Hoping student absences will come out in the wash
Sometimes the solution to improving student attendance can be as simple as offering an alarm clock, a bus token or a free breakfast. For schools in Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, Colorado and elsewhere across the United States, especially those serving low-income populations, the answer is a washing machine.
“If it’s a choice between coming to school dirty, and have kids laugh at you or make fun of you, and staying home, they’ll stay home,” said Rebecca Nicolas, principal at Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Ky., where almost 70 per cent of students qualify for subsidized or free lunches.
This month, the school opened a “Laundry and Loot” room, where students can bring their clothes to be washed, and also pick up donated items such as socks and deodorant.
All 1,750 students are eligible to participate, and teachers and counsellors are recruiting students to bring their laundry to school.
Students are given a mesh bag with a numbered identification tag (and soon, a more discreet backpack to carry the mesh bag). They can drop the bag off in the administrative office or in the laundry room, where the clothes will be washed and folded by an assistant who is also on hand to give lessons.
“We’re just trying to remove as many barriers to school attendance as possible,” Nicolas said.
According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Data Collection, about one out of six students was chronically absent during the 2015-16 school year, meaning more than 15 days of school missed for any reason. Absenteeism can impede a child’s ability to learn how to read, and can lead older students to fail courses and become more likely to drop out, studies have found.
Until recently, absences at public school were tallied with paper and pencil, and measured through truancy, or unexcused absences, and a school’s average daily attendance, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a non-profit initiative dedicated to reducing chronic absences.
Historically, schools have responded to unexcused absences with punitive measures, she said. “Truancy has been all about compliance in a legal system,” she said, and not about developing a “deeper understanding” of the reasons stu- dents stay home.
With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, and the widespread adoption of electronic records, chronic absenteeism became a nationally recognized metric. By 2017, she said, the vast majority of states had adopted chronic absences as a standard measurement for school accountability.
“Now this data can be used as an early warning that we need to invest in relationship building, problem solving and understanding what’s going on,” she said.
About two years ago, mentors in a program for chronically absent students alerted the principal of Benjamin Banneker Elementary in Kansas City, Mo., that dirty clothes were keeping students home, said Derald Davis, the assistant superintendent for Kansas City Public Schools.
At the time, only about 46 per cent of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90 per cent of the time, Davis said. But since the school received funding from the United Way to install a washing machine, the number of students meeting the requirement jumped to 84 per cent.