This article, written by Scott Girard, originally appeared in The Cap Times.

One-fifth of Madison’s kindergartners missed at least 18 days of school in 2012-2013, meaning they were chronically absent.

The problem was worrisome enough for United Way of Dane County to launch the “Here! Every Student Every Day” campaign focused on improving attendance rates.

But a decade later, the rate has nearly doubled: 38.5% of kindergartners in the Madison Metropolitan School District missed 18 days or more of the 2021-22 school year. The district’s overall “chronic absenteeism” rate was 36.7%, or more than one-third of students at all grade levels.

Six of every 10 Black children in MMSD were chronically absent, as well as over half of students considered “economically disadvantaged.” About half of all those with disabilities and more than 4 in 10 Hispanic students were also considered chronically absent in the same time period.

In total, nearly 9,000 children in Madison public schools missed more than 10% of the school year, a rate of absenteeism that can indicate broader problems facing children and puts them at risk of a serious, long-term disadvantage in learning.

Grelinda Isom’s four children are among those considered chronically absent. Isom herself has found the system a challenge to navigate as she tries to advocate for her children and their needs, she said, and each additional roadblock further drives a wedge between her family and the schools.

“The way they’re treated, them being heard, them crying out for help from trusted adults that they consider there for them, that they trust — they’re telling them what they need and their needs are still not being met,” she said, detailing Individualized Education Plans and safety plans going unfulfilled. “Mentally, physically it’s messing them up because they feel like no matter what they do, they’re not going to be heard or their needs are not going to be met.”

The chronic absenteeism rate is rising across Wisconsin and the country after the COVID-19 pandemic, with Madison’s fast-rising rates contributing to the trend. Across all Wisconsin schools, 22.7% of students missed enough days to be categorized as chronically absent in 2021-22, up from 12.7% in 2017-18.

Wisconsin figures are not yet available for 2022-23, but according to a Chalkbeat report on data from other states, absenteeism rates dropped slightly from 2021-22 to last year but remained significantly higher than pre-pandemic rates.

While the reasons for absences vary — health, transportation issues, a loss of connection to the school or safety concerns, to name a few — the costs are usually high, even beyond the missed academic content.

“What happens when you miss time in the classroom when you’re developing is you’re missing social experiences with your peers, with the adults that care about students,”  MMSD social work teacher leader Laura Glaub said. “You’re missing any type of social-emotional learning that you’re doing in the classroom, you’re missing community building, you’re missing the chance to feel like you belong as a learner and that you can get the resources for your next step.”

‘Attendance is a Signal’

The focus on chronic absenteeism, which covers both excused and unexcused absences as well as school punishments that result in missing school, is a shift from looking at truancy, a metric outlined in state law that comes with penalties for parents but accounts for only unexcused absences. That shift helps the district as it is moving “to the mindset that attendance is a signal” of something going wrong in a student’s life, Glaub said.

“If our students are not in the classroom, not at school, that’s a signal that there’s support possibly needed,” Glaub said.

Eric Grodsky, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor whose research has included publications on chronic absenteeism before the pandemic, suggested in an interview that focusing on those underlying causes is the best way to help students academically, as well. That’s because whatever is causing them to miss school can harm their ability to learn even if they’re present, he said.

“People tend to think of absence as a cause of student problems in school, right? You’re not learning as much because you’re not there, which is pretty intuitive, really,” Grodsky said. “We’re much less convinced that’s the case, that absence is the cause of student troubles, and are pretty convinced it’s more an indication of troubles that students are having.”

Research shows poor attendance is linked with worse school outcomes, from lower grades and test scores to a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school. MMSD’s dropout rate has hovered between 1.6% and 1.8% from 2017-18 to 2021-22, according to state data.

“Chronic absenteeism can really undermine our efforts to improve school performance and it can contribute to higher dropout rates and we want to make sure that we have a strong economy in our local communities and strong graduates who can contribute to that community, holding good jobs and making enough money to support their families,” said the state Department of Public Instruction’s school social work consultant, Julie Incitti.

There’s no simple fix to solve the challenges facing every Madison student who feels disengaged, especially as the district remains short-staffed and will soon run out of federal COVID-19 relief funding that helped pay for some mental health programming. Partnering with community organizations already doing some of the work — whether on mental health, housing or health care access — could be one step in the right direction.

Brandi Grayson, the founder and CEO of one such nonprofit in Urban Triage, suggested MMSD could improve its approach to those partnerships by being more flexible and building better trust with those organizations, including making it easier for those organizations and parents themselves to visit their children’s schools. But ultimately, she said, getting kids to school will require showing them why they should be there.

“We need to move away from controlling behaviors and (start) centering the kids’ humanity and really looking at what’s going on in their world and holding space to listen to them,” Grayson said. “Asking them, ‘What for you would be the answer?’ and actually doing it, because you will find when people are heard and feel seen and they feel like they belong, they actually show up differently.”

‘We Come Here Because We Have To’

Isom is a mother of three teenagers and one elementary school student.

She said her children often feel ignored at school — until they get in trouble.

“When they do something bad, that’s when they’re being heard,” Isom said.

