The Supporting Facts

It may sound counter intuitive to focus on attendance during COVID-19 school closures, but it is through the process of taking attendance that school districts can identify which students are not showing up. At-risk and marginalized students are most impacted at this time, heavily affected by the digital divide. As many as 25% of students are not checking in for distance learning. Tracking student attendance is an imperative to identifying and intervening with those students not being reached.

Supporting Fact - Articles - Stats:

• Recently the LA Times reported, Los Angeles Unified had over 15,000 students unaccounted for as they implemented distance learning. “Numbers out of Los Angeles were the first to illustrate the scope of the challenge of getting students engaged online. Forty thousand high schoolers hadn’t been in daily contact with teachers, the Los Angeles Times reported in late March.” https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-06/coronavirus-schools-missing-students

• The New York Times recently published an article “50 Million Kids Can’t Attend School. What Happens to them?" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus-schools-closed.html

• Article “Present or Absent? With Schools Closed, Some Districts Stop Tracking Attendance, While Others redefine It” https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/4/12/21225479/present-or-absent-with-schools-closed-some-districts-stop-tracking-attendance-while-others-redefine

• The same article said that New York City Schools began its attendance tracking effort last week. Teachers are counting “daily meaningful interactions,” which can include participation in an online discussion, a completed assignment, any response to a teacher’s email, or even communication with a family member that indicates a student is engaged. Present or absent? https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/4/12/21225479/present-or-absent-with-schools-closed-some-districts-stop-tracking-attendance-while-others-redefine

• Besides being a compulsory education law that still applies, attendance is a simple, reasonable approach for districts to determine which students are engaged/connected and which ones are not. https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/ai/tr/

• Attendance is the only way to accurately determine which families are encountering barriers or struggling with on-line instruction. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2020/03/25/how-shift-remote-learning-might-affect-students-instructors-and

• Mail based communication in the parent’s home language is the only effective way to get information about district specific processes in place and resources/support that is available to assist these families. In The Gap Can Be Bridged: Attendance Insights on 700,000 CA Students Report, we see the low success rate of communications swept up in the digital divide. - 46% of the email addresses in school information systems are invalid or missing - 25% email open rate on communications sent to the remaining email addresses https://b74129ad-f39d-4b69-ac76-b1359be86996.filesusr.com/ugd/2bba65_caf19bf3bf4b4a8ab75b013730907dcc.pdf

• A study from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) projects that “students who lack steady instruction during the coronavirus school shutdown might retain only 70 percent of their annual reading gains as compared to a normal year. Projections for the so-called Covid slide in math look even bleaker. Depending on grade level, researchers say, students could lose between half and all of the achievement growth one would expect in a normal academic year." https://districtadministration.com/50-million-kids-cant-attend-school-what-happens-to-them/

• This same study said “These setbacks would be particularly disastrous for fifth graders, who need to be tooling up for the more complex tasks that will come their way in the upper grades. In addition, this grim scenario will surely yield worse outcomes for students whose families are grappling with hunger, unemployment or homelessness.” https://districtadministration.com/50-million-kids-cant-attend-school-what-happens-to-them/

• “Recent polls conducted in New York and California show that nearly 90 percent of parents are worried that their children will fall behind because of the closings. Parents in both polls voiced a clear desire for more consistent access to their children’s teachers — an obvious plea for more guidance about how to proceed during the shutdown." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus-schools-closed.html https://buffalonews.com/2020/04/08/poll-parents-concerned-children-falling-behind-during-school-closures/

• “Schools need to do a better job of communicating with these parents, and effective partnership with them will be essential when schools undertake the policy changes that will be required to get students back on track academically.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus-schools-closed.html