COVID scrambled attendance and reshaped how parents view school — part of why many kids still miss class

What happens when a student starts to show symptoms of a cold, flu or even COVID? Do they risk infecting others at school? And how important is attending class in person, anyway, when online learning is available, and when many families have come to rely on help from older children at home? 

Those questions have thrown a snag into school attendance across Colorado school districts as families and schools stumble back toward the rhythm of getting students to show up to school every day.

High rates of students missing at least 10% of school days in recent years — meaning they have been chronically absent either with or without permission — have triggered alarm across the country and in Colorado communities, with national and statewide efforts to boost student attendance trickling down to individual schools.

Students miss school for a wide range of reasons, state officials say, including struggles to access transportation, the need to help a family member with a debilitating disease and a deteriorating sense of safety among students while in school.

Other factors at play stem from the chaos-laden days of pandemic learning, district administrators told The Colorado Sun, as some parents and students rethink what learning looks like, question how to navigate sick days and continue to cope with housing and economic hardships.

“It’s a change in perspective about what school has to offer,” said Desiree Quintanilla, schools intervention services coordinator in Brighton’s 27J Schools. “I think there is a group of parents still really concerned about health issues. I think families have a lot on their plate, and I think the pandemic is something that showed us how hard day-to-day life can be. So I think we have families struggling with issues outside of school related to our economy, related to employment, related to housing, that sometimes when you’re worried about a lot of other pretty foundational aspects of life, school can sometimes not be the priority on any given day.”

Student attendance in Colorado schools last year began to tick in the right direction, with student attendance rates hitting 91.5%, up from 90.8% the year before, according to state data. Most of the state’s school districts and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services — clusters of districts that share resources — saw their attendance rates jump last year. Still, average statewide attendance was higher before the pandemic — 92.8% during the 2019-20 school year.

And while chronic absenteeism among students dropped by 3.4 percentage points last year to 27.7%, that is still significantly above figures from 2019-20, when an average 22.6% of students were marked as chronically absent.

The ongoing challenge around emptier classrooms in recent years is a nod to a change in the way some families see the role of traditional schooling in their children’s lives, said Cori Canty, school improvement planning and attendance systems manager for Denver Public Schools.

“School leaders will say we’ve seen a shift in values since the pandemic, whether it’s values that we need our teenagers to work to help financially get us through or values in my child’s mental Health is not worth going to school today to we’re going to take these once-in-a-lifetime trips,” Canty said. “Those values have shifted for a variety of reasons.”

Other parents, however, are taking every step they can to make sure their kids are participating in class every day, said Lorena Garcia, executive director of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition. The nonprofit provides programs, classes and resources that help parents play an active role in their child’s Education to help set them up for success. Many of the families the organization works with are immigrants and include parents and caregivers who don’t speak English.

“They are wanting to do everything they can to support their kids in school,” Garcia said, adding that attitudes toward school haven’t changed as much as family circumstances have.

Struggles born from COVID continue to hamper low- and middle-income families, she said, with inflation on the rise, federal stimulus funding for schools expiring and difficulties accessing early childhood centers. That sometimes means parents must choose between equally distressing options: keeping an older student home to care for their younger sibling or foregoing work and a paycheck to stay home, themselves.

“This has been happening for as long as we’ve had public schools,” Garcia said. “There’s constantly this tension between acknowledging family circumstances and the expectations and requirements within schools.”

“This is not a blame game on parents”

With students’ frequent absences weighing on Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova and the Colorado Department of Education, the state has joined 13 other states in a push to slash rates of chronic absenteeism by 50% in the next five years.

“We see it as incredibly important if we’re going to keep meeting the student outcome goals that we want to meet as a state,” said Johann Liljengren, director of CDE’s Dropout Prevention and Student Re-Engagement Office. “We see this as part of it. We need kids engaged in learning, and we think that that’s going to help us make progress.”

A national survey conducted by the National Parents Union in March found that most kids are missing school because they are sick or have an appointment. When asked about the reasons their kids were absent from school, 64% of parent respondents said physical illness while 48% indicated their child had some kind of medical, dental or other appointment.

One of the best ways schools can double down on the need for students to show up to school regularly is by communicating academic progress results with parents, said Ariel Smith, senior director of policy and action with the National Parents Union.

“I think parents are under the impression that their students are doing just fine and the schools are not having those conversations with urgency,” said Smith, previously co-executive director and co-founder of Denver organization Transform Education Now. “It’s really important that this is not a blame game on parents but instead it’s a real look at how our schools are doing at engaging kids.”