For Claire Lasecki, it was summer school that got her back into the classroom this year after she missed 78% of her freshman year at Middleton High School.
Lasecki, 15, said the smaller number of students during the summer term allowed her to get to know the school and some of her peers and reduced the anxiety she had experienced when she was in class last year.
“I don’t feel anxious at school anymore because I know some of the people around here, and I know what to do,” she said. “I’m keeping up with classes pretty well.”
Chronic absenteeism — which the state defines as missing more than 10% of scheduled school days — increased significantly at schools across the country in the years after pandemic-related classroom closures that in some cases lasted more than a year.
Dane County districts were not immune, with rates of chronic absenteeism especially high among Black, Latino and poor students.
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Data from the state Department of Public Instruction show that in Madison, for example, chronic absenteeism increased from less than 35% of Black students in the two years prior to the pandemic to 62.5% in 2021-22. Just more than 43% of Hispanic students in the Middleton-Cross Plains School District were chronically absent in 2020-21, with that percentage dropping to 30.8% in 2021-22. Those figures were less than 15% prior to the pandemic.
In Sun Prairie, where officials declined to comment for this story, the percentage of students considered economically disadvantaged who were chronically absent rose slightly from 2020-21 to 2021-22, going from 42.4% to 44.4%. Before the pandemic it was under 30% of such students.
Since students fully returned to in-person learning in the fall of 2021, two of those three districts — the county’s largest — say they’ve made progress improving school attendance.
Lasecki said her parents weren’t happy about her missing so much school last year, but neither they, school staff nor a mental health wraparound program for students run through the county Department of Human Services were able to get her to go.
School officials were repeatedly in touch with Lasecki and her family, she said, and after meetings with school staff she’d go to school for a while but then stop, discouraged at how far behind she’d become academically.
“It was mostly that it was a lot of new people and a different kind of schedule throughout the day,” she said. “It was a bigger school with a ton of people.”
School district officials encouraged her to go to summer school, though, and attending at the beginning of sophomore year felt like a “fresh start,” she said. She said she’s open to attending the summer term again.
State law allows school officials to refer habitual truants to juvenile court and their parents for prosecution, but Middleton-Cross Plains district spokesperson Shannon Valladolid said the district’s “goal is to effectively intervene and support families before we involve the court system.”
‘Positive trends’ a first since COVID
The Madison School District — which with 25,000 students is the state’s second-largest — has seen rates of chronic absenteeism fall, according to Kira Hicks, assistant director of student and staff support, although she declined to provide district data before the state release.
Attendance was better in the second quarter of this year than the second quarter of last school year, she said, and there was improvement across student groups, save for one she declined to identify because it was so small that revealing it might inadvertently identify specific students.
“We are not yet quite at our pre-COVID levels, but we actually are seeing positive trends in our attendance data at (the district) for the first time since COVID,” she said.
District lead social worker Laura Glaub said the reasons she hears from absent students and their families for not attending school include trouble finding reliable transportation, unstable housing, and financial problems that might mean a student has to work or stay home and watch younger siblings while a parent works.
Those were problems before the pandemic, according to assistant superintendent for teaching and learning Cynthia Green, but the pandemic exacerbated them. The district is also dealing with more medically fragile students now, she said, and attendance can be affected by rules requiring students to stay home when sick with COVID or some other illness.
Anecdotally, she’s seen less “stamina” among student and adults post-COVID.
“There seems to be more mental health issues, more issues around the stamina to push through on any given day,” she said. “There’s a difference between learning online and learning on your couch versus now coming back and learning in person and the length of the day that is something that we are building back towards.”
Glaub said district schools have attendance teams made up of staff that can include student-engagement specialists, family liaisons, psychologists, counselors and others. When she spoke with the State Journal on Jan. 29, she had just been meeting with a group to talk about home visits to a student who hadn’t been coming to school regularly since the fall.
“We have different tiers of support based on what that family and student say they need,” she said.
One of the less tangible things students and their families need to ensure good attendance is a connection with school, she said.
