Truancy trends: Trouble looms if district can’t get kids to class

By Marcus Clem

With state oversight looming, classroom attendance rates are raising questions about the future of the St. Joseph School District.

The worsening problem of local school attendance is a crisis of troubling timing because while the warmth of spring usually causes kids to show up at higher rates, the opposite is happening now. The district reported a half-percent decrease across the board in the rate of students reporting to school at a satisfactory level in March. The district-wide figure for the month was 77.46%. A child is considered to be in satisfactory compliance if he or she is present for at least nine of every 10 scheduled classroom hours.

Show Me a trapdoor

School attendance is essential to each pupil’s academic progress, officials have said, and penalties are on the horizon for failure to turn the situation around. If the district-wide rate of satisfactory attendance remains below 80%, St. Joseph’s public schools potentially will not qualify for full accreditation. What happens after that will be in the hands of the Missouri State Board of Education.

“The (state) board may consider changing a district’s classification designation upon its determination that the district has … failed to implement any required school improvement plan at an acceptable level,” the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education advises on its website.

Specifically, districts that are below the level of 80% satisfactory attendance for all students are graded at the level of “floor” by DESE. Other levels are “approaching” (80% to 84.9%), on track (85% to 89.9%), and the best level, “target,” which is a figure that exceeds 90%. St. Joseph schools barely cleared the 80% threshold in the 2022-2023 year.

If a student finishes the year at below satisfactory attendance, whether by skipping days entirely, consistently showing up late or leaving school early, it means they did not receive the equivalent of at least two and a half weeks of instruction. There are a total of 169 scheduled school days spread over 34 weeks from August to May.

‘And see, that’s crazy’

At some schools, only about half of all students meet the “nine in every 10 hours” standard. Lindbergh Elementary reported a satisfactory rate of just 49.89% for March; most of its kids are thus below expectations. Carden Park Elementary reported only a 57.52% satisfactory attendance.

“And see, that’s crazy,” said Kayla Routon, mother of a Lindbergh kindergartner. Despite disabilities of vision and mobility, Routon said, she managed to get her kid to school each day in March. “I don’t understand why that’s happening.”

Routon said she has heard the district’s messaging about attendance and understands its importance. Along with common problems like bullying, students misbehaving toward teachers and test scores, the need to show up is a common topic on a Facebook group Routon joined to talk to other Lindbergh parents.

“There’s just got to be a reason why they’re not going to school,” she said. “And I mean, I don’t know, I don’t really have an answer for that. I don’t. I try to make my kid go to school unless he’s like, running a fever, or really sick. I don’t keep him home … If you’re not running a fever, you’re not throwing up or something, you’re going to school. That’s the rule.”

Haley Despain, another Lindbergh mother whose two sons attend first and third grades, said she has not heard anything from the district about attendance lately. However, severe bullying trends by other students have, she said, likely pressured some students to stay home.

On a scale of 10, “10” being the very worst, Despain rated the bullying at “10” as of August 2023. Principal Gary Murphy, who is in his first year at Lindbergh, has worked diligently on countering bullying since that time, Despain said, and today the level is “3.”

“I know my kids, in the beginning, didn’t want to come, because of the bullying issues,” Despain said. “I called the school and, it’s fixed now, for the most part, but there’s still days where they don’t want to come to school for that reason.”

Teacher on board

As efforts continue to bring attendance numbers up, the district has new leadership in place. One example of this is Ronda Chesney, who took the oath of office on April 15 as a member of the Board of Education, bringing 29 years of experience as a teacher to the cause of understanding what is going on and what to do about it.

To a large degree, Chesney said, what is happening now seems to be an aftereffect of the pandemic. Told at several junctures to stay away from school as the COVID-19 virus wreaked havoc in 2020 and 2021, many families seem to have lost touch with the importance of attendance. Development of parent-teacher relationships did not occur, damaging a core part of establishing a plan for each student’s success from an early age.

“I think the impacts of COVID might still be playing into the situation, especially for the older students who were in school at the time,” Chesney said. “The expectations for attendance were different as schools tried to navigate the unknown of the effects of the virus … Families not coming into schools has become the new normal, and therefore, they don’t know the school staff as well as they did, pre-COVID.”

There is no easy explanation. Whatever effect the pandemic had, it stacked on pre-existing social problems. In her experience, Chesney said, a child with chronic attendance problems often has parents who themselves had a bad experience in school. Because younger children are totally dependent on their parents to get to class on time each day, any trouble with the parents’ understanding of attendance poses a vexing challenge.

“Families have to feel school is a great place for their child to learn,” Chesney said. “I feel the SJSD is working on supporting families and is continuing to look for more positive ways to support families.”