As she travels to one school to advocate for one child, that often means another child ends up late or missing a school day at their building.

“If I have to continue to be at this one high school to make sure my one child was getting heard or her needs are getting met, if my whole concentration is on that, I can’t be at three other schools at once,” she said. “I only have one car, it’s only one me, I have four kids.

“If I have to get everybody to school and if the bus is not on time, that pushes me back, that’s not my fault.”

A group of La Follette High School students who spoke with a Cap Times reporter last spring expressed similar feelings of disconnection. One student said she did all of the work for her class but didn’t want to go because she didn’t feel like the teacher believed in her or cared about her. She experienced one incident in which “this teacher tried to get smart with me,” and she was done, she said.

Another La Follette student, speaking with the Cap Times last spring on the condition he remain anonymous, said he wants to go to college but has been chronically absent because he’s uncomfortable with the crowds and distractions at school and doesn’t feel that staff members take student concerns seriously.

“We come here because we have to,” he said.

Who Is Accountable?

Recently released state testing data for the 2022-23 school year show students across Wisconsin and the Madison district are still recovering from the pandemic.

Data also show that academic gaps between white students and their peers of color, specifically Black students, have grown wider than they already were.

It seems clear that a first step in closing that gap could be getting students to school.

“It’s really important for students to be engaged in learning and to be attending their school program,” said Incitti, with the DPI. “Students who attend more regularly have better grades and higher test scores.”

That would make absenteeism a logical measure by which to hold schools accountable.

But Grodsky, the UW–Madison professor and researcher, suggested that given the complexity of the issue and the long list of reasons students miss school, that might be an easy way out.

“If you punish schools for not getting those kids to attend, you’re basically going to end up punishing the schools who have the children and the families who are experiencing the greatest challenges,” Grodsky said. “That seems counterproductive, and I don’t think it’s the intent of anybody.”

He understands how getting students to school could seem like a way to improve test scores for students of different races and socioeconomic statuses, given the simplicity of the connection between time in school and achievement.

“One, it’s very intuitive to people that this must be a cause because you’re not there,” he said. “Two, it’s very easy to measure, so there it is. If it’s intuitive and you can measure it, then you can call it a day and use that for accountability.”

But if a lack of attendance itself is not the cause of inequalities, and instead whatever is causing the absences is also contributing to the academic challenges, “it seems irresponsible to use (absenteeism) as a metric” for schools, he said.

“You can’t help kids get where they’re going to be by making them go to school if there are things happening outside of school that make it more difficult for them to benefit from that experience,” he said. “You have to address the root causes.”

All of that said, Grodsky acknowledged that the dramatic spike in absenteeism will require more research to determine whether a lack of attendance means the same thing it did pre-pandemic.

“Where it used to be a signal of other things going on, I’m not as sure now, genuinely unsure,” Grodsky said.

There’s some evidence that meeting families where they’re at can work. A statewide program in Connecticut, set up in 2021 to combat the growing absenteeism rate, had staff visit families at home to establish relationships and explore the challenges they faced with school attendance, according to a report analyzing the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, or LEAP.

The report found that attendance rates increased by 4 percentage points in the month immediately following the first visit for most students in the study, with attendance rates continuing to increase in the following months. After six months, attendance rates saw an average increase of approximately 7 percentage points for students served in the summer and 15 percentage points for those reached during the 2021-22 school year.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has used some of its federal COVID-19 relief money on targeted outreach to students, but it doesn’t include family home visits. DPI worked with an organization called Graduation Alliance to create the ENGAGE Wisconsin program,  which provides one-on-one coaching to more than 4,000 students to help them reconnect with school, DPI policy initiatives adviser Laura Adams recently told a group of reporters.

“This is one-time federal funding, which also speaks to the need for ongoing and sustainable funding to support efforts to address this particular challenge,” Adams said.

Excused or Not

One change of focus has been a move from looking at habitual truancy to chronic absenteeism.

The former refers to unexcused absences, meaning a student missed school and no one called in to excuse them. The latter includes both unexcused and excused absences, which is a focus on the outcome of missing school for whatever reason.

“I just want the community and the world to know the importance of looking at chronic absenteeism with unexcused, excused and suspensions,” said Glaub, the MMSD social work teacher leader. “That’s a huge shift we need to have.”

Truancy, once habitual, can also bring the involvement of the court system. Dane County Circuit Court Judge Everett Mitchell said he’s seen an uptick in truancy cases brought before him since the pandemic. The courts, he said, can be a necessary resource in cases where “nobody has seen the children,” recounting one situation where no one in the school system had seen a child for more than a year.

“We’re trying to utilize the court system and the resources we have to, one, see the children, because I think the goal is to make sure that these children are seen and eyes are able to be put on them,” Mitchell said. “But also figure out ways to support the parents so that the parents can have what they need in order to make sure that the children can get to school and engage in their education.”

With the challenges school staff can face in reaching all of their students, Mitchell said the courts can be a key resource in helping when schools are overwhelmed.

