Schools searching for missing students
Districts across country increase efforts to find historic levels of absent children since shutdowns began in spring
Kenneth Chapman Sr. was hopeful as he navigated a hulking Detroit Public Schools van down the street, pulling up to a brick home. Out front, there were signs that the girl he was looking for lived inside. Amid the discarded plastic cups in the yard, there was a ball, and on the porch a small bike, painted fluorescent pink.
“Normally when I get to the house and I see toys or bikes, I think, ‘OK, somebody’s going to be here,’ ” Chapman said.
But when he knocked, no one appeared. This was one of the two dozen stops Chapman, who works in the school system’s Family and Community Engagement Office, would make, looking on this chilly day in late October for students who had been missing classes. Some of the children on the list had worrisome numbers of absences this early on in the school year. But there were 3,000 students the district could not account for at all.
School districts across the country that closed buildings in mid-March in response to the coronavirus pandemic handled the transition to remote learning with varying levels of success. During the disruption, schools lost track of students. Many students who were present in the classroom in early March could not be found online. And others who showed up in the spring haven’t been seen since.
Even before the pandemic, districts had to track down children who had stopped showing up to school or had failed to appear for a new school year. They have strong incentives to find them; school funding is often allocated on a per pupil basis. Sometimes it turns out students have moved and enrolled in other districts. Other times they can’t be found and are removed from the rolls.
But this year, students have disappeared from classes in unprecedented numbers, forcing districts to rethink their approach to those who stop showing up. Many districts, cognizant of the damage lost school time can cause, have employed extraordinary efforts to track down students to ensure that they are safe and have devices to learn. Others, like Detroit and Miami, have kept students on rosters even after they failed to show for an entire month. North Dakota began tracking attendance for all schools on a daily basis, and several schools used coronavirus aid to hire family liaisons to find missing students.
In North Carolina, a state education official told state lawmakers that more than 10,000 students have not been accounted for. New Mexico is searching for more than 12,000 students who were enrolled in public schools before the pandemic hit but never returned in the fall.
Katarina Sandoval, New Mexico’s deputy secretary of academic engagement and student success, said that in previous years, the number of students who failed to come to school was so small that they did not even have a name for them. Many of them were high school dropouts. But this year, the missing students come from all grades. The state organized an effort to reach out to families and enlisted the help of social service agencies to support those families who struggled to get their children to school.
A lot of these discrepancies stem from poor record-keeping systems. In many states, districts collect attendance individually and do not have a good way of sharing with one another. So a student who merely transferred may be marked as missing, and a student who cannot be found could be presumed to be in another district.
When school districts reach out to families, they often do so through text messages and robocalls, emails, Facebook posts and snail mail. It’s communication that requires families to have a working cellphone, Internet access and a fixed address. That means families who move frequently, change cellphone numbers or do not speak English can be left out of the loop and can be difficult to find.
It is deeply worrisome for educators when they cannot account for where a young person is, or whether they are learning and safe. When school is in session and classes are face to face, teachers are better able to detect whether a schoolchild is being abused or neglected. Those check-ins are tougher when school is closed and children are no longer showing up for face-to-face instruction. Educators accounted for about a fifth of child abuse reports in 2018, according to federal data.
“There’s just a whole layer of kids who have just disappeared,” said Hailly T.N. Korman of the think tank Bellwether Education Partners, who is studying what she calls “the attendance crisis.”
She is particularly concerned about children who come from low-income households, English-language learners, homeless students and migrant students, whose families may have been hit especially hard by the economic downturn: “It’s been true for generations … that every one of society’s unmet needs of children shows up at a classroom door.
“School has historically been the daily wellness check for a lot of kids,” Korman said. “They don’t have that anymore.”