Early Grades Become the New Front in Absenteeism Wars

[proud2BlibKansan]

While many think of chronic absenteeism as a secondary school problem, research is beginning to suggest that the start of elementary school is the critical time to prevent truancy—particularly as those programs become more academic.

“Early attendance is essential; This is where you really want to work on them,” said Kim Nauer, the education project director at the Center for New York City Affairs, which studies attendance issues. “By the time you get to 5th or 6th grade, you can really get a cascade effect that you can’t recover from. How much money do we spend in a school system on all of this recuperative stuff in high school—getting the kid back and reengaged—as opposed to making sure the kids don’t slip off in elementary school?”

Yet statistics show that rates of absenteeism in kindergarten and 1st grade can rival those in high school. An average of one in 10 students younger than grade 3 nationwide is considered chronically absent, defined as missing 10 percent or more of school. That’s about 18 days in a normal 180-day year, according to the San Francisco-based Attendance Counts and the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation and others.

According to the Casey foundation, which has stepped up its focus on attendance in recent years, the problem is particularly acute among students from low-income families. The foundation reports that, in 2009, more than one in five poor kindergartners was chronically absent, compared to only 8 percent of young students living above the poverty line. Among homeless students, absenteeism can be even more common.

more . . . http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/10/14/08earlyabsenteeism.h30_ep.html?tkn=QTLFEVUpEBC0Gu3jfKp8ePZFITu%2FXXIiH3Ye&cmp=clp-edweek

[surrealAmerican]

1. I wonder how much of this problem is simply ...

... a transportation issue. A poor kid who misses the bus, misses school. A somewhat less poor kid may be getting a ride and coming in anyway.

[donco6]

3. That's not the case here.

We have a number of KG kids who will miss 25 of the first 50 days of school - happens every year. This carries over into the primary grades. When a poor KG kid misses the bus, they're home alone all day - and I can't imagine any parent worth anything who would allow that to happen regularly. At least, not without Social Services getting a call.

[Catshrink]

8. You know, you just need to kick teachers in the butt

because it's their fault the kids aren't in school. It isn't poverty, it isn't parent neglect, it isn't underfunding of sped or education in general, it's the damn teachers. Get it? Our own DU education experts could tell you that:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=219&topic_id=29111&mesg_id=29116

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=219&topic_id=29083&mesg_id=29094

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=219&topic_id=29083&mesg_id=29112

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=9334155&mesg_id=9334221

[donco6]

10. How long does this Open Season on teachers last anyway?

Isn't there a time limit on that license?

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. If it wasn't just here it wouldn't be so bad

I am having longtime very supportive friends forwarding HORRIBLE emails endorsing this stupid Superman movie and trashing teachers unions. And some of these friends are UNION activists in other unions. HELLO?!

Facebook is bad as well. And nearly every other left wing site on the internet is promoting this teacher bashing crap.

Family members who have expressed nothing but admiration to me for what I do for a living are now inserting little negative comments about teachers and public schools into conversations. Just yesterday I told one "Do you realize when you criticize TEACHERS, you are criticizing ME??"

Someone here suggested Michael Moore make a documentary next, thinking he would be more fair. But I can't even support that idea, as how do we know he hasn't fallen for this nonsense?

It's just beyond disheartening.

[Lyric]

14. Not always.

I can only speak for my own experiences, but I grew up poor in a West Virginia trailer park, and kids there missed school because of crappy busing all the time. Buses going to trailer parks or housing projects or subsidized apartment complexes tend to be VERY overcrowded. There were days that we literally couldn't fit all the kids onto the bus without being forced to stand up for a 1 hour ride to the consolidated school. It's humiliating, dangerous, and physically painful for a little kid to stand in the aisle of a moving bus with a heavy backpack on for that long, not to mention that it made you a perfect target for the bullies and older kids, because the bus driver can't really see anything with standing kids blocking his/her view. There were days we'd deliberately dawdle just so we could miss the bus and avoid the hellish bus ride and the torture at school that we received from the better-off bullies and racists (half the kids in my neighborhood were minority races). The school wouldn't do anything. In fact, there was recently a bus collision here on one of the rural routes--a car hit a bus. Some of the parents in the poor neighborhoods FINALLY got the media to pay attention to the overcrowded bus problem by pointing out that if that bus had been one of the overcrowded buses with little kids standing up in the aisle, some of them would have probably been killed. Nobody's actually DONE anything about it yet, but at least they can't pretend anymore that the problem doesn't exist.

