentage points on top of 10% is a big increase."
..... The state has identified root causes of increase absenteeism, but it expects district leaders to take the reins for change and tap into their communities.
..... State superintendents at the county level are expected to work with school districts on their corrective-action plans, but "ultimately, districts need to use locally sourced data to determine the root cause of their absenteeism and the most untactful responses," the state said at April's [2024] board meeting.
..... Districts are "the most effective unit of change," with "spot checks" from the state, said White, of JerseyCan. "attendance is very much a relational and hyper-local issue. It is about knowing your community, knowing your students, knowing families, creating systems and structures."
..... Ricca, the State Board of Education member, said families play the biggest role in having kids attend school regulatory. "I don't know if a state entity or a school entity can ever be as effective as the parent or guardian at home in making sure that happens, and if they're experiencing difficulty, making sure that the schools are connecting with them to overcome it,' he said.
..... "Ultimately, it is really important for kids to go to school for the benefit of the country and their future,' Ricca said.
..... A Paterson Public Schools spokesperson said district initiatives reduced chronic absenteeism by 4% to 38.5% in 2023-2024, compared with the previous year, when it was 42.5%. The increase in numbers "could be attributed to more students staying home due to sickness," it said, "or exposure to COVID-19."
..... Yet two years after the pandemic, at 38.5%, Paterson's absenteeism rate is still much higher than its pre-pandemic rate of 27.6%.
..... Some other districts are also taking steps on their own to address absenteeism.
..... At the Manchester regional High School district in Passaic County, for instance, a public school where chronic absenteeism jumped from 17.5% in 2018-2019 to 33% in 2022-2023, the school board decided to hire an attendance clerk to make home visits and counsel students.
..... In June, [2024] it drafted an advertisement for a one-year position.
..... The Bayonne School District in Hudson County published corrective action plans for every school in the district on its website for the 2023-2024 school year, after a spike in chronic absenteeism from 13.5% in 2018-2019 to 26% in 2022-2023.
..... The Bayonne high school plan included keeping attendance "a subject of conversation" at school functions and events, crating a timetable for staff to review attendance problems regularly, and sending parents of at-risk students detailed letters during the year, showing how much school their child missed.

Mentors a key influence to help some kids stay in school

..... Charter schools were not immune to the high absenteeism trends, either, with rates going up after the pandemic.
..... Collage Achieve Paterson, Shamar's charter school, had 23.8% of its students chronically absent in 2022-2023.
..... A charter school day is at least an hour longer than a typical public school day, the state public charter schools association said, and :many" charters were trying to "redouble efforts to curb it."
..... In November, [2023] upon urging by the middle school principal and counselor, Mills paid for a program to help students struggling with depression, suicidal ideation and chronic absenteeism. The Resilient Stars Program served 70 middle-schoolers at Collage Achieve for $27,525, school officials said.
..... Strong leadership and a connection between school and family are key to keeping kids interested in attending classes, Mills said.
..... Jamal hall, an administrator at Collage Achieve, met Shamer for the first time at the car wash where he was working after school. when Shamar did not let his car through without Hall paying, Hall was impressed.
..... He encourage Shamar to join the higher-performing college Achieve -a decision that may have changed Shamar's life path.
..... As family members adjusted to their father's disability, Hall became a mentor to Shamar.
..... "Shamar is a highlight for us," said Mills, because unlike most middle-schoolers focusing on studies and sports, he "wants to provide. He's adamant about figuring out this world."
..... "He comes to school every day," Mills said. "He's been given a camera. he's the radiographer for our middle school basketball games.
..... "It's the kind of welcoming environment you must create for students, by monopolizing a young person's time, so they feel like they're missing something by not being here."
..... The school is Shamar's community outside home. "I stay positive by being around the right people, like Mr. Hall and Mr. will and my mom," Shamar said. Mr. Will is Williams, the basketball coach.
..... "Whenever I have a problem at my school I will go to Mr. will and he will give me a couple of advises [sic] on how to stay to yourself ... cause when you're doing good things, people are going to come in the middle and take advantage of it," Shamar said.
..... Whether it's running a car rim business, or one day pwning his own dealership - both goals for Shamar - seeking out mentors to help stay on track is key.
..... "They stand out about him," said Williams, the coach. "He really appreciates the people in his life, wh8ich makes it easier for guys like me and Mr. Hall to be there for him when he needs it, because if his high spirit."

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