City Reduces Chronic Absenteeism in Public Schools

City Reduces Chronic Absenteeism in Public Schools
By SHARON OTTERMAN

At Public School 309 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, students wear necklaces with colorful pendants, each marking a month in which they did not miss a day of school. At P.S. 75 in the South Bronx, a row of young adults welcomes students each morning as they walk in the door. Some 40,000 city children got daily automated wake-up calls from Magic Johnson and other celebrities to remind them to show up for class, and City Hall offered prizes like baseball tickets and gift certificates.
Throughout New York, educators and politicians have been increasing their focus on attendance in recent years, and their efforts appear to be paying off, at least in elementary schools: 1 in 15 elementary students were absent on a given day this year, compared to 1 in 13 four years ago and 1 in 9 in 1995.

And there have been even more significant strides in combating chronic absenteeism in early grades, according to a new study by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School: In the 2009-10 school year, according to the report, there were 105 elementary schools where 30 percent or more of students missed at least a month of class, down from 216 three years earlier.

The problem has hardly disappeared. Last year, at 42 percent of the city’s 700 elementary schools, one in five students missed a month or more of school, according to the New School study. But four years ago, that was true of 58 percent of the schools. And high school attendance is worse and tougher to fix: 34 percent of the city’s high school students missed a
month or more of school last year.

“We were surprised by the results,” said Kim Nauer, a New School researcher. “The number of elementary schools with virulent absenteeism problems is going down. But thousands of kids are still in schools where a third of their class might be gone on any given day.”

Researchers and city officials credited the improvements, in part, to a change the Education Department made two years ago in beginning to specifically track chronic absentees, defined as students who miss 20 days or more in a school year, along with tracking average attendance in schools, the traditional benchmark. READ MORE...