Students from a wide variety of families attend Ohio schools. With this diversity comes many family situations, some with great support for children attending school and others with barriers and problems that may cause a student to leave school to aid earn money for the household or to care for siblings when a working parent is unable to.
“It could mean anything from a basic need, to transportation, it could be a family issue, it could be a student issue,” said Brooklyn Brown, director of outreach at the nonprofit Communities in Schools of Ohio.
Before becoming principal, Brown served as the nonprofit’s site coordinator, which means she was one of dozens of people who went to Ohio school districts to connect with students and aid schools meet the many needs of students in classic schools and beyond. educational items.
“Everyone has a responsibility to advance Ohio’s students,” Brown said. “We are in schools every day as teachers and we consistently strive to ensure that students have this.”
Site coordinators are mainly focused on the grassroots level: creating a space where students want to come to school to avoid the chronic absenteeism that Ohio has struggled with for years, even before the pandemic closed schools. Brown said she formed attendance groups, contacted parents and held one-on-one meetings with students to check in on their outside lives and make sure their school lives didn’t suffer because of it.
“We motivate them until they are intrinsically motivated,” Brown said.
(Photo courtesy of Communities in Schools of Ohio)
Communities in Ohio Schools partners with 52 schools in the state to assist with issues such as academic assistance, behavioral interventions, college and career preparation, mental health services and attendance initiatives. The nonprofit organization uses attendance data, academic statistics, resource lists, and service funding as resources to benefit school districts that need their aid most. The group said it has connected with more than 35,000 students and 13,000 families over the last school year.
“We have always worked on turnout, but when we saw these numbers in Ohio, we said we had to do something,” Brown said.
For CIS coordinators, being a school-age child has historically been complicated by issues such as food insecurity and poverty, as well as socialization and other stages of normal childhood, but it has become even more elaborate over the years.
“I think we’re just seeing it now,” Brown said. “Everything was always here, we just didn’t pay attention.”
This includes student mental health, which has received attention for years, increasing the workload of school counselors, social workers and other care teams, including CIS. As a result of the pandemic, children who may have started learning online or spent educational years away from their peers are having further socialization problems.
“Managing student mental health is becoming increasingly difficult,” said Adero Robinson, CEO of CIS. “So we need to think about how we find ways to deal with depression, anxiety, cell phones and social media and things like that.”
Ohio’s absenteeism problem
An absence is considered chronic if a student misses more than 10% of class hours during the school year, regardless of whether the absence is excused or not. Absenteeism can have negative consequences for students, and education advocates say it can impact a student’s future as they enter adulthood.
“In addition to chronic absenteeism being an indicator of low academic success, it also predicts which students will ultimately drop out of school,” says the American Federation of Teachers.
The AFT said patterns of chronic absenteeism “reflect common equity issues.”
“Students from low-income families, students of color, students with disabilities, and students involved in the juvenile justice system are more likely to be chronically absent,” the AFT reports.
(Photo courtesy of Communities in Schools of Ohio)
Data from Ohio Department of Education and Labor (ODEW) shows that chronic absenteeism has decreased slightly over the past two school years, but is still 25.6% of all students in the state. According to state data, that rate dropped from 26.8% in the 2022-2023 school year and even further from 30.2% in the 2021-2022 school year.
For the 2023-2024 school year, attendance among all students in Ohio was 91.3%, with the rate varying depending on student demographics. While students who identified as Asian/Pacific Islander had the highest attendance rate at 94.3%, with White students at 92.3%, Black students at 86.6%, and American Indian or Native Alaskans – 89.3%. status found.
According to ODEW, the attendance rate for students considered economically disadvantaged was 88.9% compared to 94.3% for students not considered economically disadvantaged.
State leaders promise to solve the problem
In October 2024, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and ODEW Director Stephen Dackin pledged to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50% over the next five years. Leaders said the state plans to follow the recommendations of the Attendance Task Force and Ohio Attendance Guide from May 2024, which presents the effects of chronic absenteeism.
The guide states that increasing attendance and dealing with chronic absenteeism “requires working with students and families to understand and address challenges that arise outside and inside schools” and emphasizes prevention and early intervention.
Improving turnout comes by changing “attitudes and beliefs about turnout” and adopting a “positive problem-solving approach versus a legalistic and punitive approach,” the guide recommends.
Attendance task force that gave the state recommendations in October 2023, he called turnout rates “a crisis in Ohio” even before the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem. The recommended task force “thoughtful refinement” of state laws to focus on the “local context” to find solutions to the problem.
“The policy change could allow for more effective communication with families to increase attendance and reduce absenteeism, and continue a statewide shift in thinking toward prevention and early intervention,” the report said.
In early 2024, two Ohio lawmakers tried to convince their colleagues that “foo-foo” (as former state Rep. Bill Seitz called them) such as pizza parties and extra playground time that schools were using to encouraging school attendance are “not working and the state needed to make bigger moves.
With this in mind, Seitz and Democratic Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, proposed a pilot program it would provide $1.5 million over two years to school districts that qualify, with the funds distributed to students in biweekly, quarterly or annual payments. The annual payment to a student under the pilot would be $500.
The program would also award an “award” to graduates depending on their grade point average.
Even though Isaacsohn emphasized the urgency of the problem and the need for the legislature to take action, he and Seitz’s bill House Bill 348it never passed the House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education, and the bill died at the end of the 135th General Assembly.
Robinson said more funding is always the right thing to do when it comes to student well-being, but a program like the pilot program may not be sustainable.
Programs like CIS, which bring site coordinators directly into schools and continually monitor student well-being, are needed almost as much as anything else.
“I think programs that provide access to schools, teachers, parents and counselors… that holistic opportunity is a better and tangible investment,” Robinson said.
Robinson said he has had conversations with Ohio legislators about what education priorities should be, and several of them have even traveled to school districts where CIS participates to see the work in action.
“It was beneficial for them to hear from site coordinators and students,” Robinson said. “I hear the work we do is very important to schools.”
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