Tag: Chronic

  • This New Jersey district tackled chronic absenteeism despite COVID

    This New Jersey district tackled chronic absenteeism despite COVID

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    SEATTLE — For almost a decade, Hamilton Township Public Schools in New Jersey has seen major gains in chronic absenteeism — despite the bumps that came with the COVID-19 pandemic.

    During the 2016-17 school year, 21 of the district’s 23 schools exceeded the state’s average chronic absenteeism rates, said Mary Beth Currie, coordinator of special projects at the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association. 

    With the help of a grant-funded initiative at the association’s Foundation for Educational Administration, Hamilton Township Public Schools eventually changed course. As of June 2025, only two of its 23 schools surpass the statewide average for chronic absenteeism, Currie said.

    Currie and Kisthardt Elementary School Principal Diana Vasil shared how the FEA’s partnership with Hamilton Township Public Schools contributed to a long-term drop in chronic absenteeism rates during a Friday session at UNITED, the National Conference on School Leadership in Seattle. 

    A team-based approach to boosting attendance

    In 2018, FEA received a $10,000 grant from the Princeton Area Community Foundation to create a plan to combat chronic absenteeism in the district, Currie said. Later on that year, FEA received an additional five-year $30,000 grant from the foundation to carry out the plan across all 23 schools at Hamilton Township. 

    FEA hired coaches to meet monthly with every school to help address their chronic absenteeism rates, Currie said. FEA trained the coaches beforehand on best practices in English language arts and math, legal knowledge on attendance, climate and culture, and data analysis, she added. 

    Then, FEA helped each school identify members for their own “Be There Team,” a group focused on school climate and attendance. The teams often included school leaders, nurses, counselors and teachers, Currie said. The FEA coaches met with these teams to identify student target groups and develop action plans based on Attendance Works’ tiered approach for combatting chronic absenteeism.

    During the first school year of the program’s implementation in 2018-19, Currie said, attendance soared while chronic absenteeism fell significantly. That trend continued into the first semester of the 2019-20 school year until the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. Once the pandemic hit, FEA modified its plan and shifted all of its meetings to be virtual gatherings with coaches and central office administrators.

    When students returned to in-person classes in 2021-22, attendance dropped in line with national trends, Currie said. But as the in-person coaching and team meetings picked back up, attendance began to rebound again in 2023-24 as did the district’s climate and culture, she added.

    In fact the district’s chronic absenteeism rate fell by 3.9% between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 school years — a decline from 18.4% to 15.2%, said Vasil. RAND Corp. and the Center on Reinventing Public Education estimated that 19% of students were chronically absent nationwide during the 2023-24 school year. 

    One elementary school’s approach

    Vasil, who was principal at Sayen Elementary School from 2019 to 2025, said her previous school’s Be There Team was already established before she was hired into the role. 

    As Vasil’s team explored how to address the school’s chronic absenteeism rates, she said, it was important to remember that fixing attendance isn’t just about getting students in the door. “It’s getting them to want to come tomorrow.”

    To better understand the root of the school’s attendance problem, Vasil’s team did a deep dive scoring their school’s climate using a rubric and found there was a lot of work needed to improve school culture. In 2019-20, the team identified three areas they needed to address: the school’s mission statement, its social-emotional learning programs and professional norms for staff, she said. 

    Vasil said that the team was able to meet their goals during the pandemic by revisiting and tightening the school’s mission statement, consolidating the school’s many scattered SEL programs, and establishing a set of professional norms for staff meetings to ensure everyone has a voice. 

    Source link

  • Fake Citations Appeared in Federal Chronic Diseases Report

    Fake Citations Appeared in Federal Chronic Diseases Report

    The Department of Health and Human Services cited fake publications in a report on children’s health issues issued last week, The New York Times reported. 

    The Make America Healthy Again Commission claims its report—which blamed chronic disease in children on ultraprocessed foods, pesticides, lack of physical activity and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants—was produced with a “clear, evidence-based foundation.”

    However, some of the researchers it cited said they didn’t write the papers the report attributed to them. 

    In one example, the report cited a paper on the link between mental health and substance use in adolescents by Katherine Keyes, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University. But Keyes told the Times that she didn’t write the paper. And no paper by the title cited—written by anyone—appears to exist at all. 

    The report cited another paper about psychiatric medications and advertising that was allegedly published in 2009 in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology by “Findling, R. L., et al.” But the Times confirmed that Robert L. Findling, who is a psychiatry professor at the University of Virginia, did not author the paper. 

    The newspaper also found numerous other instances of mischaracterized or inaccurate summaries of research papers. 

    After both the Times and NOTUS reported on the false citations Thursday, the White House promptly updated the report with corrections. In response to questions from reporters about whether generative artificial intelligence—which is notorious for “hallucinating” information and failing to provide accurate citations—was used to produce the errant report, Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for HHS, did not provide an answer.

    Instead, she characterized the false citations as “minor citation and formatting errors,” according to the Times, and doubled down on the report’s “substance” as “a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”

    Source link

  • How much does chronic absenteeism cost communities?

    How much does chronic absenteeism cost communities?

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief:

    • For each student who is chronically absent in California schools, there’s a $5,630 economic burden to the community, according to a report released Wednesday by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies.
    • Each expulsion costs $70,870 in social burdens such as increased likelihood of dropping out, said the report, which was developed with the University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for the Transformation of Schools.
    • Using state, school and student data, researchers calculated the total economic burdens and gains resulting from factors such as graduation rates, school attendance and disciplinary infractions. To improve those factors and offset burdens, the report calls for more equitable opportunities for student success, as well as efficiency-based reforms like the use of a multi-tiered system of supports framework.

