Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones at least every four years with a “civil rights focus.” State lawmakers should increase funding to transport students to and from school. And attorneys, advocates, and community organizations should embrace the right to sue over school assignments that increase racial segregation.
Those are among the recommendations in a new report from the Colorado Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “Examining the Racial Impact of Public School Attendance Zones in Colorado” concludes that the way Colorado draws school attendance boundaries and assigns students to schools mirrors segregated housing patterns and results in low-income families having less access to high-quality schools.
“This segregation fuels a widespread belief that schools serving predominantly white and affluent students are inherently better than those serving predominantly students of color or low-income families,” an accompanying policy brief said.
The Colorado Advisory Committee is a 10-person group of bipartisan appointed volunteers. Each state has an advisory committee that produces reports on civil rights issues ranging from housing discrimination to voting rights to the use of excessive force by police officers.
In its latest report, the Colorado committee found that “thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of Colorado students are likely to be assigned to schools in violation” of a federal law that says assigning a student to a school outside their neighborhood is unlawful “if it has segregating effects.”
The committee’s recommended solutions attempt to balance strong support for neighborhood schools with allowing families to choose the best school for their child. School choice, or the ability for a student to apply to attend any public school, is enshrined in state law.
The committee advocated for what it called “controlled choice,” which it said could mean that popular schools reserve seats for students who live outside the neighborhood or that schools give priority admission to non-neighborhood students who live the closest.
To produce its report, the committee held hearings in 2023 to gather input from national experts including university professors, the author of a book on school attendance zones, and representatives from think tanks across the political spectrum.
The committee also convened a group of 10 local experts including Brenda Dickhoner from the conservative advocacy organization Ready Colorado; Kathy Gebhardt, who was then a member of the Boulder Valley school board and now sits on the State Board of Education; former Aurora Public Schools superintendent Rico Munn; and Nicholas Martinez, a former teacher who heads the education reform organization Transform Education Now.
The committee’s other recommendations include:
The civil rights divisions of the federal education and justice departments should review options for enforcing “the permissible and impermissible use of race in drawing attendance boundaries and setting school assignment policies.”
Colorado lawmakers should correct “the systemic racial and ethnic disparities” caused by the state’s school transportation system, which does not require school districts to provide transportation to students who use school choice.
State lawmakers should improve Colorado’s school choice system, including by adopting a uniform school enrollment window statewide and providing families with more information about schools’ discipline policies, class sizes, and other factors.
Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones and student assignment policies at least every four years and “consider racial and ethnic integration as part of the rezoning process.”
“Redrawing school boundaries every few years can help prevent segregation from becoming entrenched while still allowing students to maintain a sense of stability in their educational environment,” the committee’s policy brief said.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
NEW ORLEANS — Between 2020 and 2024, student attendance in Missouri’s Springfield Public Schools dipped from 94.73% to 90.63%.
Like many other school districts nationwide, Springfield’s attendance rates took a hit from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data from the American Institutes for Research shows fall 2020 attendance rates nationwide for elementary school at 92%, middle school at 90%, and high school at 89% — down from pre-pandemic averages of 95% for elementary and 92% for middle and high school.
And because of the global health crisis, the state kept Springfield at its 2019-20 attendance numbers for funding purposes, Superintendent Grenita Lathan told attendees in March at the annual conference of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, in New Orleans.
But with the state’s hold harmless order on attendance about to sunset, Lathan said, officials in the 24,500-student district knew that they needed to boost attendance during the 2023-24 school year. So they set a goal: By the end of that school year, they would raise attendance to 92%.
“When it comes to school attendance, 90% is not an A.”
Springfield Public Schools’ messaging on attendance
Announcing that charge during her annual state of the schools address in August 2023, Lathan said chamber of commerce members and the community at large needed to understand the impact that a 2 percentage-point attendance increase would have.