“When we’re doing that attendance support plan, one of the first questions we ask is, ‘Who are your children’s trusted adults at school or who do you know that’s at your child’s school?’” she said. “If we hear ‘no one,’ we know that’s our first priority is connecting students and families to build relationships within that school.”
Middleton sees fewer days missed
Middleton-Cross Plains was likewise reporting “significant improvements in our attendance data,” including 31 fewer students receiving letters during the first part of this school year for missing between 10 and 15 days, as compared to the same period in 2022. There were also 670 fewer days missed, the district said, although it saw a 26% increase in tardiness.
In a statement, the district said it has “implemented various programs and initiatives to address chronic absenteeism especially among ‘marginalized’ students,” including:
- Staff to work with non-English speakers.
- Better messaging campaigns to emphasize the importance of being in school.
- Daily, weekly and monthly monitoring of attendance and tardiness to catch and address problems early.
- “Personalized” outreach measures such as letters, texts and home visits.
- Development of attendance contracts and individualized student plans.
Middleton-Cross Plains, which had 7,263 students last year, also pointed to a need to form connections between students and their families and the schools, with staff known as student and family engagement specialists at the middle and high schools working to promote “a sense of belonging” so “that every student feels valued and encouraged to participate in their educational journey.”
In-person learning during COVID
Post-pandemic absenteeism was less problematic at three Madison private or charter schools that offered in-person learning in the 2020-21 school year, although exact comparisons are difficult because two of the schools don’t fall under the same state reporting requirements as traditional public schools.
Chronic absenteeism at Lighthouse Christian School on the city’s Southwest Side was 8.5% in 2019-20, 10.2% in 2020-21, 23% in 2021-22, 17% last school year and 1.5% so far this year, according to principal Tia Sierra, who said the school uses the same definition of chronic absenteeism as traditional public schools.
Sierra said most of the absences in 2021-22, when the school stopped offering an online schooling option for all students, were related to anxiety or mental health issues among children and families.
“The vast majority were families just afraid to send their kids to school, which was an interesting thing because in our mind, science had proven that schools aren’t the biggest spreaders of COVID,” she said, referencing research as early as the fall of 2020 that in-person schooling did not create an elevated risk for getting COVID for students or employees.
About 80% of the school’s 285 students in grades 4K through eight use state-funded vouchers to attend, according to Sierra. About 90% are non-white — the largest percentage, at 60%, are Latino — and about 90% are low-income, Sierra said.
At public charter One City Schools — which does have to report data to the state Department of Public Instruction and which has 203 students this year in grades 4K through seven — chronic absenteeism was about 39.1% for Black students and 42.9% for low-income students in 2018-19, when it offered only 4K and kindergarten.
Those figures had dropped to about 31.7% and 37%, respectively, by 2021-22, when the school served students in 4K through fourth grade. Still, One City’s founder and CEO Kaleem Caire said absenteeism is a consistent problem at One City, where currently about 90% of students are non-white and about 61% are low-income.
The private Catholic Edgewood Campus School, which serves grades K4 through eight, is “not suffering from chronic absenteeism,” according to principal Lauren Costello, who didn’t provide data.
No county deaths linked to in-person schooling
Researchers knew from early in the pandemic that children were less likely to have serious complications from the disease than the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions. In Dane County, one school-age person died of COVID-19: 16-year-old Madison East High School student Isai Morocho, on Nov. 25, 2020.
According to the last update Public Health Madison and Dane County made to its COVID dashboard, on Oct. 11, there were a total of 624 COVID deaths in Dane County and 3,694 hospitalizations, and 532 of the deaths were of people age 60 and older.
The most recent analysis the agency did of COVID hospitalizations or deaths linked to in-person schooling in Dane County was released in October of 2022 and showed there had been no deaths and eight hospitalizations — six of students and two of teachers.
The White House on Sept. 13 released a statement pointing to the increase in chronic absenteeism in the wake of COVID-19 and its role in falling test scores, and calling for an “all hands on deck” approach to getting children consistently back in the classroom.
Editor's note: This story was updated on March 4 to correct information provided by the Middleton-Cross Plains School District that it later determined was incorrect. This story was updated on April 4 to correct information provided by the Madison School District and state Department of Public Instruction that they later determined was incorrect.