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Lexington City Schools is working to address chronic absenteeism among students and to follow state guidelines.
“You’ve heard from us a bit this year about this being a focus for us as a district,” Rebecca Walters, district superintendent, said at the March meeting of the School Board. “It is a focus for most districts across the state, in terms of trying to improve strong attendance efforts for all attendance levels.”
Jason White, director of operations and student services, provided the School Board an update on the district’s attendance efforts this year.
“The state defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10 percent or more of the academic year. For us, I believe, with some of our smoke-out days, and our one snow day, we’re going to land somewhere around 172 days of school,” White said.
“Therefore, any student who misses 17 days of school will be safe and not counted chronically absent, but any of our students who miss 18 days this school year will be considered by the state as chronically absent,” he explained.
Though White said the division has not historically had high rates of absenteeism, changes since Covid and new state policies have led to increased focus.
“Lylburn Downing Middle School has remained pretty steady, somewhere in that 7.5% to 8.5% range,” White told the Board.
“Waddell has traditionally been lower than the middle school, until last school year. And you can see that huge jump from about 6 percent the two years prior to almost 14% last year at Waddell,” he said.
Administrators took action as absentee numbers began to rise.
“So this summer, when those rates started coming, and certainly we knew, as the school went on […] I had to meet up with [principals] Dr. [Abbott] Keesee and Ms. [Kim] Troise and we said, ‘We’ve got to do something,’” White said.
“We’ve got to do something, not just to support our families, but also, unfortunately, to hold folks accountable that are not getting their children to school, regularly and on time.”
A policy was implemented, creating a threshold number of absences, after which students must provide additional documentation.
“Back in the summer, we adopted a new policy where students who accumulate 15 or more absences, regardless of excused or unexcused, have to provide a medical note, a notice that they were in court, or were at a funeral for it to be excused,” White said.
This limit was chosen to comply with state policy.
“We felt like that 15 threshold keeps us under the magic number of 18 we’re trying to stay under so that student is not counted chronically absent,” White explained. “We felt like with us not having a policy in place prior, we really wanted to start out on the conservative end, because we do want to work with our families.”
Also over the summer, both schools worked to increase communication with parents.
“We also met with families of a good number of students we did identify from last year [as chronically absent]. We had meetings, we sent a lot of letters this summer that we’d never sent before, saying, ‘Your kid missed a lot of school, we want to work with you what can we do to help,’” White said.
Though this process was challenging, White said that the results were often positive.
“We learned, from families, things that we didn’t know about kids and, then we were like, we can help, in this manner, to overcome that,” he said.
“Those were positive, and I would say that some families, we’ve seen some very drastic changes in behavior, some we haven’t.”
Following this summer work, attendance numbers from the start of the current school year were much improved.
“Looking at our mid-year rates, so after the first semester, with approximately 90 days of school at that point, using nine absences as a threshold, that would be 10%,” White said.
“We’re looking at, Lylburn Downing is 3.8%, or seven of 180 students [chronically absent], and Waddell was much improved from last year, 6.5%, or 22 of 338 students [chronically absent].”
A reassessment in March, however, showed slippage.
“Unfortunately our numbers have taken a hit, Lylburn Downing is now at 8.4% and Waddell has creeped up to 10.4%,” said White.
Some of this was attributed to the spread of winter illnesses.
“Honestly, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I read those numbers, but again, we’re hopeful that it was the flu season and Covid and all that stuff,” said White.
The division will continue working with families and implementing programs as the year goes on and is also looking at implementing programs outside of school hours, which would allow students to earn back missed time.
“We will be able to work some attendance credit, so a student who may became chronically absent throughout the school year, we will be able to have some in-person tutoring, outside of the school hours, after school before school summer school,” White explained.
“We’re kind of filling that out right now to see what that would look like and how that might work, and we’re hoping to get some results from that that next year, will be available next year, flexible learning time,” he said.
Overall, White said the schools are learning from their data and will continue their working with students and families.
“We’ve got to continue our efforts; we know that. We’ve got to keep having these tough conversations with families, we’ve got to keep making the phone calls sending the letters,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, but we hopefully will be able to impress this upon families.”