    Dive Insight:

    Like many other localities, California’s chronic absenteeism rate rose because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2019-20 school year, the state’s chronic absenteeism rate for all students was 10%, compared to 30% in 2021-22, which was the same rate nationally. The report uses a common definition of chronic absenteeism, which is when a student misses 10% of the school year, or about 18 days.

    The report also calculates that each suspension costs $27,260 and each disciplinary restraint adds up to $6,040.  The economic burden for each student who does not graduate high school is $478,440.

    On the other hand, a 3 percentage point increase in California’s high school graduation rate would add almost $10 billion to state coffers and $3 billion in taxpayer savings.

    To calculate these financial burdens and gains, researchers used an economic model that accounts for all the resources that are needed or contributed to for each educational status over an individual’s working life. 

    For example, the lifetime social gain of an 18-year-old who graduates high school is $478,440, or $681,930 if the student enrolls in college, according to the report. A variety of factors are taken into consideration in this calculation, including the estimation of higher earnings with additional education and the assumption of reduced criminal activity, improved health status and less reliance on a social safety net.

    A. Brooks Bowden, an associate professor of educational policy at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Cost-Benefit Studies of Education, said the study’s findings in California are an indication of potential economic burdens nationwide.

    “Addressing these challenges can lead to substantial savings and improved educational outcomes across the country,” said Bowden in a statement. 

    The report also said multi-tiered system of supports holds the promise of efficiency in education, because rather than schools delivering extensive support to all students, the MTSS framework provides resource-intensive supports to students with the highest need, as well as equitable services because interventions are individualized based on data.

    The MTSS framework has been used by districts across the country to address stubborn absenteeism rates. This approach — which begins with universal supports and increases the intensity of interventions based on student needs — is also promoted by Attendance Works, a nonprofit that provides school attendance resources.

    Source link

  • Punishing Parents for Chronic Absenteeism – The 74

    Punishing Parents for Chronic Absenteeism – The 74


    Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    As educators nationwide grapple with stubbornly high levels of student absences since the pandemic drove schools into disarray five years ago, Oklahoma prosecutor Erik Johnson says he has the solution. 

    Throw parents in jail.

    This week, I offer a look at chronic absenteeism’s persistence long after COVID shuttered classrooms, plunged families into poverty and led to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans. Lawmakers nationwide have proposed dozens of bills this year designed to curtail student absences — with radically different approaches.

    While a proposal in Hawaii would reward kids’ good attendance with ice cream, new laws in Indiana, West Virginia and Iowa impose fines and jail time for parents who can’t compel their children to attend class regularly. In Oklahoma, where Johnson has ushered in a new era of truancy crackdowns, state lawmakers say parents — not principals and teachers — should be held accountable for students’ repeat absences.

    “We prosecute everything from murders to rape to financial crimes, but in my view, the ones that cause the most societal harm is when people do harm to children, either child neglect, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence in homes, and then you can add truancy to the list,” Johnson told me this week. 

    “It’s not as bad, in my opinion, as beating a child, but it’s on the spectrum because you’re not putting that child in a position to be successful,” continued Johnson, who has dubbed 2025 the “Year of the Child.”

    In the news

    Books are not a crime — yet: Under proposed Texas legislation, teachers could soon face jail sentences for teaching classic literary works with sexual content, including The Catcher in the Rye and (unironically?) Brave New World. | Mother Jones

    Mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week could have devastating consequences for the health and well-being of low-income children. | The Associated Press

    Ten days or else: The Education Department demanded Thursday that states certify in writing within the next 10 days that K-12 schools are complying with its interpretation of civil rights laws, namely eliminating any diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or else risk losing their federal funding. | The New York Times

    A Texas teen was kneed in the face by a school cop: Now, with steep cuts to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, her case is one of thousands that have been left to languish. | The 74

    Students’ right to privacy versus parents’ right to know: The Trump administration has opened an investigation into a California law designed to protect transgender students from being outed to their parents, alleging violations of the federal student privacy law. | The New York Times

    • A similar investigation has been opened against officials in Maine, where the feds claim district policies to protect students’ privacy come at the expense of parents’ right to information. | Maine Morning Star
    • “Parents are the most natural protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement after a similar federal investigation was launched against Virginia educators. “Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that imply students need protection from their parents.” | Virginia Mercury
    • A little context: In a recent survey, more than 92% of parents said they were supportive of their child’s transgender identity. | Human Rights Campaign
    Sign-up for the School (in)Security newsletter.

    Get the most critical news and information about students’ rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox.

    The Student Press Law Center joined a coalition of free speech and journalism organizations in denouncing the recent ICE detention of Tufts University international student Rumeysa Ozturk over opinions she expressed in an op-ed in the student newspaper. 

    • “Such a basis for her detention would represent a blatant disregard for the principles of free speech and free press within the First Amendment,” the groups wrote in their letter. | Student Press Law Center
    • The Turkish doctoral candidate is one of several students who’ve been rounded up by immigration officials in recent weeks based on pro-Palestinian comments. | The New York Times

    Florida lawmakers have a plan to fill the jobs of undocumented workers who are deported: Put kids on the overnight shift. | The Guardian

    Minority report: Following bipartisan opposition, Georgia lawmakers have given up on efforts to create a statewide student-tracking database designed to identify youth who could commit future acts of violence. | WABE

    A majority of school district programs focused on protecting student data are led by administrators with little training in privacy issues, a new report finds. | StateScoop

    Washington students’ sensitive data was exposed. The culprit? A student surveillance tool. | The Seattle Times

    ICYMI @The74

    Emotional Support

    Annie, who lives with The 74 social media guru Christian Skotte, is the cutest regular at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. You won’t convince me otherwise. 


    Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    Source link