HISD on lookout for students who have not returned to school
Floyd Young blamed the coronavirus pandemic.
When the virus disrupted what he cared about — football — and sapped his interest in other aspects of school, the would-be sophomore at Houston Independent School District’s Kashmere High School stopped going. Instead, he started working at McDonald’s about 20 hours a week to help his family, said his mother, Angelica Henley.
“He is just a teenager,” Henley said. “He should not have to put all this stress on him.”
HISD Superintendent Millard House II personally visited Floyd on Saturday to check in and pitch him on returning to school. And it seemed to work. Floyd said he would go back, as did 81 other students, during the district’s annual “Students Within Reach Walk.”
Many youngsters, however, so far have remained out of reach.
The state’s largest school district recorded a first-day enrollment of 172,091 students, a significant decrease compared with previous years. It is not uncommon for enrollment to lag, even to its lowest point of the
year, in August.
While numbers reported later in the fall typically provide a more accurate depiction of a district’s student body, HISD’s enrollment in recent weeks has slowly risen to about 190,000 as of last week, according to House, but remains lower than the nearly 200,000 who finished last school year.
Still, House said before embarking on the home visits Saturday, the district is on pace to reach its target of about 197,000 students.
“Student reengagement efforts are ongoing, and it is our goal to facilitate outreach to the families of all students who have left HISD,” he said. “We are not here to judge, we are here to support. That is very important for us to understand. So, as we knock on doors this morning, we are here to ensure that we get these babies back in classrooms so that they can get the kind of support they need.”
HISD is not alone.
The Texas Education Agency registered a decrease last year of statewide enrollment from the previous year for the first time since it began collecting enrollment data.
There were roughly 5.37 million students enrolled in schools across Texas last year, a 2.2 percent decrease — about 122,354 students — from the prior year, agency officials wrote in a June report.
Locally, districts have seen a mix of enrollment fluctuations this year.
Fort Bend ISD has recorded a roughly 3 percent decline to about 77,050 students.
“Fort Bend ISD is working to recapture students not currently enrolled in the district, and multiple departments are working in tandem to plan and conduct these outreach efforts,” the district said in a statement Monday.
Meanwhile, some districts in the Houston region already have seen increases in student enrollment.
Conroe ISD had projected an enrollment of 66,298 and as of Monday had 67,747 students. Spring Branch ISD had nearly 400 more students than anticipated.
“We made an aggressive outreach effort to families in advance of the start of the school year,” Spring Branch ISD spokesman Terry Abbott wrote in an email Monday. “And school leaders have been diligent about being in touch with their families to encourage everyone to return this fall.”
At HISD, the start of Saturday’s walk offered a glimpse into the challenges districts can face trying to entice students to come back.
A cadre of district staffers looking to engage with Floyd first went to a house on Lavender, where they found a barking dog, a wandering chicken and a man who was not the student.
Eventually, administrators got an updated address and drove the nearly 5 miles to the apartment where he lived.
Such problems — having an outdated address or phone number as a student’s contact information — are par for the course for Burl Jones, a student outreach worker at HISD, who said he goes on “wild goose chases all the time” as he tries to get students back into classrooms.
COVID-19 made it worse. Some students did not have access to the internet early on, and some parents remain skeptical of vaccines or health protocols.
“Sometimes, people will be there, they won’t answer the door. Or you have an address on file for them and they don’t actually live there,” Jones said. “That is what it is out there, man, that is the real world. … I do what it takes to find them. It’s like, I am an investigator. I don’t give up. I get a joy out of recovering these kids.”
HISD also has held several phone banking sessions, including in partnership with Houston Federation of Teachers, the district’s largest employees union.
Of 23,099 calls looking for students, 4,437 led to conversations, HFT President Jackie Anderson said. An additional 3,500 conversations occurred during neighborhood visits on the district’s southeast, southwest and north sides.
“We know that the best learning for students occurs in the classroom,” Anderson said. “There is no doubt about that.”
As part of its return to school program, HISD also has expanded its wraparound services to have at least one specialist on every campus to help identify and address students’ basic needs.
“The tough part is that it is really detrimental if our students don’t come back,” said Adeeb Barqawi, a former Kashmere High teacher who founded the nonprofit ProUnitas, which partners with the district to better connect students with social service providers. “While there might not be like a silver bullet solution of how we are going to get them back, we cannot leave this because schools are so important to our kids’ lives and them not being there is really going to set us back even more in our fight for educational equity.”