Transient families put pressure on state schools
In La Crosse, officials tackled student turnover like health crisis
LA CROSSE - Three years ago, La Crosse County won a national award that local leaders could use for any project aimed at improving health.
Instead of providing free flu shots or eye exams, organizers put the $10,000 toward something else: Working with two schools to stabilize families on the brink of enrolling their children elsewhere.
It was a small amount of money, but the move was significant. Across the country, few districts are focused directly on stemming student turnover. Even fewer are addressing it as a community health issue.
But the results in La Crosse yielded few comforting takeaways. Families were impoverished or homeless. Parents struggled with addiction. Children landed in emergency shelters or foster care.
“Dealing with student mobility is like trying to fix bad health habits,” said Catherine Kolkmeier, executive director of the La Crosse Medical Health Science Consortium.
“It’s like telling someone who’s massively stressed not to smoke anymore. You have to get down into all the things
that are causing this to happen, but there’s so much going on in every family.”
Student mobility, or churn, is what happens when kids switch schools — not because they moved naturally to higher grades, but because their family was evicted, or there was a custody fight, or they disagreed with staff at one school and left for another.
Research shows chronic schoolswitching is linked with lower test scores, more behavioral problems and an increased risk of dropping out. One study showed that classrooms with high churn trailed more stable classrooms by a full year — something that harmed students who stayed as well as those who moved.
Across Wisconsin, about 10 percent of students switched schools last year. In urban districts such as Milwaukee and Racine, churn rates were at least twice that high, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis.
Further, students in the five largest districts — Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha, Green Bay and Racine — accounted for 33 percent of the school changes despite having 20 percent of the statewide enrollment.
Some small Wisconsin districts have very high rates of turnover, including Northern Ozaukee, Grantsburg and McFarland. But that number comes with a wrinkle. Most of the churn is from students cycling through the district’s virtual charter schools, which can enroll children from all over the state.
The style of schooling works well for some students, but many others are not successful and drop out — often to return to brick-and-mortar schools even farther behind.
Schools with high churn
Individual schools all over the state are saddled with high rates of turnover.
At Longfellow Elementary in Sheboygan, Read Elementary in Oshkosh and Lakeview Montessori in Sparta, one in four students changed schools between 2016 and 2017.
That’s about the same as the Milwaukee average for publicly funded students, according to the Journal Sentinel’s analysis.
Wilson Elementary in Janesville also had 25 percent student turnover. So did Badger Elementary in Appleton. And Grand Marsh Elementary in the tiny town of Friendship.
In Wausau, four elementary schools saw more than one-third of their respective students churn through buildings last year. That’s greater than the amount of children moving in and out of schools in some of Milwaukee’s highpoverty neighborhoods.
“Change schools once per year and you can lose six months of achievement, said Kolkmeier, the health official from La Crosse. “Move three times? You’ve lost a whole year.
“When students change schools, it causes a lot of disruption for everybody.”
Cities vs. suburbs
Changing schools isn’t always bad. Children often have to move when their parents get new jobs or new homes or choose new schools because they have special programs.
But in places with low turnover, test scores are generally higher than average.
Germantown, Fox Point, Grafton, Greendale and Mequon-Thiensville outside of Milwaukee saw fewer than 5 percent of their students switch in or out of schools last year. So did Milton and Monona Grove outside of Madison. All performed well.
Contrast that with the Racine Unified School District.
Among its 19,000 students, more than two out of three live in poverty. On average, about one in four Racine adults reported experiencing major — and multiple — childhood traumas, a higher percentage than what was reported by adults in Milwaukee.
Holly Moore, a veteran social worker at J.I. Case High School, sees chaotic school-switching as a symptom of poverty and its attendant issues, from joblessness to homelessness. Most transient students have had discipline problems and poor attendance at their previous schools.
When they move, Moore said, “it’s like starting all over again at square one.”
How hard is it to reach those students and make a difference?
Four years ago, Moore started meeting with a freshman who had a history of acting out and fighting in school. It took a year to learn his story: His mom was very poor. Sometimes there was no electricity. Sometimes he didn’t know where he was sleeping that night. He didn’t see his dad much.
The boy was diagnosed with ADHD, but his mom’s financial struggles often kept him from keeping appointments with doctors and receiving consistent medication. The boy started to trust Moore enough to share when he was off his medicine, which allowed her to try to get help.
Moore found the boy a mentor and a stable place to stay. He started to form stronger relationships with other teachers. He signed up for theater and found confidence on stage. Now he’s on track to graduate this spring and talks of college and plans for life after that.
