Unexcusable: Philly schools’ chronic absence crisis

Chronic absenteeism is surging in Philly’s early grades, putting thousands more at risk of lasting academic harm.

Brown is a professional in residence at Temple University’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting. Purcell and Graham are Inquirer staff writers.

Missing school is a way of life for nearly half of the students in the Philadelphia School District.

An alarming 46% of all district students are “chronically absent,” meaning they missed more than 10% of their school days, according to an Inquirer analysis of internal district data. This puts them at far greater risk of falling behind in reading and math, or eventually not graduating at all.

The district has long been plagued by poor attendance, but the problem has intensified.

Chronic absenteeism rose in 93% of the district’s schools in the 2021-22 school year compared with 2018-19, the most recent full year before the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite citywide enrollment being down 9% over that span, chronic absenteeism grew by an additional 12,500 students.

The Inquirer’s conclusions come from analyses of detailed Philadelphia school attendance data obtained after a three-year legal battle with the district. The data had not previously been public.

For far too many of the Philadelphia School District’s 113,443 students in district-run schools, poverty, safety fears, mental-health issues, and aftershocks of the pandemic contribute to a deepening absenteeism crisis. Many students who struggle with attendance also say they don’t believe that their school provides engaging instruction with reliable teachers.

“These high levels of chronic absenteeism are a sign of an erosion in the basic positive conditions of learning and it reflects that kids don’t feel physically and emotionally healthy and safe,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national education research nonprofit. “It’s not going to be an easy return” from the pandemic for Philadelphia, she said.

Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. acknowledged the urgency at a recent school board meeting.

“Attending school is a life-and-death issue for many children of color in this city,” Watlington said. “Overall, we are too immune to this issue of Black and brown kids not coming to school. We are not doing our best work, and I want to own that as superintendent.”

The Inquirer analysis focused on “chronic absenteeism” as a measure, rather than average daily attendance (ADA), which the district commonly uses to describe schools’ performance. Relying on the ADA metric can mask the at-risk students, those who over the school year miss more than 10% of the school year, or 19 or more of 180 days, the state Department of Education says. (The state does publish data on how many students regularly attend district schools. The district’s figures through March show no improvement in attendance over the 2021-22 school year.)

Watlington, who took over in June 2022, has made getting more children in classes regularly a key part of his goal of Philadelphia becoming the fastest-improving urban school system in the country.

“Attendance is absolutely where it begins,” Watlington said. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of why some students are not in attendance every day.”

Crisis in the lower grades

Philadelphia is not alone in seeing a climb in chronic absenteeism. According to Attendance Works, which helps districts nationwide counter student absence, an estimated 16 million students were chronically absent in the previous school year, more than double the number before the pandemic.

Philadelphia is the poorest of America’s 10 biggest cities, and students living in poverty are two to three times more likely to miss more than 10% of school days.

The biggest surge in chronic absenteeism has been in the elementary and middle school grades.

In the district’s 103 K through 8 schools, all but two had higher levels of chronically absent students compared with 2018-19. In about a third of those schools, the rates more than doubled, turning absenteeism into a daily crisis.

Principal Amy Williams, the veteran leader of William Dick Elementary in North Philadelphia, led a staff that went all-out during the pandemic to try to make sure students were engaged and getting instruction.

Although school was a lifeline during the pandemic, when students came back to the classroom last year, getting them to show up regularly was challenging.

“Attendance was horrible, and parents would tell me, ‘I’m not sending them, there’s all this COVID going around,” Williams said. Even now, with far fewer COVID-19 cases, parents who keep their children at home cite health reasons.

Before the pandemic, Dick’s chronic absenteeism was 36% – more than one in three students missed more than 10% of the school year, the marker for mediocre academic outcomes. Last school year, Dick’s rate soared to 67%.

The school’s staff showers students with incentives to attend – there’s the 95% Perks club, for those who miss only 5% of their schooling, with prizes ranging from cheesesteak parties to homework passes. But those tactics haven’t worked as well as they used to, Williams said.

