Gone from school rolls
Many students dropped out; practice of delaying kindergarten more popular
ALBANY — Just before the pandemic struck New York three years ago, Lester Marshall tried to quit school.
He was 15, not legally old enough to drop out, so he started skipping anyway when school officials denied his request. But the subsequent COVID -19 shutdown made it easier to unofficially leave school. He never went back.
“I was going through stuff with my dad. I didn’t know where I was gonna sleep, eat, and they expected me to focus?” he said. “And I was like, (screw) it.”
School officials in Schenectady didn’t let up. They couldn’t get him to go back to the special needs school he had attended, but they refused to give him his working papers. Until he turned 18, he struggled, because he could not work legally. Now, he lives in a men’s shelter.
He is among tens of thousands of former New York students who disappeared from the school rolls during the pandemic and never returned.
An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. There are likely far more around the country. The students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home schooling, according to publicly available data.
In New York, more than 132,000 students left public schools in the 2020-21 or 2021-22 school years, according to data from the state Education Department. Private schools also saw a decline in enrollment by about 8,000 students, the data shows.
Home schooling increased dramatically,
adding more than 21,000 students. In the Capital Region, more than 1,400 students have switched from public school to home schooling since the pandemic began, an increase of 70 percent.
During the pandemic, the number of school-age children in New York dropped, likely due to the state’s nation-leading outmigration and declining birth rates, census data estimates suggest.
Nevertheless, the data indicates tens of thousands of New York students who were expected to be in public schools didn’t attend and are no longer enrolled. Thousands more students are chronically absent, according to school officials.
The biggest drops in public school enrollment were among kindergartners, students in 10th grade, and students in special education classrooms who are not assigned to a grade.
The state Education Department did not respond to questions about how it is ensuring children, who may be unaccounted for, are being educated.
State law requires that children between the ages of 6 and 16 receive an education. Kindergarten is optional.
The AP analysis found that states where kindergarten is optional were more likely to have larger numbers of unaccountedfor students, suggesting the missing also includes many young learners who were kept home instead of starting school. California had more than 150,000 missing students in the data, and New York had nearly 60,000.
Census estimates are imperfect, so the AP and Stanford ran a similar analysis for pre-pandemic years in California and New York. It found almost no missing students, confirming something out of the ordinary occurred during the pandemic.
The kindergarten decrease is a trend that had been building in New York for many years before the pandemic, and accelerated as parents postponed kindergarten for their 5-year-olds because of the risk of COVID -19. Since then, each year many kindergartners have started late in the year that they turned 6 instead of the year they turned 5.
Jenna Dodd of Burnt Hills delayed her son’s entrance to kindergarten last year because he would not have turned 5 until October, two months after school started.
“Statistically, boys are less mature than girls,” she said. “Then COVID happened and that solidified our decision.”
In her son’s class, half the students had started a year late, she said.
The practice, called “redshirting,” is more common with boys. One argument for it is that younger boys would be physically at a disadvantage when playing competitive sports. But Dodd was more worried about his independence.
After the extra year, “he was emotionally more ready to be away from me for an entire day,” she said.
The family paid for him to be in half-day preschool when he was 5, and paid for speech services because the school district would only continue the service if he was enrolled. His speech improved greatly, Dodd said, making her certain that the delay was what he needed.
It went so well that she might delay again when it’s time for her daughter to go to kindergarten.
“It is a conversation in the house,” she said. “Emotionally, she’s very attached to me. She’s also super shy, but that’s because she’s what you call a COVID baby. We want to wait and see how she does next year when she advances to pre-k.”
But if her daughter was a boy?
“She wouldn’t be going,” Dodd said.
Dropouts
A bigger concern is the older students who left school and never returned. Some are hitting barriers as they become adults without a diploma or general equivalency degree.
Without either credential, Marshall is ineligible for many jobs even though he no longer needs working papers. That almost pushed him back to school last fall.
“I was thinking about it this year, going back to regular high school,” he said.
But he’d be an 18-year-old ninth-grader, which didn’t seem palatable. When he thought back on school, his memories were of studying topics that seemed irrelevant to his life.
Instead of reenrolling, he joined Youthbuild. Young people learn construction skills and take classes there to earn their GED.
It’s way better than high school, he said.
“They pay us every week,” he said. “Plus, we’re not learning nothing. We’re learning skills.”
He hopes to get a construction job, a GED, and eventually become a mentor for other teenagers like himself. He knows now the adults have to be the ones to reach out and persuade the youth to open up about their problems. He never asked for help when he was 15. Instead, he was disrespectful to teachers, he admitted.
But he knows what would have worked for him.
“You gotta talk to them, ask them what’s going on, what’s wrong,” he said.
Missing students
“Missing ” students received crisis-level attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools nationwide. In the years since, they have become largely a budgeting problem. School leaders and some state officials worried aloud about the fiscal challenges their districts faced if the students didn’t come back. Each student represents money from the city, state and federal governments.
Gone is the urgency to find the students who left — those eligible for free public education but who are not receiving any schooling. Early in the pandemic, school staff went door-todoor to reach and reengage kids. Most of those efforts have ended.
“Everyone is talking about declining enrollment, but no one is talking about who’s leaving the system and why,” said Tom Sheppard, a New York City parent and representative on the city’s Panel for Educational Policy.
The missing kids identified by AP and Stanford represent far more than a number. The analysis highlights thousands of students who may have dropped
out of school, like Marshall, who need help reentering school, work and everyday life.
“That’s the stuff that no one wants to talk about,” said Sonja Santelises, the chief executive officer of Baltimore’s public schools, speaking about her fellow superintendents.
“We want to say it’s outside stuff ” that’s keeping kids from returning to school, she said, such as caring for younger siblings or the need to work. But she worries teens sometimes lack interacting with school officials who can discuss their concerns about life.
Discussion of children’s recovery from the pandemic has focused largely on test scores and behavior. But Dee said the
data suggests a need to understand more about children who aren’t in school and how that will affect their development.
“This is leading evidence that tells us we need to be looking more carefully at the kids who are no longer in public schools,” he said.
Students and families are avoiding school for a range of reasons. Some are still afraid of COVID -19, are homeless or have left the country. Some students couldn’t study online and found jobs instead. Some slid into depression.
During the prolonged online learning phase of the pandemic, experts say there were students who fell so far behind developmentally and academically that they no longer knew how to behave or learn at school. Many of those students, while largely absent from class, are still officially on school rosters. That makes it harder to count the number of missing students. The real tally of young people not receiving an education is likely far greater than the 240,000 figure calculated by the AP and Stanford.
In New York, schools often have a policy of dropping students from the roll if they skip school for 20 days in a row, are at least 16 and do not respond to attempts to reach them.
Many more students are too young to drop out but aren’t coming to school. In Troy, 12 students never showed up for the 2020-2021 school year.
An audit in 2019 indicated nearly 19 percent of New York students are chronically absent, and school officials say the problem has gotten much worse since the pandemic began. The state Education Department is scheduled to issue its first report on those absences this spring.