Maryland state lawmakers and education leaders are searching for ways to decrease chronic absenteeism in schools statewide.
Over one-third of Maryland K-12 students missed 10% or more school days last year, the state education department presented in a senate hearing Thursday. That number varies by local district, with 54.1% of Baltimore City students and 34.7% of Baltimore County students hitting that mark.
The chronic absenteeism rates are also growing for children in younger grades.
“And that's a real concern, particularly when you're thinking that they're starting their educational career,” said Interim State Superintendent Carey Wright.
Nearly 35% of children in kindergarten statewide are chronically absent.
“Chronic absenteeism can adversely impact a child for a lifetime,” said Clarence Crawford, president of the state board of education. “Research has shown that chronic absenteeism…impacts test scores, grades, children’s ability to be able to graduate. And also, it increases the likelihood of engagement with the criminal justice system.”
Lawmakers called for initiatives that could be implemented this legislative session to reduce absenteeism numbers. But education leaders said there’s no clear-cut solution.
Cheryl Bost, president of the Maryland State Education Association, said schools need more funding for staff like psychologists and social workers, who often make personal phone calls to families and form one-on-one relationships with students.
“If a school counselor has one thousand students on their workload, they're not seeing anybody,” Bost said. “It's very hard to have that immediate time with students.”
Lori Phelps, principal at Woodbridge Elementary School in Baltimore County, said her school has seen success after making “a decision to prioritize attendance.” Their chronic absenteeism rate dropped from over 28% to 9.2% in one year.
Phelps tracks absence data for her school, noting patterns like weather-related skips and students who never attend early dismissal or late start days. An attendance team, complete with a student social worker, meets every week to identify students at risk and extend personalized support.
Wright said that every school will need a different solution path.
“Not all schools have a full-time psychologist that's available to them. Not all schools have full-time one or more school counselors,” she said.
Wright said she and her team will engage with local stakeholders and successful schools to create a statewide guide to help address absenteeism.
Bias and miseducation make attendance gaps worse
Sue Fothergill is a senior researcher at Attendance Works, a national nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about the negative impacts of absenteeism.
At Thursday’s hearing, she said many parents don’t know about the impact that missing school has on student academic achievement.
“In early grades, some of our families think, ‘Well, it's just kindergarten, or it's just first grade, children can miss a few days here and there, it's not that big of a deal,’” Fothergill said. “The reality though, is that those are the most important formative years, not just for learning to read, but learning social emotional skills, and establishing habits that help those young people throughout their careers.”
When a child is chronically absent in kindergarten, they are less likely to be proficient in reading by third grade, Fothergill said. And at that point, teachers often switch to content-focused learning.
“It becomes much harder to catch a child up and be able to learn how to read as they matriculate through their years, because they've missed those formative years,” she said.
Fothergill said educating parents on this trend is an important step to addressing absenteeism.
Part of that work also comes from the recent shift to looking at chronic absenteeism, which calculates both unexcused and excused absences, instead of truancy, which only focuses on unexcused reasons.
“When we look at truancy, we’re missing the full scale and scope of the problem,” she said. “And we’ve taught our families that attendance is a matter of compliance, rather than a habit of academic success.”
Only 6.9% of Maryland students are truant, meaning they miss 20 days or more per year for unexcused absences.
And there’s bias in the definitions of legal versus illegal absences, Fothergill said.
“Oftentimes, illegal absences are absences that happen due to poverty, they’re absences that happened due to the over policing of Black and Brown people, and they’re absences that happened due to the unpredictable lives of people that are living at the economic margins of our society,” she said.
Fothergill has heard children say they miss school because they don’t have clean clothes, or they missed the bus. Others stay home to watch younger siblings while their parents are at work.
“There are a lot of reasons that children miss school that don't qualify as legal that one might argue isn't somebody just skipping,” she said.
And when students return to school, there are differences in how they’re treated, Fothergill said. Unexcused absences mean students don’t get to make up missed exams or schoolwork.
“Children that miss school for legal reasons, they get to make up the work, sometimes they even get tutoring support,” she added.
Fothergill said the state needs to start tracking the unexcused reasons why children miss school, to “leverage attendance data to initiate deeper problem-solving, rather than deeper punitive action.”
