“The Importance of Being in School,” compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center and the Get Schooled Foundation, offers the first national glimpse at the prevalence of chronic absenteeism in our schools.

Johns Hopkins researchers Robert Balfanz and his team studied trends in six states that have calculated their numbers: Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island.

Among the findings:

• A projected 10 to 15 percent of students nationwide are chronically absent, generally defined as missing 10 percent of school days.
• Chronic absenteeism affects students in urban, rural and suburban communities. In some urban districts, a third of the students are chronically absent, while poor rural areas are in the 25 percent range.
• The rates are highest in kindergarten and in the high school years.
• Children in poverty are more likely to be miss school regularly. In Maryland, more than 30 percent of poor children were chronically absent, compared to 12 percent of others.
• Chronically absent students tend to be concentrated in a relatively small number of schools. In Florida, 52 percent of chronically absent students were in just 15 percent of schools.

This research reinforces what we’ve found about the prevalence and pernicious effects of absenteeism on school performance. It also underscores how little attention is paid to this critical early warning sign. We hope that the report and the policy recommendations it offers will encourage more states and school district to start monitoring chronic absence data so they can intervene and prevent students from missing so much school they fall behind academically.

Parents and students can track absences on this online calculator on the Get Schooled website. Get Schooled is a nonprofit that runs nationwide Attendance Challenges to improve school attendance and high school graduation rates. Get Schooled also links to several of our tools for parents, schools and cities.

New York City’s new ad campaign aims to alert parents to the consequences of chronic absenteeism. And it directs parents to a website where they can find government and nonprofit resources, borough by borough, to help them get their kids to school every day.

“Chronic absenteeism is often a child’s first step down the wrong path in life,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference today. “Many parents and guardains either don’t recognize the serious consequences of chronic absenteeism or don’t know what to do about it.”

The “School Every Day NYC” ad campaign builds on the work of Bloomberg’s Task Force on Truancy and Chronic Absenteeism, which has already seen improvements in attendance at its 50 pilot schools. The task force’s work combines public awareness–through celebrity wake-up calls and the new ads–with a mentoring program for at-risk students. (So far, students with mentors have attended 11,820 more days than similar students without help.) Businesses and community organizations are also working to improve attendance in targeted schools. The $9 million ad campaign was created chiefly by in-kind services and donations.

The mayor also announced a partnership with libraries across the city to combat chronic absence. Library staff will be trained to help parents access the on-line help center, and four times a year the city Department of Education staff will also meet parents in libraries to connect them to the information.

The ads direct viewers to text  “school” to 30364. Parents will then receive the website address and access to attendance information on their children and help centers. These centers will serve all parents, providing information on their children’s attendance and linking them to city agencies, as needed. Parents can also call 311, where operators can connect parents to computerized attendance information and can direct them to government resources.

The ad campaign, launched in collaboration with the Ad Council,  is expected to reach millions of New Yorkers, with a special focus on ads placed in communities with high rates of chronic absenteeism. The ads will be placed on 500 bus shelters, 50 newsstands, 5 million Metro Cards and other ad spaces. They expect to distribute 3,000 posters and 40,000 palm cards this spring, with another wave in the fall.

The  campaign is valued at $9 million, including pro bono creative production from the Publicis New York advertising campaign and free ad space in subway platforms and bus interiors donated by MTA. AT&T support the project with a $250,000 grant.

This week, the state posted a revised handbook for local School Attendance Review Boards (SARBs) that emphasizes the importance of looking at the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of school days and intervening to turn around problems early.

“Combating this is one of the best strategies for having students succeed, fighting the dropout rate and saving money,” he said at a recent news conference in San Diego, one of 11 model districts recognized for their successful efforts to improve attendance.

San Diego Unified, he noted, is one of the few large urban districts that has shown success improving attendance by tracking and addressing chronic absenteeism, rather than just truancy and average daily attendance. In his news release on the model districts, he emphasizes how important it is to count both excused and unexcused absences.

