When students miss school, they’re not just missing the chance to learn something new in class. They’re missing out on engagement opportunities, on friendships, on community resources.
And a lot of students in Ohio are missing out on those opportunities every school year.
In the 2018-2019 school year, 16.7% of Ohio students were chronically absent, according to an October 2023 report from the Ohio Attendance Taskforce. In the 2022-2023 school year, 26.8% were. The report defined chronic absenteeism as missing 10% of school hours.
And missing that much school can be a big problem. Students who attend school regularly are nine times more likely to graduate high school on time, and 6.7 times more likely to be reading on grade level by the third grade, the report noted.
Frank Gant, an educational consultant with State Support Team Region 8, sees a variety of factors leading to increased absenteeism, from confusing messaging around how long students should stay home when they’re ill to health concerns like asthma and dental issues. There are also families who became disconnected from a school when community engagement efforts faded during the pandemic.
Matthew Bowen, superintendent of the Campbell City Schools, was part of the Ohio Attendance Taskforce, which was made up of school leaders like superintendents, business people and representatives from the state’s juvenile court system. The Campbell City Schools in Mahoning County have worked to create year-round engagement opportunities and wraparound support for its students and families through the Community Literacy Workforce and Cultural Center, but took a backseat during the pandemic, as the district wasn’t able to offer in-person services.
“It was very much an environment where it was reading, writing, arithmetic, basically taught in isolation with less engagement and less collaboration,” Bowen says. “Here’s what I’ll tell you: when you limit engagement, when you limit collaboration, when you limit partners, you’re also creating less motivation and less purpose. And I think that’s a big piece there.”
Gant, who works out of the Summit Educational Service Center and helps support schools in Summit, Portage and Medina counties, thinks there are a number of things schools and districts can do to grow attendance.
He says building stronger relationships between families and schools is important, as well as ensuring the lessons teachers are offering are engaging and relevant. School leaders can also work to connect families with community partners, like in healthcare, or reconsider their transportation offerings to address outside barriers to attendance.
On a more day-to-day basis, parents can help students get excited for school by using the idea of “positive anticipation,” Gant says, adding helping them find things to look forward to at school, like an interesting upcoming lesson or a class party, or helping them find a club or sport they enjoy. And parents can also help students learn how to respectfully ask teachers why a lesson is relevant to their daily lives or their future.
“If they don’t understand why they’re learning it, and they don’t understand why they’re there, then it just becomes something they have to do,” he says.
For example, in the Campbell schools, leaders have intentionally brought back student clubs and other activities, going beyond what was offered before the pandemic, and the district has seen attendance increase in the past year.
The report also notes students are more likely to be engaged with school and attend regularly when “positive conditions for learning are present.” That includes academic learning opportunities, but also supports to emotional well-being, physical health and social connection.
The report included a number of recommendations to improve attendance, from creating those kinds of supportive learning environments to giving students chances to have their voices heard.
When students can find deeper meaning in their school experience, “attendance just comes naturally,” Bowen says.
Enduring the pandemic was difficult, he adds, but it did offer some lessons on what can’t be replicated digitally.
“You cannot teach those soft skills, that collaboration, that engagement, those partnership authentic opportunities, those experienceships that students so much enjoy,” Bowen says. “Those are the things that, after the pandemic, it was an awakening for all of us to say, you know, we need to get back to this and, not only do we need to get back to this, but we need to do this better than ever before.”
