California’s dramatic jump in chronically absent students part of a nationwide surge

This story was updated to provide additional information on the data collected from California districts for the 2022-23 school year by a consulting firm.

Veronica Lopez has twin fifth-grade daughters. One is working toward her school’s “perfect attendance” award. The other, Miranda, has been sick a lot and chronically absent from Los Angeles Unified’s Fair Avenue Elementary.

“If she’s not feeling well, then she shouldn’t go to school,” Lopez said. “She’s not going to learn. She’s not going to get better. She needs to rest.”

Lopez said having a child miss school is the “last thing you want” as a parent, both for their education and because it can be hard to find someone to look after them.

With schools fully reopened, millions of students were calling out sick in 2021-22 at a much higher level than before the pandemic, according to national data compiled and analyzed by Stanford University education professor Thomas S. Dee in partnership with The Associated Press. EdSource collaborated in the effort with an analysis of California data. The same trend surfaced for California, where the percentage of chronically absent students zoomed from the pre-pandemic rate of 12.1% in 2018-19 to 30% in 2021-22.

Dee’s analysis found that since the pandemic the number of students who were chronically absent nearly doubled to about 13.6 million, with 1.8 million of them in California.

Compared with before the pandemic, Dee found that about 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent in 2021-22, including more than 1 million in California.

EdSource’s analysis of California data shows increases in chronic absenteeism in nearly every district. Chronic absence is defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. For students on a typical 180-day school calendar, this totals to about one month of missed school. There were significant increases in all groups of districts — city, suburbs, town and rural — with the highest chronic absenteeism rate of 35.7% in districts serving rural areas.

Dee said his national analysis, which is based on data from 40 states and Washington, D.C., tested for explanations like illness and Covid-related policies such as mask mandates, but they don’t explain the significant spikes in chronic absenteeism.

While sickness may have contributed to the rise in chronic absenteeism, Dee said, “it’s not really wholly explaining it … so the evidence is pointing to other substantive and enduring factors.”

He said the findings “should really be a kind of clarion call to learn more about exactly what is explaining this incredible growth.”

“Kids who are more economically challenged don’t have as much resources to make up for time lost in the classroom,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of a chronic absenteeism initiative called Attendance Works.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education has led to a significant financial investment in students. But there’s a crucial caveat, Dee added. “The effectiveness of these investments relies in part on the expectation that students—particularly those that are most educationally vulnerable—can access these supports through consistent school attendance,” he wrote in recently published research.

Experts attribute the absences to a variety of factors, ranging from difficulty accessing consistent transportation to school, the emotional and economic fallout of pandemic-related deaths and increased anxieties around the safety of attending school in person.

And while rates have risen across the board, the consequences of missing school are likely to differ based on demographics such as socioeconomic status, race or ethnicity, and age.

“The pandemic’s over but if people lost family members, that matters,” Chang said. “That’s a lasting impact on a whole set of things, both emotional and economic.”

LAUSD steps up efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism

With every absence, Lopez had to supply a doctor’s note so Miranda could return to school, a task that became increasingly difficult because Lopez had to take off from her job as a high school Spanish teacher to take her daughter to the doctor.

“It’s not only an inconvenience,” Lopez said. The co-pays add to the expense, she added.

When she didn’t get a doctor’s note, she felt pressured by school administrators demanding that her daughter’s “truancies” be excused. So she wrote letters detailing each absence.

“They should trust us that, you know, we understand our children,” Lopez said. “I mean, if you see them in the morning, and they do not look well, or … even if it’s a low-grade fever, like, yeah, we may not be doctors, but we’re parents.”

With a 40% absentee rate in the 2021-22 school year, the Los Angeles Unified School District developed an outreach campaign targeting students and their families — including those struggling with homelessness.

The district’s superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, has led iAttend events, where he, along with school board members, principals, attendance counselors and other staff, go door to door to meet students who were chronically absent and encourage them to return. Their next event is planned for Friday.

During a recent back-to-school rally, he said district staffers knocked on 9,000 doors during the last school year, which he credits with a 10-percentage-point drop in absenteeism during the 2022-23 school year to 30%.

“A change in mindset”

Many of California’s districts in towns and rural regions faced high chronic absenteeism rates long before the pandemic and, according to an EdSource analysis, rural districts as a group have seen the sharpest increases since then.

Renee Slater’s daughter is a straight-A student who is active in her middle school’s student council. Yet, she missed 20 days this past school year.

The eighth grader had a good attendance record prior to the pandemic, but that changed when she began insisting on staying home more often than she ever had, her mother said.