“While we need to address problems with truancy, we cannot overlook students and families that may need support due to health or emotional problems, or who may simply not realize the importance of regular school attendance, even in kindergarten,” he wrote.

Several other communities—including San Francisco, Oakland and various cities and counties involved in the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading Network—are beginning to track the chronic absence data, as well.

San Diego Unified’s efforts led to a one percentage point gain in average daily attendance, which may seem modest but it actually quite significant, the San Diego Union Tribune reported.  David Kopperud, chair of the State School Attendance Review Board said that improving attendance by a half-percent in one year would increase the district’s attendance revenue by $3 million.

He also stressed that San Diego Unified’s efforts to include student as early as kindergarten in its efforts.

“Kindergartners and first-graders can miss a few days of school, and it is easy to go unnoticed. They are often the same students who become truant or drop out later,” Kopperud told the newspaper. “It’s important to start this work before students are disengaged and before they hate school.”

The revised SARB handbook reflects many of the same themes as it provides information about how to expand the scope of the attendance practice by emphasizing prevention and chronic absence. The handbook:

• Stresses the importance of early identification
• Offers a three-tiered approach to improving attendance
• Provides sample letters to parents of chronically absent students
• Recommends that attendance boards develop a policy that requires schools with unusually high levels of chronic absence to develop plans for improving attendance.

• 1,071 students in 2009 were hospitalized with asthma.
• Elevated blood lead levels among children ages 0-6 were 3.6 times more prevalent in the city of Baltimore compared to the Maryland state average.
• 10.3 percent of Baltimore City youth aged 9-17 were diagnosed with a disruptive behavior disorder in 2007.
• 35.4 percent of Baltimore City children live in families receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or cash assistance.

In a city where one in four students was absent at least 20 school days – Maryland’s definition of chronic absence – during the 2010-11 school year, local and state leaders and advocates are concerned because chronic absenteeism is recognized as an incredibly reliable predictor of poor educational outcomes and an early indicator of a student’s likelihood to drop out.

“Absenteeism is a warning sign that tells us a student is in need of support,” said Sue Fothergill, director of the Baltimore Student Attendance Campaign. “When absenteeism is widespread, it tells us that schools aren’t meeting the needs of their students.”

About 40 people gathered for the Chronic Absenteeism and School Health Policy Forum on Tuesday to explore links between school-based health care and chronic absenteeism in Baltimore. Attendees discussed strategies for improving school-based health services as a way to bring down absenteeism, and several volunteered to serve on a work group that will continue to develop strategies for addressing this important issue.

Several promising practices identified in the report and discussed during the forum included:

• The Asthma-Friendly School Initiative. The Maryland Asthma Control Program launched this program to improve asthma management and reduce environmental triggers in schools. The effort includes identifying and tracking students with asthma, maintaining school buildings and facilities to reduce asthma triggers and improving indoor and outdoor air quality.
• Electronic Medical Records. The Baltimore City Health Department is spearheading an effort that aims to provide better coordination across the school system. It will also provide better documentation and tracking of chronic health conditions of Baltimore students and reasons for health-related visits.
• Expanding School-Linked Health Services. A pilot at Dunbar High School and National Academy Foundation Campus is testing the idea of enabling students to use school-based health centers at other schools with the premise that connecting youth to health supports will improve attendance.
•  Expanded school mental health services. Baltimore City Public Schools provides prevention, mental health promotion, early intervention and treatment programs for students. For example, the Sixth Grade Expanded School Behavioral Health Initiative is a collaboration of city schools, Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems and Baltimore Mental Health System that provides targeted mental health and substance abuse prevention to sixth-graders at risk of dropping out.
• The Family League of Baltimore City’s Snack and Supper Program. With many families struggling to provide good food for their children each day, this program provides snacks and suppers to out-of-school time programs throughout the city.