“I just don’t know how long it’s going to take, not just for us, but probably for the entire country,” Williams said. “For some families, school lost some level of importance over the course of the pandemic, which is really hard.”

‘Sometimes I just leave’

By 16, Aniya Bowens had left home, was working multiple fast food jobs in Kensington and the Lower Northeast, and sleeping some nights in the back room of a bakery. It became impossible to keep up with her classes.

“It went from me not going to classes, to me collecting the work, doing it at home, and bringing it back to school,” said Bowens, who’d been in and out of the foster care system. “But that wasn’t enough, I just couldn’t get to school.”

At one point, Bowens found herself months behind at Fels High, with all F’s. She had no motivation.

Within a few blocks of Bowens’ school in Northeast Philadelphia, at least three teenagers were shot in the last year, two of them fatally. One of the victims, a 15-year-old former Fels student, was chased down and shot 10 times.

For Bowens, the violence added to her sense of helplessness. “There’s really something about Philly that makes you think you can’t do anything outside of this,” she said. “It’s really just something in this air that really makes you think once you grow up here, this is where you’re just bound to stay. Especially if you’re in the streets.”

Further exacerbating the attendance problem are students who show up for school, and are technically counted as present because they swipe their identification to enter the building – but skip classes or leave school altogether for the day. Sometimes they spend most of their school hours walking the halls.

At Sayre High School in West Philadelphia, “we have chronic hall-walkers who are here at 7:30 when school starts, and you just never see them in class,” said Kate Conroy, an English teacher there. Students can get detention for skipping class, but it’s not much of a threat.

Many of her students have responsibilities caring for relatives or helping to support their families. And many work at jobs where bosses schedule them for shifts during the school day.

For some students, Conroy said, there’s little incentive to go to class, sometimes because “they don’t feel connected to learning. Maybe they feel like they’re not capable, and they’re afraid of showing that.”

Though she wants to reach all her students, there are so many factors outside her control, Conroy said.

“I’m not a social worker — teachers go so far outside of what our job description is, but there’s a limit to what we’re capable of,” she said. “I can teach you how to read better, to write better.”

Social workers who work with impoverished Philadelphia families say one of their biggest challenges is students not having a stable place to live.

“Housing insecurity is the number-one crisis that our clients are experiencing,” said Amber Fullwood, a family coordinator for nonprofit Congreso de Latinos Unidos, which has a contract with the City of Philadelphia to help get students back in the classroom.

“I had a client who was living on her own, a 16-year-old girl. Her family just wasn’t taking care of her. They were also homeless. So she wasn’t going to school, she was working and trying to live.”

Fullwood said the girl’s case escalated to truancy court, but that could have been avoided. “I feel like some of these issues that families have, such as housing, can be addressed at the school level. But the schools aren’t equipped with the types of resources to help,” she said, echoing Conroy’s point.

A number of George Washington High students told The Inquirer they often come to school, swipe in, then walk out of class and sometimes don’t return.

Some students cited boredom, having substitute teachers, or just feeling depressed.

“There are times that I’m just stressed out and I don’t want to do anything at that moment. I feel pressure so sometimes I just leave,’’ said a 15-year-old 10th grader who would speak freely only if her name were not used.

She and other students at the school said they ask for a restroom break and just don’t go back to class. Teachers rarely check on them, they said, making skipping fairly easy.

“They just see you leaving and they don’t care. They say ‘if you leave, don’t come back in.’ I go to school and I just leave,” the Washington sophomore said.

Over the last year, the city’s Office of Children and Families has intensified its efforts to help the district cope with growing absenteeism through home visits and outreach. But the office has only seven social workers, and for now, works in only a limited number of schools identified as needing the most help.

The stakes are incredibly high.

Of the district’s 52 high schools, those that draw from local neighborhoods such as Washington and Fels generally have significantly higher absenteeism, higher dropout rates, and lower college-bound rates.

‘We’ve got to own this work together’

Some districts around the nation have made strides.

