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Efforts at increasing attendance in Lexington City Schools are making progress, as Jason White, director of operations and student services, presented preliminary chronic absenteeism rates at the July meeting of the Lexington School Board.
Chronic absenteeism is defined by the state as a student missing 10% or more school days in a year, and was one of the major categories targeted by Governor Glenn Younkin’s All In plan.
“Chronic absenteeism, it’s a big thing going on in the state right now. From Covid, as we’ve talked about, school closures have done nothing to help,” White told the Board.
At the end of the 2022-2023 school year, around 8% of Lylburn Downing Middle School students were counted chronically absent, and nearly 14% of Waddell Elementary students, which was nearing one of the state’s thresholds for accreditation standards.
“As you all know, this number from last school year kind of jumped out at us — we were 1 percent away from being a level one school by the state standards,” said White.
Steps were taken to improve attendance. “As you all know, by spring we implemented a new attendance policy as one of the actions we took to try to combat what happened the year before,” White explained.
“Students with 15 or more absences have to bring in a doctor’s note, court documentation, or a funeral note for that to be an excused absence.”
A tutoring program was implemented at Waddell Elementary School mid-year, which allowed students to recover lost time outside of school hours.
Administrators also held regular attendance meetings, sending letters or calling the families of students with a high number of absences.
“It was a huge undertaking. It took a lot of time. They really stepped up to the plate and did a great job communicating with families,” White said. “The message is not, ‘We caught you, you’re at 15’ — it’s not that we’ve caught you, but what can we do to help you.”
Near the end of this school year, the focus narrowed to students who were near the threshold of chronic absence.
“The last month of school, the calls and letters, we dropped that. I said look, ‘It’s too late to be sending a bunch of those at this point,’” said White.
“We found the students who were in that threshold, where it was a day or two here or three days here, this kid is going to go from being on the verge to being chronically absent.”
Members of the attendance team would then make personal phone calls if those students missed a day of school.
“We saw some great results from that. That last month, we were just shifting our focus to kids who were on the threshold there. That really helped a lot,” he said.
Preliminary results at the end of the 2023-2024 school show Lylburn Downing’s chronic absenteeism rate had dropped from around 8% to around 3%.
Meanwhile, Waddell’s rate had fallen from nearly 14% to just over 6%, which, factoring in hours recovered through the tutoring program, White said, would likely be reduced to around 4%.
“So huge, huge improvement in results there. We know we’ve got to keep on keeping on,” he said. “We can’t go, ‘We did it and let’s just forget about attendance.’ We’re going to continue what we’re doing.”
Looking forward to the 2024-2025 school year, White said plans are in place to include teachers in regular attendance meetings, and to expand the tutoring program to the middle school.