Many of Moore’s toughest cases don’t hang around long enough to get help.
Evictions and other household moves, Moore said, prevent students from getting involved in activities that could tether them to school, provide a sense of belonging and boost their chances of staying on track to graduate.
“It’s exhausting,” Moore said. “The influx and outflow. You can see the detachment right away.”
La Crosse and transient students
The La Crosse School District had about 11 percent student turnover last year, but two schools in particular drove up that average: Northside Elementary School, with 17 percent churn, and Hamilton Early Learning Center, with almost 24 percent student turnover.
Both Northside and Hamilton, located to the south, are located in lower-income neighborhoods with a higherthan-average number of renters.
Much of the student churn at each school is driven by housing instability.
A recent report showed that half of renter households in La Crosse County were spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. That made the county the 12th most rent-burdened in the state, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
The city often appeals to families relocating from Milwaukee and Chicago because it offers an abundance of highquality social services while having less crime. Of the approximate 52,000 people in La Crosse, about one in four are low-income.
Often, the children of new arrivals show up without school records, leaving teachers scrambling to figure out their educational histories.
Unstable school enrollment is also a byproduct of opioid addiction.
On average in Wisconsin counties outside of Milwaukee, the number of children in out-of-home foster-care placements jumped 39 percent between 2011 and 2016, according to the La Crosse County Human Services Department. This includes a rising number of placements in Vernon, La Crosse and Trempealeau counties.
It’s exhausting. The influx and outflow. You can see the detachment right away. Holly Moore, a veteran social worker at J.I. Case High School in Racine
Isaac Hoffman, director of the La Crosse Area Family Collaborative, said workers try to place children in homes close to where they live, but that’s often impossible.
“There’s a huge, huge lack of foster homes and we are routinely placing kids further and further away from not just their school, but also their city,” Hoffman said.
At Northside, churn has disrupted classrooms and slowed progress for years, said Principal Laura Huber. She eagerly partnered with Kolkmeier, the project leader, to address the problem with the grant.
More people got involved: a professor with the University of Wisconsin-Extension; Hoffman’s group, which embeds county social workers in neighborhoods; a health care expert and a financial counselor.
The partners agreed that school staff would refer families on the brink of moving to county workers, who would meet with parents and provide whatever services were necessary to prevent a disruptive move.
Hoffman, of the Family Collaborative, said they were all “a bit naive” in thinking that families sliding in the wrong direction just needed a little extra support.
“It wasn’t that at all,” he said. “It was crisis. It was homelessness. It was us getting reports from the Salvation Army on a Friday night that all the rooms were full and they couldn’t house our family.”
Last year, Northside Elementary teacher Sarah Westman received five new transfers in her fourth-grade class, while two others left. Over the summer, two more disappeared. Then, two more students arrived to join the now-fifthgrade class.
“Some of my more transient kids who come in are pretty far behind, and it’s in part because they’ve been bouncing around,” said Westman.
To develop longer relationships with her students, Westman is experimenting with a strategy called “looping,” which meant she moved up with her fourth-grade class last year and is continuing to teach them in fifth grade. A fifth-grade teacher switched with her and is teaching fourth grade this year.
Westman said she’s moving at a much faster clip this fall because most students already know her expectations — especially regarding behavior.
Northside is trying other strategies to keep families connected to the school. It switched to a year-round calendar that starts students in July with a 45-days-on, 15-days-off schedule. It now has a community schools coordinator to bring more resources to families.
The one-year award is finished. The partners served 11 families between Northside and Hamilton; nine kept their children at the same school all year. All of the $10,000 was spent on rent assistance or transportation.
The few families served, however, likely would have been assisted by county services even without the grant. By the time they were on the brink of moving and flagged for help, related issues like poverty, neglect, mental illness, violence or drugs were already chipping away at their children’s chances of success.
Still, Kolkmeier thought the work scored two important wins. Only one required money.
“What was helpful was having the flexibility to spend the funds on whatever the family needed,” Kolkmeier said, “and having a reason to talk with parents about the importance of keeping kids in schools.”
Kevin Crowe of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
Erin Richards can be reached at 414224-2705, or at erin.richards@jrn.com.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Erin Richards examined the impact of student churn on academic performance during a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.
She was assisted by Marquette student researchers Patrick Thomas, Sean Blashe, Diana Dombrowski and McKenna Oxenden.
Journal Sentinel reporter Kevin Crowe did the data analysis for this series.
Marquette University and administrators of the program played no role in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project.