COUNT DECLINE
Officials account for children missing from school during pandemic
Where have the children gone? Education officials in Oakland County and statewide wanted to know. And they went to great lengths over the past year, since the coronavirus pandemic began, to find out.
The Michigan Department of Education reports an enrollment decline of about 3.7% in public schools in fall 2020, compared to the previous fall.
Oakland County lost an estimated 6,400 students, a drop of about 3.5%, over the same period.
State and county officials say that most of the losses are due to parents deciding to homeschool their children, to enroll them in private schools or to delay enrolling their children in kindergarten.
Families are delaying their chil
dren’s kindergarten enrollment so they can have a “more complete, less staccato” school experience, state Superintendent Michael Rice acknowledged in a statement earlier this school year.
Additionally, the state experiences enrollment losses every year, even without a pandemic, as families move out of Michigan.
Those factors accounted for most of the losses, but state and county officials were concerned about a number of children who were missing.
MDE issued toolkits to help local districts locate them.
Carolyn Claerhout, manager of pupil services for Oakland Schools, heads a team that assisted local districts in calling families to find out why their children weren’t attending school this year, either in person or virtually. Oakland Schools is an intermediate district that provides services to schools countywide.
“We knew it was going to be a challenging year,” she said. “But you can’t take the school year off.”
State law requires children ages 6-18 to be in school. Even without a pandemic, Oakland County authorities rarely take criminal action against parents or guardians whose children are truant, Claerhout said.
Instead, school officials usually work with them to find out what barriers are keeping their children out of school.
Last March, there was an almost overnight pivot from in-school classes to remote learning. Officials in districts across the county knew that not every family had a computer for each child, or even an Internet connection at home. Districts set up pickup times for families to get the needed equipment. In some districts, officials delivered equipment to children’s homes.
But there are still barriers. Internet availability in some parts of the county is spotty, Claerhout said.
Not all parents could work from home during the pandemic. Leaving children unsupervised, they couldn’t make sure they were logging into online school.
Many parents complained of chronic connectivity issues with their district’s online schooling. Or they grew tired of going back and forth between remote and in-person school.
All of these factors contributed to dramatic increases in the number of children enrolled in private schools or being homeschooled.
But state and local officials have few means of tracking these shifts.
The parents or guardians of more than 17,000 students statewide told their public school districts upon exiting last year that they were homeschooling their children. In a typical year, that number would be only about 3,000, according to MDE.
Homeschooling families can register with the state, but they are not required to do so, and many never do, Claerhout said.
State law puts few requirements on homeschoolers. The state does mandate that homeschooled children be in an organized program covering the following subjects:
• Math
• Reading
• Spelling
• Science
• History
• Civics
• Literature
• Writing
• Grammar