LOST STUDENTS
38,500 children left schools across Arizona, and no one is sure where many of them went
More than 38,500 children disappeared from both virtual and physical classrooms this school year as the coronavirus spread through Arizona.
The loss, a 3.3% drop year over year according to Arizona Department of Education data, has school officials scrambling to figure out where these children went, if they will return in the fall and how they will fashion their curriculum for students who may have had significant learning loss.
Their conclusions also will shape budget decisions, as schools are funded based on the number of children who show up in the fall.
The steepest enrollment declines came at the youngest ages: about 42% of the loss is due to preschoolers and kindergartners not showing up on public-school rolls, according to state data.
Eighth graders and high-school seniors were the only classes to show an increase year over year, although the gains were minimal.
Teachers, counselors and school administrators offer anecdotal examples of why the numbers are down: The kids just stayed home, or moved to private schools, or began homeschooling.
Then there are the questions left hanging when school officials visit family homes only to find no one there and no evidence of where the children went.
No one seems to know for sure where they are.
“That’s the burning question,” said Kayla Fulmer, director of marketing and community relations at the J.O. Combs Unified School District in the southeast Valley. “We wonder and worry about that.”
“Sometimes we needed to have a heart-to-heart with the student. Some of the homes, you could tell they had moved. No one was there.”
Janine Menard
Counselor at Sheely Farms Elementary School in Phoenix
Door-to-door checks in SW Valley
In the Tolleson Elementary School District, staffers put on their masks late last year and went out door knocking to get some answers.
The southwest Valley school district lost 305 students this academic year, or nearly 10% of its enrollment.
Half of the children moved to another school district, superintendent Lupita Hightower said, citing research school staffers did. A quarter of them enrolled at a public charter school.
Her staff focused on the remaining quarter of students because, Hightower said, “We don’t know where they went.”
Janine Menard got a sense of where the no-shows were. A lot of them were home but not logging into their laptops for virtual learning, said Menard, a counselor at Sheely Farms Elementary School.
“Parents had to work,” Menard said, explaining she and her colleagues found students home alone. “The stories were really sad.”
Parents with five to six kids talked about how they were overwhelmed with the demands of holding down a job and being a school proctor. Some parents didn’t keep on top of their children’s online learning, which Menard conceded is difficult unless an adult is on the screen with the child.
In other cases, Menard or other staffers would find school-issued laptop computers weren’t working — something that could be quickly fixed — or students weren’t bothering to log in.
“Sometimes we needed to have a heart-to-heart with the student,” Menard said, to emphasize the importance of keeping up with their lessons.
But other times, there was literally no one to talk to.
“Some of the homes, you could tell they had moved,” she said. “No one was there.”
Menard estimated three of the estimated 15 visits school officials made ended with no clues as to where the children went.
Re-engaging students with education
Door-to-door surveys took place in other districts during this pandemic year. Earlier last month, the Arizona Department of Education launched a pilot program to find students who had disappeared from Mesa classrooms.
In its first week, the Urban Recruitment Program reached out to more than 100 families whose children had not returned to the Mesa Public Schools.
In about one-half of the cases, recruiters were able to talk to families about getting back into school, and to see if the children qualified for the state’s Migrant Education Program, which aids local school districts in educating the children of migrant workers.
The recruiters identified barriers such as the need for school supplies, food and clothing and shared that information with Mesa school officials so they could connect the families to local resources and help them re-enroll in school.
But in the other half of the cases, the recruiters found the children were not at the last known address, with no clue as to where they might have gone.
Answers in the fall?
Across the state, school officials say they may not be able to answer the question of where the children went until the next school year starts and they see if familiar faces that were missing this year return.
Sarah Skemp, a counselor at Lake Havasu High School, said the biggest concern is whether students dropped out.
“For the older students, we hope they just stayed home and stayed safe,” Skemp said.
Department of Education data showed a slight uptick in the number of high-school seniors year over year: about 1%. For freshmen, sophomores and juniors, the decline was less than 1%.
The biggest drop came in the preschool and kindergarten ranks: 33% and 11%, respectively, or more than 16,000 children statewide, state data shows.