“That would bring in anywhere from $3 [million] to $4 million in funding that would help us with different programs,” Lathan said.
Lathan and other district officials laid out a districtwide strategic plan that included a communication timeline, monthly updates to 300 local business leaders, and a promise that Lathan would let herself be publicly doused in Powerade if the district reached its goal. Here are the keys to how officials rallied the community to work toward the attendance goal.
Keep it simple and be bold
“It was important that we had buy-in from everyone in the district so that the messaging would resonate with everyone in the community,” said Stephen Hall, the district’s chief communications officer.
To that end, the district prioritized making its messaging simple, direct and bold in presentation. This was reflected not only in the attendance campaign’s slogan — “Attend today, succeed forever” — but also in messaging on social media and on signage around the city.
In their car pickup lines, each of Springfield Public Schools’ 50 elementary, middle and high school buildings displayed five 18-inch by 24-inch yard signs heralding the directive “Attend daily. On time. All day.”
Additionally, the district used digital billboards at three major intersections to get its message out. For only $500, Hall said, the district was able to get more than 250,000 ad placements on the billboards over 20 days.
The attendance initiative became an easy, noncontroversial message for media and business partners to get behind. District leaders asked businesses to be creative in incorporating the campaign into their own messaging and also to sponsor PSAs on local TV stations.
Furthermore, the district sent monthly news releases to local media showing the district’s progress. One local reporter even made it his mission to try to calculate the progress on his own, because he wanted to beat the competition on getting the story out once the district hit its goal, Hall said.
On social media, the district boldly declared, “When it comes to school attendance, 90% is not an A.” The school system supplemented these posts with graphics that simplified attendance data. Visuals, for instance, demonstrated how much of an impact each successive absence could have on a student’s performance, as defined using their GPA: Where a student with four absences might average a 3.63 GPA, a student with 35 absences might have a 2.29.
A social media graphic from Springfield Public Schools shows how prolonged absences correlate to potential impacts on student GPAs.
Permission granted by Springfield Public Schools
Don’t sweat the pushback
Shifting a community’s mindset isn’t without its hiccups, however. If your messaging is working, you should expect to receive pushback, the Springfield officials told AASA conference attendees.
“Because it was consistent, because it was bold, and because we were holding people accountable, we heard quite a bit of feedback,” Hall said.
One negative Facebook comment shared with attendees, for instance, read in part: “The SPS attendance obsession is why everyone in our house has been sick the last month. Our kids report they have been surrounded by sick kids at school who have been bullied by administrators into thinking they cannot miss any school. The result? Our kids are getting sick because sick kids are at school.”
When concerns like this arose, Hall said the district made a point of reminding parents that it’s still important to keep their kids at home when they are ill, and that punishing sick children wasn’t the purpose of the attendance campaign.
The district used the pushback as an opportunity to have school attendance officers and liaisons talk with families to identify barriers to attendance and offer solutions and resources to help address the issue. These included six attendance advisors who provided supports for transportation and health needs, counseling referrals, home visits, phone calls and address checks.
But pushback didn’t just come from parents: Students also leveled criticism against the district using social media comment sections, the district website’s feedback platform, and even a cover story in Kickapoo High School’s quarterly KHQ Today Magazine. Among their complaints: participation in school activities like dances, art shows, and public-facing performances such as band or choir relied upon attendance staying above a certain level.
“The only way to move metrics by 2 percentage points is for people to understand that there’s accountability, that there is consistency. And so it does ruffle some feathers sometimes, because they’re hearing it from multiple levels of the organization,” Hall said.
Yard signs promoting school attendance are pictured on the cover of the Fall 2024 issue of KHQ Today Magazine, a quarterly publication produced by students at Kickapoo High School in Springfield Public Schools in Missouri.
Permission granted by Springfield Public Schools
Leverage virtual learning
Not only is Springfield Public Schools the largest school system in Missouri, but it has the state’s largest virtual learning program, which serves around 400 school districts statewide.