“She’d just be like: ‘I don’t feel good today, I’m just gonna stay home.’ She’s on student council, she’s very involved with school activities,” said Slater. “She doesn’t dislike school; it was just a change in mindset. Like, you know, I can make it up.”

Slater, a single mother of two, teaches in the Rio Bravo-Greeley School District, the same district her daughter attends, and she’s worried about her learning.

The daughter remains high-achieving, “but I know there is still learning loss there no matter what,” Slater said.

Their district’s chronic absenteeism rates rose to 21% during the 2021-22 school year, up from 8% in 2018-19.

Rio Bravo-Greeley, a 1,000-student rural school district in Central California’s Bakersfield, saw its chronic absenteeism rate more than double to 21% during the 2021-22 school year.

The district’s boundaries mostly encompass vast orchards of almond trees on the rapidly developing northwestern fringe of the city. It serves students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, with some of the more economically disadvantaged students living in areas with weak internet connectivity, according to Slater. This reduces their ability to catch up on assignments they may submit online if they miss school.

“My daughter has support at home, and certain students that might not have as much support at home, I would see them falling further and further behind,” Slater said. This has occurred even as her district has implemented strategies meant to bring students back to campus, like more phone calls to check in on them.

With high school on the horizon and her daughter dreaming of becoming an engineer, Slater finds herself often reminding her daughter that she can’t continue skipping out on in-person classes.

“She has a really good work ethic, so I don’t worry about her achieving goals — just making sure she’s in class,” Slater said.

Chang said one potential solution could be increased and more intentional communication from schools to the families they serve. Dee’s just-published report notes that low-cost options like postcards and text messages can help schools connect to students and families.

Rural districts combat state’s highest absenteeism rates

At Lodi Unified, a 28,000-student urban district in Central California, families will begin receiving a new weekly letter this upcoming school year with updates on school activities and events. The “Sunday night letters,” as they’re being referred to, were sparked in part by a tripling of Lodi’s chronic absenteeism rate to 39.2% in 2021-22.

“Every principal will be crafting a message that will go out either via email or text — whichever the family wants,” said Robert Sahli, the district’s associate superintendent. “It’s just really important to get that frequent communication.”

At Lassen Union High School District in rural northeastern California, students, particularly younger ones, have remained fearful of school settings after experiencing Covid-related deaths in their families.

“We’re also seeing a situation where it’s more of a feared return to normal school setting simply because of the anxiety, depression that they’re feeling,” said Morgan Nugent, superintendent of the 857-student district in Susanville in Lassen County, about 100 miles north of Lake Tahoe.

Knocking on absent students’ doors to do a wellness check isn’t feasible for them, as their district is spread out so far that some students live over 45 miles away. “If we do that, we’re looking at a two-hour time where our employees are out of the building doing a welfare check for some of our students,” he said.

Farther north in Modoc, the state’s most northeastern county, distance also leads to absences, said their Superintendent Tom O’Malley.

“If you need any kind of advanced services, if you’re a child who’s got some kind of a medical issue, you’re going to be gone a lot,” said O’Malley, who also grew up in the area.

The nearly 900-student district experienced an increase in chronic absenteeism of 15 percentage points to 38% in 2021-22.

“Our kids miss a lot of school, but you kind of have to,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”

At Happy Valley Union School District in rural Shasta County, one solution has been to purchase a van to transport students to school and to host roundtable events that increase direct communication with parents.

“Literally, we’re buying a round table so that we can fit together and have that conversation face to face in a peaceful, calm manner,” said Superintendent Shelly Craig.

The 500-student district had a significant advantage in reducing their absenteeism rates from 45% in November 2021 to 16% by April 2022: They established a strategic team on chronic absenteeism years before the pandemic.

Signs of continuing high absentee rates

Most states, including California, have not released attendance data for the 2022-23 school year for its nearly 1,000 districts. In Dee’s study, two states that did release their data —Massachusetts and Connecticut — reported continuing high absentee rates for the past school year, a trend also surfacing in California.

School Innovations & Achievement, a national attendance consulting firm, found that while still high, the rate of chronic absenteeism in California may be dropping from 32.7% in 2021-22 to 30.5% in 2022-23. Their numbers are overall higher than the state’s because they count attendance for every period, catching students who come to school but leave later. The analysis is based on a sample of 29 of the 356 districts that the firm contracts with to advise on solutions. The firm declined to identify the districts but said the sample represents California’s diverse geographic regions, district sizes and student demographics.

“A lot of the feelings of safety, security and connectedness were broken and disrupted due to the pandemic, and so (students) are just now starting to build school-going habits and reestablishing connections at schools,” said Erica Peterson, the firm’s director of education and engagement.

EdSource reporter Zaidee Stavely, Emma Gallegos and intern Cara Nixon contributed to this story.

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