“When lockdown started in spring 2020, a lot of preschoolers and kindergartners just left school and never came back,” said Wes Brownfield, executive director of the Arizona Rural Schools Association.
He predicted these children will return to classrooms come August, when the next school year starts.
That will pose a challenge for teachers: Kindergarten teachers likely will have a lot of students who didn’t get any preschool preparation, and first-grade teachers will have to figure out how to teach children who did not get the lessons in “how to go to school” that kindergarten provides: lessons such as how to recognize basic letters and numbers, or how to get in line.
“The good news is, those kinds of skills and behaviors will be easier to remediate at the beginning of a kid’s school year than later on,” Brownfield said. “They haven’t lost these skills — they just haven’t started.”
Likewise, Jake Logan, president and
CEO of the Arizona Charter Schools Association, attributed enrollment declines to what he called the “redshirting” of kindergartners.
“I think it’s parents deciding to hold off for a year,” Logan said. “I also think that in the beginning, technology was a barrier.”
Charter schools, as a category, saw a gain of 18,000 students, or about 8%, this year compared with last. But some schools had double-digit losses, such as a 26% decrease at Summit High School in central Phoenix and a 47% loss at Sequoia Pathway Academy in Maricopa.
In the fast-growing southeast Valley, the J.O. Combs Unified School District saw an 8.7% decline, state figures show. District officials say it’s now closer to a 6% drop as some students have returned.
Fulmer said there’s no hard data to explain the decrease. But anecdotally, school officials are aware of students moving into home-schooling pods or to other non-traditional learning formats that aren’t captured by the publicschool data, she said.
What the numbers show
Statistics compiled by the Education Department show the churn caused by the pandemic.
The number of students who withdrew from school or did not show up at another Arizona public school was up 79% this year compared with last.
The decline cut across all racial and ethnic categories, led by children of mixed race backgrounds, whose ranks dropped 22% year over year.
Far behind that group were Native American students, at 7 percent; Black students at 6.6 percent and Anglo students at 5 percent. Latino/Hispanic students made up the smallest percentage of the decline, at 3.3%.
Brownfield of the rural schools association said the numbers likely reflect students from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
“These groups tend to be underrepresented when it comes to technology, from device (availability) to internet connection,” he said.
The Department of Education also mentioned the lack of reliable internet service as a deterrent to student participation in online learning. And worries about COVID-19 spreading in multigenerational households, especially in Black and Native communities, also could inhibit school participation, said Richie Taylor, communications director for the state education department.
Transfers within the state’s public school system were up 36%, which helps explain the popularity of online charter schools.
Homeschooling numbers shot up 142% year over year.
And as a sign that the pandemic slowed household moves, fewer students moved out of Arizona this year and had their school records transferred to another state. That category was down 18% year over year.
Safe or not?
Despite fears that children would suffer increased rates of abuse or neglect because schools were not fully open, that has not translated into an increase of children entering the fostercare system.
Department of Child Safety data from August (the start of the school year) through February shows a decline in the number and rate of children entering foster care.
That could be attributed to fewer calls to the state’s child-abuse hotline from teachers. With many children attending school online, it was harder for school officials, who are mandatory reporters, to see children in the same way as they would if students were sitting in front of them in a classroom.
Or the numbers could suggest that children are doing OK in their home environments. DCS Director Mike Faust earlier this year said it was too soon to draw conclusions from the data.
In February, the latest month for which data is available, 624 children were put in foster care, compared with 765 in February 2020.
Enrollment affects school budgets
The declining numbers also will influence school budget decisions.
Last month, the Gilbert Unified School District laid of 152 teachers, citing enrollment declines.
Other school districts have held off on staff reductions, either expecting some level of enrollment rebound or counting on increased federal pandemic-related aid. Those federal dollars favor schools that qualify for the reduced and free lunch program, a benefit to schools that serve lower-income students.
In the Tempe Union High School District, officials are expecting a $3 to $4 million budget shortfall. Enrollment dropped 2% this year, according to state figures.
But with the federal funding on the horizon, fears that rippled through the faculty earlier this spring have not materialized in layoffs.
“We’re not anticipating any RIFs (reductions in force) at this point,” said Megan Sterling, the district’s executive director of community relations.