“We have, in-house, a really robust virtual learning program,” said Ben Hackenwerth, the district’s chief strategy and innovation officer. “In Missouri, the way we’re funded, if a student is a virtual student, they automatically receive 100% attendance as long as they are participating.”
While there are specifics on how that participation has to be monitored and reported, Hackenwerth said, this situation provided an opportunity to meet with parents of students who were struggling in the regular school environment and offer them an option that might suit their child better.
The virtual learning program also gave Springfield a pathway to rethink suspensions.
For students on long-term suspensions, “we would give them the option of becoming a virtual student with the expectation that they could not be on campus,” Hackenwerth said. “So instead of taking that attendance hit, they could continue learning in a virtual setting, and it didn’t impact our attendance in a negative way.”
At the high school level, leveraging virtual learning options raised attendance by 1.5 percentage points.
It’s a small percentage of students in the grand scheme of things, “but it’s still good for kids,” Hackenwerth said.
Springfield Public Schools principals pose with their attendance trophies. (L-R) Truman Elementary Principal Sara Shevchuk, Watkins Elementary Principal Joanna Brockwell, Sunshine Elementary Principal Tracy Daniels, Pershing K-8 Principal Tommy Wells, Middle School and K-8 Campuses Director Andre Illig, and Elementary Schools Director Mykie Nash.
Permission granted by Springfield Public Schools
Reward progress
Of course, recognition for successes achieved is crucial to keeping morale up during an effort like Springfield’s attendance campaign. So, the district each month awarded trophies to principals in categories such as largest attendance gain year over year, most improved over the past month, and 95% attendance or better.But what about Lathan’s Powerade promise? Did Springfield hit its goal?
The short answer is “yes.” At her 2024 State of the Schools address in August, Lathan announced the district’s attendance had reached 91.78%, which was rounded up to 92%.
Lathan noted that one school in particular stood out throughout the campaign: McGregor Elementary School. The 281-student, 90%-free-lunch campus led by Principal Rebekah Kirby— then a first-year principal — raised its attendance by 3.56 percentage points.
“Her children were outperforming our higher-performing campuses where attendance is not an issue,” Lathan said.
With that in mind, at Lathan’s August 2024 state of the schools address, Kirby, along with some of her building’s teachers and students, got to do the honors of dumping a bucket of Powerade over Lathan’s head.
“It truly was worth it to be able to hit that goal and for them to be able to celebrate,” Lathan said.
There have been two cycles so far for which students have received the gift cards and, in addition to the 4,936 students who had perfect attendance in at least one of two-week periods, 2,028 have had perfect attendance in both cycles, according to data Superintendent Nikolai Vitti shared with Chalkbeat this week.
The attendance incentive is aimed at improving attendance in the district, where two-thirds of nearly 49,999 students were considered chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year. The incentive is among a number of efforts the district has employed over the years to create an attendance-going culture among students. The district has invested heavily into attendance agents to improve attendance and this school year announced that students with extremely high rates of chronic absenteeism will be held back a grade at the K-8 level and required to repeat classes at the high school level.
The number of students earning the perfect attendance incentive is a fraction of the nearly 15,000 high school students in the district, leading one school board member to question last week whether the incentive is working. But Vitti said he is encouraged that the program is getting more high school students to class and resulting in a small decrease in the chronic absenteeism rate for high school students. He said the district and board will have to evaluate the program’s success at the end of the school year.
Chronic absenteeism has been one of the district’s biggest challenges for years. The chronic absenteeism rate has declined, from a high of nearly 80% at the height of the pandemic, when quarantining rules meant many students missed school because of COVID exposure. But last school year’s much lower chronic absenteeism rate of 66% still means it is difficult to have consistency in the classroom and improve academic achievement.