Attendees also brainstormed strategies to stem chronic absenteeism, such as:

• The need to broaden the concept of school health, so that everyone realizes healthier students are better learners.
• Identifying a health advocate, someone in each school who is the “voice of health” and is focused on student health issues and solutions.
• Improving communication and coordination to bring great programs and resources to more schools.
• Close the gap in knowledge regarding services that are available to students.
• Improving summer youth programs to provide greater access to services.

Central to partnership is the realization that health issues are among the leading causes of school absenteeism. Some recent research sheds light on what’s ailing our children and how we can prevent such problems.

One recent study published in Child Development this winter shows that not only is there a connection between missed school days and mental health disorders, but that the connection is reciprocal, “wherein the presence of one uniquely increases the risk that the other will emerge or worsen.” For instance, a youth suffering from depression may lack energy and miss school, and as a consequence, risks becoming further isolated and worsening the depression. This, then, leads to more missed days from school.

Recognizing this is a significant step toward preventing both absenteeism and mental health disorders, the study suggests. But how do we do this? The study suggests targeting absenteeism specifically can improve attendance and may prove vital in the prevention of mental health disorders.

Another study explored a key factor to preventing absenteeism: health insurance. According to a study in Santa Clara County, Calif.,  children who enrolled in the Healthy Kids program – a program which provides health insurance coverage to children otherwise unable to attain it – were sick less and consequently missed less school. “Children missing three or more school days in the past month fell from 11 percent without Healthy Kids to just 5 percent with Healthy Kids,” the report noted.

This initiative has insured more than 80,000 children across California, but the next stage will be expanding this coverage nationwide. Other suggestions include further increasing preventive medical and dental care, and evaluating the results to see if they have a positive correlation with children’s health and consequently, school attendance.

In Baltimore, Elev8 and the Baltimore Student Attendance Initiative are hosting a Chronic Absenteeism and School Health Policy Forum on April 17 to exploring the issues.

The Community Action Project Tulsa County, which serves about 2,000 students from low-income families, took a deep dive into attendance in 2009 and found that 64 percent of the students were missing 10 percent of school days. The research also showed that students who attended more regularly demonstrated more growth in literacy skills.

To improve attendance, providers began intensive outreach to parents, emphasizing the importance of attendance at initial enrollment, program orientation, and in home visits as well as through the creation of attendance plans for children missing too much school.

The programs ask parents to ensure that children attend at least 85 percent of the time. The interventions take different forms, said Cecilia Robinson, CAP’s senior director of early childhood programs on a recent Attendance Works webinar. “Sometimes it’s an alarm clock, sometimes it’s a bus pass. Sometimes, it’s a matter of ‘I didn’t know that’s what you meant by 85 percent,’” Robinson said.

CAP providers draw up Attendance Improvement Action Plans for children who are miss school 20 percent of the time, who miss more than 10 days in a single month, or who consistently arrives more than 15 minutes late. Providers monitor the students’ progress to make sure attendance is improving. They also post attendance averages at the 13 sites, or even on the classroom doors, to give instructors and parents some ownership in the issue, Robinson said.

CAP’s efforts, recently featured in the New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch blog, has produced results: 52 percent of students attended school 90 percent of the time in the 2010-11 school year, compared to 36 percent the previous year. In the same year, providers saw the percentage of chronically absent students dropped from 64 percent to 48 percent.

For more on Tulsa’s efforts, listen to Robinson and researcher Cindy Decker on our February webinar, “Right from the Beginning: Early Childhood Strategies for Reducing Chronic Absence”: video or slides.

Researchers also looked at the type of early education experience children had. Students who had attended Head Start showed the highest attendance rates in kindergarten and the lowest level of chronic absence in first through third grades. Those who stayed home and didn’t start school until kindergarten had the worst outcomes for attendance, retention and standardized tests, a finding that could have implications beyond Maryland.

Overall, the study found that poor children were more likely to be chronically absent than their peers and less likely to be considered “ready” for kindergarten, using Maryland’s kindergarten readiness test. In an encouraging finding, the research showed that many of the children chronically absent in preK improved their attendance levels in kindergarten and suffered fewer of the ill effects.