Chronic absenteeism in the Los Angeles school district improved in 2022, dropping to 32% from 43% the year before.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho of the Los Angeles Unified School District beefed up outreach to students who weren’t attending school, and got to know 10 students to better understand why they were unable to regularly attend school.

"Kids in America are facing a multi-faceted crisis that I think adults have failed to respond to," Carvalho said, explaining his staff found many students under the care of parents or other adults facing drug addiction and homelessness.

In Philadelphia, district spokesperson Monique Braxton said in a statement that the key to tackling absenteeism “is to ensure our schools are engaging, supportive, safe and welcoming environments.” The district also will perform more “attendance data reviews and consistent morning calls to students’ caregivers informing them of their child’s lateness or absence,” she said.

The district has begun holding focus groups, talking to educators, families and students, to understand why kids don’t come to class. Meanwhile, Watlington has pledged an additional $3.54 million in attendance resources in the 2023-24 budget, including funding for staff to target attendance at high-needs schools, more counselors, and a contract for outside help to study best attendance practices in other districts.

“Money alone isn’t going to solve it,” said Chang, of Attendance Works. “It requires thinking about how schools use data, and insights into tailored approaches. One of the challenges we’ve heard is finding staff – money can help you but only if you can find skilled staff to fill the positions.”

Watlington and Mayor Jim Kenney recently met to talk about absenteeism, the superintendent said.

Kenney and Watlington resolved to share data about truancy.

“We want to do this in a way that is not just about throwing the book at kids,” the superintendent said. “We will not discipline our way out of this attendance issue that we have.”

The city’s truancy office considers students habitually truant after they miss six or more days of school with unexcused absences. (Excused absences, such as for health reasons, aren’t counted against them.) Last year, the office identified more than 5,000 students as habitually truant.

“This is not just the school district’s work,” Watlington said. “This is the work of our city. It’s the work of our parents. We’ve got to own this work together.”

It can be the work of community groups, as well. James Washington, communications director of the Institute for the Development of African American Youth (IDAAY), which assists at-risk teenagers besieged by social and economic problems, said kids aren’t going to school because they are lost – and scared.

There used to be safe after-school programs that provided extracurricular activities and help with homework, Washington said. “But now, there is nowhere for kids to go.”

As of May 28, 165 Philadelphia public school students have been victims of gun violence. Twenty-five have died.

One at-risk youth who found her way to IDAAY, in North Philadelphia, is Bowens, brought there last summer by a boyfriend. She enrolled in a program that got her off the street and back in classes. Now 18, she is working part time, and is set to graduate from Achievement House Cyber Charter School in June.

Extra money makes a mark

At Dunbar Elementary in North Philadelphia, one family sometimes struggles getting their three children to school. Principal Daniel Mina and his attendance team know why: The family lives in a homeless shelter.

“They need a lot of support around uniforms, around transportation, around providing employment for the family,” said Mina, whose school enrolls 243 students. “I fundamentally believe that it’s not for lack of wanting the kids to come to school. There are just very real challenges that people face.”

Dunbar uses an impressive array of resources focused on attendance, including a three-member case management team that calls parents, conducts home visits, and helps connect families to services. The city pays for that resource because Dunbar is one of 20 “community schools” designated by the mayor to receive $500,000 in extra support and funds from proceeds of Philadelphia’s tax on sweetened beverages.

Mina’s attendance numbers took a hit last year, but they are recovering, he said, pointing to the school’s intense focus on building relationships with families, offering incentives to children who attend regularly, and making Dunbar “a joyful environment — a place where kids feel safe, where kids want to come to school.”

Average daily attendance at Dunbar hovers in the high 80% range, Mina said. And there’s been a drop in students who attend school less than 80% of the time, he said. It was 29% last year, and currently is 19% – a significant improvement.

On a recent day, Mina had a warm exchange with the father of an eighth-grade boy who had missed a significant amount of school the year before. The boy was at school – and on time – after being a focus of the attendance team. Just getting the student to school was a victory.

“We need kids to be here for our academic work to take hold and for everything else to happen,” the principal said.