Students in Michigan are chronically absent when they miss 10%, or 18 days in a 180-day school year. Statewide, 30% of students are considered chronically absent, compared to 23% nationally. A recent education scorecard cited the state’s rate as being a factor in students’ slow academic recovery from the pandemic.
Here are some of the highlights of the students who’ve received the incentive so far::
3,473 students had perfect attendance during the first cycle.
3,492 students had perfect attendance during the second cycle.
About 10% already had perfect attendance.
About 4% were considered chronically absent at the time the incentive began.
About 16% had missed 10% of the school year at the time the incentive began.
About 25% had missed 5-10% of the school year.
About 44% had missed 5% or fewer days in the school year.
At a Detroit school board meeting last week, Vitti said the statistic showing that just 10% of the students who earned the incentive already had perfect attendance is an indication that “this is not just rewarding those that have already been going to school.”
Board member Monique Bryant questioned what school leaders are doing to promote the incentive to students who haven’t earned it.
Bryant suggested that data Vitti shared at the meeting showing that chronic absenteeism is down by 5 percentage points for high school students since the incentive began is an illustration that most students aren’t rising to the goal of the incentive.
Vitti responded that it depends on how you look at the data.
“Right now, chronic absenteeism at the high school levels improved by five percentage points,” Vitti said. “That means that 700 high school students are not chronically absent where they were last year. I’d also say that at least on the 97th day, our chronic absenteeism at the high school levels is the lowest it’s been since the pandemic.”
The question for board members to decide at the end of the school year is whether the incentive “is the right investment with other challenges that we have districtwide,” Vitti said. “But I think the data is suggesting it’s working for many students … but not all.”
Board member Ida Simmons Short urged the district to survey students to learn more about what is preventing them from coming to school.
The causes of chronic absenteeism are numerous and include physical and mental health reasons, lack of transportation,and lack of affordable housing. Most of them tie back to poverty. Vitti specifically cited transportation, because half of the students in the district don’t attend their neighborhood school and the district doesn’t provide school bus transportation for high school students, who must take city buses to get to school.
“Sometimes they’re unreliable, they’re late, they’re too far away from where the child lives,” Vitti said.
Vitti said traditional school bus transportation for high school students “was decimated” under emergency management and it could cost between $50 million and $100 million to bring that level of transportation back.
Another factor, Vitti said, is that for some students, school isn’t relevant. Middle and high school students, in particular, “struggle to understand, ‘why am I going to school every day? How is this connected to what I’m going to I need to know for life.’”
Mi’Kah West, a Cass Technical High School student who serves as a student representative on the board, said that when talking to other members of the District Executive Youth Council last week, many said students overall are excited about the incentive.
One thing that stuck out, she said, was council members saying they heard students in the hallways or on social media saying they were coming to school because they want the money.
“And, while we don’t want to just say we want to come to school for the money,” West said, “I think it’s important to see that students … may have stayed home because they don’t want to come to school, but they’re willing to come to school now.”
Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at [email protected].
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
This week on the podcast Minister of State for Skills Jacqui Smith helped launch a pamphlet on whether universities are “worth it” – and was notably cold on extra money. But does she mean outlay or eventual return to the Treasury?
Plus there’s changes afoot in Scotland, UKVI is cracking down on attendance for international students and students are still feeling the pinch financially – is a return to maintenance grants a lost possibility?
With Ben Vulliamy, Executive Director at the Association of Heads of University Administration, Dani Payne, Senior Researcher at the Social Market Foundation, Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Back in April you’ll recall that UKVI shared a draft “remote delivery” policy with higher education providers for consultation.
That process is complete – and now it’s written to providers to confirm the detail of the new arrangements.
Little has changed in the proposal from last Spring – there are some clarifications on how it will apply, but the main impact is going to be on providers and students who depend, one way or another, on some of their teaching not being accessed “in person”.
The backstory here is that technically, all teaching for international students right now is supposed to be in-person. That was relaxed during the pandemic for obvious reasons – and since, the rapid innovations in students being able to access types of teaching (either synchronously or asynchronously) has raised questions about how realistic and desirable that position remains.