But those who missed too much school in both years were headed for trouble. Half of them were chronically absent in later years, and a quarter of them were retained, according to an analysis of one cohort of students. Their standardized test scores were lower than peers who attended more regularly.

The analysis of prior preschool experience found that about 44 percent of students attended a preK program in the city schools, 13 percent went to Head Start and about 4 percent attended both. Another 11 percent went to a private nursery school, 5 percent were in day care and 15 percent were in home care. Those in home care and Head Start had similar demographic profiles. But the Head Start students outperformed them in kindergarten attendance, and also bested children in public preK programs.

Baltimore’s findings mirror preliminary results from an ongoing study in Chicago. The Consortium of Chicago School Research, supported by the McCormick Foundation, has found that nearly half of preschool students are chronically absent, compared to about a quarter of kindergarten students. About 80 percent of those chronically absent in kindergarten also missed too many days of preschool.

Based on the Baltimore findings, BERC researchers made a series of recommendations:

• The state Department of Education should report average daily attendance (ADA) and chronic absence rates for students in PreK and K. The state is one of a few that require schools to track chronic absence (defined as missing 20 or more days), but starts at first grade.
• Baltimore agencies should make a concerted effort to increase the number of students in Head Start and school-based PreK programs.
• The city schools should work with Head Start to develop family education and outreach to emulate the high attendance rates seen among Head Start graduates.
• Schools should monitor chronic absence as well as of school-wide attendance as important indicators.

Beyond the data analysis, BERC is using the findings to shape its approach to parent focus groups that will help researcher assess what barriers and challenges families face in getting their children to school.

BERC is also identifying outlier schools with particularly good or bad attendance. The consortium is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Abell Foundation and the Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

Johns Hopkins researcher Bob Balfanz started it off in Monday’s opening plenary, making a plea for states and school districts to measure how many students are missing nearly a month of school.

“Any district or state or community that has a graduation rate challenge or a dropout crisis usually has an unacknowledged chronic absenteeism problem beginning as early as kindergarten,” he told the 1,400 people assembled there.

“This is like bacteria in a hospital – it creates havoc, and until we recognize it, we can’t act against it because we don’t see it,” Balfanz continued. “We don’t see it because we don’t measure it – schools measure average daily attendance, 90% is not an A. You can  have 90% average daily attendance and have one fifth of your kids missing a month or more of school. If you dig beneath a low literacy rate, you’ll probably find that those kids aren’t coming to school regularly, and if they aren’t coming to school regularly, it doesn’t matter how great the lesson is, because they’re not there to get it.”

Later that morning, the issue emerged again as the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading’s Ron Fairchild explained how chronic absence can keep young children from learning to read well by the end of third grade. ”Far too many kids are missing far too much school in the early grades,” he said in a pullout panel. Fairchild told how improving attendance is one of three community solutions the Campaign has identified to improve early literacy. The other two are increasing school readiness rates and summer learning opportunities.

Last week 123 communities  across the country submitted action plans aimed at addressing these three solutions and increasing the number of children reading on grade-level. Most of them are applying for the All-America City award with winners announced in July. All of them will become part of a network that receive advice from experts and policymakers, as well as access to foundations investing in early literacy. Attendance Works is already providing technical assistance to many of these communities and expects to work closely with them and with the Campaign to ensure schools recognize when they have a chronic absence problem and know how to resolve it.

Yesterday, Attendance Works director Hedy Chang spoke on a lively panel about early warning indicators. She delivered a compelling message about how poor attendance as early as kindergarten can tip off educators to trouble ahead. She encouraged the policymakers and practitioners in the audience to start tracking the data not only for individual students but for school campuses. “When you have 45 percent of your students chronically absent in one school, something is wrong,” she said.

A woman in the audience at one panel discussion summed up the connection to graduation rates succinctly.