My parents didn't have a car, but my Mom was out of work at the time, so I wasn't home alone. There are very few poor kids who have two working parents. My next-door neighbor Tasha was in a single-parent home, so if she missed the bus, she just came over to my house or went over to her grandma's house (she lived two rows over from us). The parents had all worked that out together before school started. Nobody had a car and very few of us had phones, so even though our parents were frustrated, there wasn't much they could do about it. The scenario of poor kids missing the bus and then not being able to get to school is, unfortunately, rather common.

I also think that the schools need to look at bullying and teasing as a primary cause of absenteeism--and that includes bullying BY teachers, which happens more often than most students dare to report. Students who are minorities (black, Latino, GLBT, etc.) are very prone to bullying from other students, and students who are struggling academically can fall victim to frustrated teachers who assume laziness when the problem is actually more structural--like a failure to learn the "foundation" lessons in earlier grades, or poverty and uneducated parents.

How can a child be motivated to go to school when she knows that she's going to be criticized for not getting a project done--a project that involved, say, a trip to the public library (no car, inadequate bus service), internet access that often is NOT available at home, or (for older kids) research that the kid couldn't do because her Mom works night-shift and she has to babysit her younger siblings, make dinner, clean up, and basically take on the workload of an adult? Administrators are NOT doing enough to help children who have serious study obstacles. I remember missing 50+ days in 10th grade because I kept getting assignments that I didn't have the time or resources to do at home. I was so ashamed, and so terrified of getting yelled at and humiliated in front of everyone over and over again, that I'd just skip school and stay home.

The administrations are treating the whole thing like absenteeism is a personal failure of the student--like the student is apathetic, willful, or lazy--when in fact, there's almost always some kind of bigger obstacle (like poverty, bullying, inadequate academic help from teachers) involved.

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. And yet the vast majority of kids never miss the bus

If I didn't have a car to get my kid to school, I'd make damn sure he was on that bus every day.

[donco6]

2. We have bigger problems with fewer kids in the elementary levels.

At secondary, more kids become truant, but at elementary we have a smaller, identifiable group of kids, starting at KG, who are chronically absent. Obviously, it's a parenting problem. It's especially bad with our Latina mothers of Latinos. They are so overprotective they keep them home FAR more often than they should. They often refuse to let them go on field trips. It's strange.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Yep. Same problem here.

The younger they are, the worse it is. We have our most chronic absenteeism at PK.

[LWolf]

4. To compound this problem, the school year in my district is only 168 days long.

And it will be only 161 days this year; days cut because of budget. It was 143 days last year, on a 4 day week due to budget cuts.

I will have many students who have over 18 absences by the end of the year. I always do.

Some of them are happening now, in October, when families take one or two weeks for deer or elk hunting season. While there are certainly legitimate illnesses, and we don't want them to come to school sick, most of our excessive absences are due to hunting and other family trips.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Ours go to Mexico

They're gone for weeks. We have to drop them. Then when they come back, they are mad that they can't just come back to school. They have to re-enroll and that is a big hassle.

[donco6]

9. Ours, too.

They think nothing of being gone through Labor Day. School starts around the 18th of Aug.

[LWolf]

11. We have a little of that, too.

Not as much as when I taught in So Cal.

[jwirr]

15. The one child in my family who was not getting to KG was missing

because her parents were meth users who had more important things to do. She flunked KG. The parents are now separated and the father has custody and the help of our side of the family. She has not missed on day this year. This NOT a teacher problem.

[proud2BlibKansan]

16. Oh how sad.

My heart just aches for some of these babies.

[jwirr]

17. Yes. And I think we have a lot more of them even when the drug of

choice is not meth.

[Starry Messenger]

18. k & r

[Catshrink]

19. Kick

[distilledvinegar]

20. K is not mandated in CA

Students are not required to attend Kindergarten in California, and are not required to attend school at all until they are six years old. As a result, when we have had truancy problems with a K student under six, we've been told that there are no consequences that we can enforce. We can't send them through the SARB (Student Attendance Review Board) process as we do with older students. Reading through the Ed Code faqs (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/em/kinderfaq.asp) I do see that it says that once they are enrolled, "children in kindergarten must attend on the same basis as children ages six through eighteen," but that is not how my district has handled the problem. That's not teacher choice - it's not even up to the site administrator, it's coming down from the district level.

I no longer teach K, but this problem came up at least once in each of my classes during the two years I did teach that grade level. Unfortunately, some parents don't regard kindergarten as anything more than daycare. I had one parent tell me that they fully intended to "get serious" when their child reached first grade. I tried to explain that it's like building a house with a faulty foundation, but the student's attendance remained spotty.