Politics swirls around this too – the worry/allegation is that students arrive and then disappear, and with a mixture of relaxed attendance regulation (UKVI stopped demanding a specific number of contact points a few years ago for universities) and a worry that some students are faking or bypassing some of the attendance systems that are in place, the time has come, it seems, to tighten a little – “formalising the boundaries in which institutions can use online teaching methods to deliver courses to international students”, as UKVI puts it.
Its recent burst of compliance monitoring (with now public naming and shaming of universities “subject to an action plan”) seems to have been a factor too – with tales reaching us of officials asking often quite difficult questions about both how many students a provider thinks are on campus, and then how many actually are, on a given day or across a week.
The balance being struck is designed, says UKVI, to “empower the sector to utilise advances in education technology” by delivering elements of courses remotely whilst setting “necessary thresholds” to provide clarity and ensure there is “no compromise” of immigration control.
Remote or “optional”?
The policy that will be introduced is broadly as described back in April – first, that two types of “teaching delivery” are to be defined as follows:
Remote delivery is defined as “timetabled delivery of learning where there is no need for the student to attend the premises of the student sponsor or partner institution which would otherwise take place live in-person at the sponsor or partner institution site.
Face-to-face delivery is defined as “timetabled learning that takes place in-person and on the premises of the student sponsor or a partner institution.
You’ll see that that difference isn’t (necessarily) between teaching designed as in-person or designed as remote – it’s between hours that a student is required to be on campus for, and hours that they either specifically aren’t expected to come in for, or have the option to not come in for. That’s an important distinction:
Where the student has an option of online or in-person learning, this should count as a remote element for this purpose.
Then with those definitions set, we get a ratio.
As a baseline, providers (with a track record of compliance) will be allowed to deliver up to 20 per cent of the taught elements of any degree level and above course remotely.
Then if a provider is able to demonstrate how the higher usage is consistent with the requirements of the relevant educational quality standards body (OfS in England, QAA in Wales and Scotland) and remains consistent with the principles of the student route, they’ll be able to have a different ratio – up to 40 per cent of the teaching will be allowed to be in that “remote” category.
Providers keen to use that higher limit will need to apply to do so via the annual CAS allocation process – and almost by definition will attract additional scrutiny as a result, if only to monitor how the policy is panning out. They’ll also have to list all courses provided to sponsored students that include remote delivery within that higher band – and provide justification for the higher proportion of remote learning based on educational value.
(For those not immersed in immigration compliance, a CAS (Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies) is an electronic document issued by a UK provider to an international student that serves as proof of admission, and is required when applying for a student visa. The CAS includes a unique reference number, details of the course, tuition fees, and the institution’s sponsorship license information – and will soon have to detail if an international agent is involved too.)
One question plenty of people have asked is whether this changes things for disabled students – UKVI makes clear that by exception, remote delivery can permitted on courses of any academic level studied at a student sponsor in circumstances where requiring face to face delivery would constitute discrimination on the basis of a student’s protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.
A concern about that was that providers might not know if a student needs that exception in advance – UKVI says that it will trust providers to judge individual student circumstances in cases of extenuating circumstances and justify them during audits. The requirement to state protected characteristics on the CAS will be withdrawn.
Oh – and sponsors will also be permitted to use remote delivery where continuity of education provision would otherwise be interrupted by unforeseen circumstances – things like industrial action, extreme weather, periods of travel restriction and so on.
Notably, courses at levels 4 and 5 won’t be able to offer “remote delivery” at all – UKVI reckons they are “more vulnerable to abuse” from “non-genuine students”, so it’s resolved to link the more limited freedoms provided by Band 1 of the existing academic engagement policy to this provision of “remote” elements – degree level and above.
Yes but what is teaching?