“By the time we get the case, we have access to more resources, some of which we can mandate,” Mitchell said. “It just puts another set of eyes other than a few social workers working inside of a school building, now you have a whole system paying attention to a family, to a child. I think that adds more complexity to those families’ lives, but it gives us some assurance that these children are going to be successful and that they’re seen.”

La Follette High School social worker Leland Pan, who began in the district in 2022, said the “archaic state law” around truancy is unfortunate and not helpful in trying to help families facing difficult situations.

“The idea is, ‘Oh your kid is truant, you might get a ticket, that’s the potential outcome,’ that’s the only legal leverage we have with families who are in this category,” Pan said. “I’ve yet to meet a single family where a ticket is what’s going to fix the problem. I’ve yet to meet a family that doesn’t care about their kid or their kid’s education. The system is not designed to meet where our families are coming from.”

Limited Resources

While Pan can have conversations with families about what they need, it can be hard to actually provide the help.

“Without any sort of financial resources backing my work, it’s very much just a conversation,” Pan said. “It’s very hard to have concrete action steps. If the issue is housing instability, ‘Oh, we’re forced to move,’ … I can connect them with the housing nonprofits here, but all of this bureaucracy doesn’t move at the pace fast enough for families.”

Capital High School social worker Kelli Semrau echoed that challenge, and stressed that it’s still important to listen, especially early on in building relationships so that families “feel safe or… feel willing to share some of the things that are going on with them.”

“A lot of what we end up being able to do is just listen and just give them a space,” Semrau said. “Especially for parents to just share if they feel comfortable enough with us or trust us.”

MMSD Interim Superintendent Lisa Kvistad acknowledged the need to give schools those resources this summer, weeks after taking over the position, as well as the importance of building relationships.

“The idea that schools deeply know students and families is really important, like that’s where it starts, to deeply know children, to deeply know families and what they need,” Kvistad said. “We can’t support and intervene if we don’t know that.”

“So how do we help schools be able to do that? How do we give them the resources, the staff, the tools so that they know what they can draw from to address chronic absenteeism? And how do we also make schools feel like places where children and families belong, that their backgrounds and the assets that they bring are valued in a school?”

She said there’s “not necessarily even one particular answer” to those questions, but it’s about “creating a clear system, finding ways to actually communicate with families that are explicit while building healthy relationships with families and students that show their voice matters and they’re valued in school.

“It’s the importance of a strong foundation and ways of working and individually outreaching to give that individual attention in specific areas that might define chronic absenteeism for any particular time,” she said.

Among MMSD’s continuous improvement goals during Kvistad’s year in charge is a 5 percentage point increase in the portion of students with 90% or higher annual attendance — or, put another way, a 5 percentage point decrease in the absenteeism rate.

“We can’t improve literacy and math outcomes without our kids in school,” district staff wrote in a continuous improvement plan shared with the Madison School Board. “We, the adults, need to be intentional about creating the conditions for learning for our students.

“These conditions promote belonging, relevancy, engaging learning, and agency so that our students have a reason to come to school.”

‘A Bureaucratic Mess’

Madison’s community resources can be difficult to work through “for people with social work degrees who get paid to do it,” Pan said, making it hard to imagine how families who are “juggling jobs or juggling appointments” can do it on their own.

“I feel like a lot of the job is navigating the bureaucracy for them,” Pan said. “We are a community that has a lot of nonprofits, a lot of community agencies doing what we can to help, but that ironically leads to a lot of, ‘Well, this nonprofit focuses on people in this specific situation, and if you’re in this situation then you’re actually going to this group.’

“It is a bureaucratic mess for families to navigate.”

Urban Triage’s Grayson said the district, as a whole, needs to improve its relationships with community partners to help solve those issues.

“We need to get radical and innovative,” she said. “We need to figure out ways to get parents into schools, and not just all parents but I mean people in leadership, mentors, teachers who are retired, folks who have the privilege to volunteer some of their time — we know we don’t have the resources to hire enough social workers, right?”

Grodsky echoed the importance of the entire community working on solving the problems students and their families face, and said it will require action from every level of government and the community to make it happen.

“You need to give people the time and the space — people who can do the programming, who can do the servicing — to get together to discuss this to come up with a plan and to execute,” he said. “That requires each of these pieces of the puzzle, the district, the city, the county, to be willing to say, ‘We’re going to staff this, we’re not going to ask them to do another two dozen things this week, we’re going to ask them to focus on this, we’re going to give them the space to do it.

“‘And then when they come back with a plan, we’re going to vet that plan and we’re going to commit to doing it and again, we’re not going to give them another two dozen things to do while they’re doing this.’”

Without innovation, Grayson said, it will continue to be hard for some students to connect with school.

“School isn’t engaging for our kids,” Grayson said. “It used to be a place you would go to escape the home life, the chaos, you’ll go to be with your friends, be supported and affirmed by your teachers, talk to your counselor or social worker or restorative justice person or liaison who could inspire you, empower you, say ‘it’s gonna get better,’ provide you with a snack.

“That’s not what school is anymore. It’s really morphed into a place we just house bodies. It’s not just MMSD, it’s every school. Every single school in the Madison area has this challenge.”