“They’re not dropping out in high school,” she said. “They’re dropping out in fourth and fifth grade because they can’t read. And they can’t read because they’re not showing up in kindergarten and first grade.”

Last week we realized that many more people than we ever imagined share an interest in seeing how we can cultivate the critical habit of attendance staring in preschool. We had a record turnout–nearly 800 people–for our webinar, Right from the Beginning, this week. If you missed it, or want to review what you heard, view it on our peer learning resources page.

We heard from:

• Amanda Bryans, Department of Education and Comprehensive Services Division, Office of Head Start, spoke about the importance of working with chronically absent students and their parents to improve attendance, rather than dismissing them from the program. The Head Start mandate is to serve the most need children, and the children who miss the most days are often the ones who need school most to develop their pre-literacy skills.
• Cecilia Robinson, Senior Director of Early Childhood Programs, and Cindy Decker, Senior Research Associate for Data and Accountability from the Community Action Project of Tulsa County, which manages Head Start and Early Head Start programs as well as the Oklahoma State Pilot Program serving children birth to 3. They described their promising attendance practices and their research that demonstrated the impact of  improved attendance on early literacy development.
• Louise Weiner, President and Founder of Leadership and Learning with Families, discusssed how the Perfectly Punctual Campaign marshals the efforts of Head Start teachers, aides and parent volunteers to create a new mindset about the impact of attendance and punctuality on school readiness.
• Sandra Gutierrez, National Director of Families in Schools, described how her organization’s Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors curriculum, which has been used in 28 states to educate Latino parents about their key role in their children’s early years of education, is now being revised to stress the importance of attendance.

Under the city’s current law, students showing up late for school in Los Angeles can find themselves handcuffed, fingerprinted and charged from $250 to more than $1,000 for the offense. They would have to appear in court with a parent. Some students, running late, just decided to stay home instead.

Protests from families and from civil rights groups, who noted the disparate effect on African-American and Latino students, led the council to give preliminary approval this week to a measure relaxing those stiff penalties, which were part of a nine-year-old daytime curfew law. Instead of fines, the first two offenses would lead to counseling to help students turn around their attendance problems.

“Young people,” this is not a permission slip to be late or skip school,” Councilman Tony Cardenas said at Wednesday’s hearing. “But instead of purely punishing you, like the old system, we will be there for you.”

Pressure from parents, students and civil rights groups led to a commitment from the L.A. Police Department last year to stop its morning truancy and tardiness sweeps. But the tactics persisted. An article by The Center for Public Integrity gave this account of what happened to Juan Carlos Amezcua, 15, in  November.

Amezcua and his cousin, also 15, were emerging from a market near their school in Los Angeles’ tough Boyle Heights neighborhood when school  officers stopped the teens, handcuffed and searched them. When Amezcua said the two were going to school and added, “You can’t do this,” an officer used profanity and told him to “shut … up or else I’ll slap you in the face,” according to the complaint filed Feb. 3.

One of officers took Amezcua’s baseball cap off and once he was in the car threw it in his face, the complaint alleges. And instead of driving directly into the closest school lot, the complaint says, the officers circled the campus and sped up at each turn, causing the handcuffed students, who were not wearing seatbelts, to slide against the car doors and for one of them to strike his head against the car window.

The students were taken into Roosevelt High School and remained in handcuffs while officers wrote them tickets for being truant at 8 a.m., Amezcua said. By the time they were released, he said, only 10 minutes were left of his second period class.

The story also reported on the racial and ethnic disparities in enforcement:

In 2010, the pro bono law firm Public Counsel, the American Civil Liberties Union and a local group, the Labor Community Strategy Center, disclosed city and school police data showing that 88 percent of more than 47,000 daytime curfew tickets issued in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2009 went to Latino or black students. Together, these students are 77 percent of the student population.

The Center created maps showing that ticketing was concentrated around lower-income Latino and black neighborhood schools. The data also indicated that not one of the more than 13,000 students ticketed during those years by the Los Angeles School Police was identified as white, although whites are 13 percent of that district’s population.