A head-scratcher when the draft went out for consultation was what “counts” as teaching. Some will still raise questions with the answer – but UKVI says that activities like writing dissertations, conducting research, undertaking fieldwork, carrying out work placements and sitting exams are not “taught elements” – and are not therefore in scope.
Another way of looking at that is basically – if it’s timetabled, it probably counts.
Some providers have also been confused about modules – given that students on most courses are able to routinely choose elective modules (which themselves might contain different percentages of teaching in the two categories) after the CAS is assigned.
UKVI says that sponsors should calculate the remote delivery percentage on the assumption that the student will elect to attend all possible remote elements online. So where elective modules form part of the course delivery, the highest possible remote delivery percentage will have to be stated (!) And where hours in the timetable are optional, providers will have to calculate remote delivery by assuming that students will participate in all optional remote elements online.
The good news when managing all of that is that the percentage won’t have to be calculated on the basis of module or year – it’s the entire course that counts. And where the course is a joint programme with a partner institution based overseas, only elements of the course taking place in the UK will be taken into account.
What’s next
There’s no specific date yet on implementation – IT changes to the sponsor management system are required, and new fields will be added to the CAS and annual CAS allocation request forms first. The “spring” is the target, and there’s also a commitment to reviewing the policy after 12 months.
In any event, any university intending to utilise (any) remote delivery will need to have updated their internal academic engagement (ie attendance) policy ahead of submitting their next annual CAS allocation request – and UKVI may even require the policy to be submitted before deciding on the next CAS allocation request, and definitely by September 2025.
During the consultation, a number of providers raised the issue of equity – how would one justify international and home students being treated differently? UKVI says that distinctions are reasonable because international students require permission to attend a course in the UK:
If attendance is no longer necessary, the validity of holding such permission must be reassessed.
There’s no doubt that – notwithstanding that providers are also under pressure to produce (in many cases for the first time) home student attendance policies because of concerns about attendance and student loan entitlements – the new policy will cause some equity issues between home and international students.
In some cases those will be no different to the issues that exist now – some providers in some departments simply harmonise their requirements, some apply different regs by visa status, and some apply different rules for home students to different dept/courses depending on the relative proportion of international students in that basket. That may all have to be revisited.
The big change – for some providers, but not all – is those definitions. The idea of a student never turning up for anything until they “cram” for their “finals” is built into many an apocryphal student life tale – that definitely won’t be allowed for international students, and it’s hard to see a provider getting away with that in their SFE/SFW/SAAS demanded home student policy either.
Some providers won’t be keen to admit as such, but the idea of 100 per cent attendance to hours of teaching in that 80 per cent basket is going to cause a capacity problem in some lecture theatres and teaching spaces that will now need to be resolved. Module choice (and design) is also likely to need a careful look.
And the wider questions of the way in which students use “optional” attendance and/or recorded lectures to manage their health and time – with all the challenges relating to part-time work and commuting/travelling in the mix – may result in a need to accelerate timetable reform to reduce the overall number of now very-much “required” visits to campus.
One other thing not mentioned in here is the reality that UKVI is setting a percentage of a number of hours that is not specified – some providers could engage in reducing the number of taught hours altogether to make the percentages add up. Neither in the domestic version of this agenda nor in this international version do we have an attempt at defining what “full-time” really means in terms of overall taught hours – perhaps necessarily given programme diversity – but it’ll be a worry for some.
Add all of this up – mixing in UKVI stepping up compliance monitoring and stories of students sharing QR codes for teaching rooms on WhatsApp to evade attendance monitoring systems – and for some providers and some students, the change will be quite dramatic.
The consultation on the arrangements has been carried out quite confidentially so far – I’d tentatively suggest here that any revision to arrangements implemented locally should very much aim to switch that trend away from “UKVI said so” towards detailed discussion with (international) student representatives, with a consideration of wider timetabling, housing, travel and other support arrangements in the mix.
