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More than one out of 10 Utah elementary school students was chronically absent from school last year.
About 36,000 kids, or 12 percent of all students, routinely missed classes during the 2012-2013 school year, according to a report released Thursday by Voices for Utah Children.
September is national and Utah Attendance Awareness Month and the report was the centerpiece of a forum held Thursday in Salt Lake City for educators, policy makers and school attendance advocates.
"If kids aren't there, they can't benefit from what's being taught in the classroom," said Hedy Chang, director of the national initiative Attendance Works. "We know that you have to have attendance every day to get to achievement every year in order to get to attainment over time."
Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year, or roughly 18 days. A student's rate of absence is considered a key indicator of student success, prompting school- and district-level initiatives to promote attendance.
"It is a low-cost or no-cost strategy to reduce the achievement gap," said Karen Crompton, president and CEO of Voices for Utah Children. "We see the outcomes on reading scores, math and language test scores. It makes a huge difference."
Crompton said her organization focused on the elementary school years for the report because the younger grades are when attendance habits are formed. She also said the report makes a point of separating absenteeism from a school's daily attendance, which often can give a falsely positive portrayal of the number of children attending classes on a given day.
All of Utah's 41 school districts had daily attendance rates above 90 percent during the 2012-2013 school year. But the percentage of students who missed 18 or more school days ranged from 3.9 percent in Piute School District to 35.5 percent in Daggett School District.
"If you're only looking at average daily attendance, you can think everything's good," Crompton said. "But everything is not good in every school."
Chang, who gave the keynote address at Thursday's forum, said that identifying chronic absenteeism early in the school year and intervening at the individual student level is critical to improving student attendance.
She said the schools that are most successful at curbing absenteeism use data to track student attendance and take steps to correct habits after the initial weeks of the school year.
"The attendance you have in the very first month of school puts you at risk for the entire year," she said. "If you don't have enough resources to talk to every single kid, use your data to find out which kids to talk to." Chang also complimented the efforts of the Utah Governor's Office to include attendance data on the Governor's Report Card, a school accountability report that is proposed as a replacement to Utah's controversial school grading program.
"That is phenomenal," Chang said of the report card. "That actually is a model for the country."
Tami Pyfer, Gov. Gary Herbert's education director, said educators recommended including attendance figures in the report card to provide context into the factors that influence school performance.
"I think it will be startling for parents and community members to see what those rates are in some of our schools," Pyfer said. "Once they see that, there's a way to address the problem."
Lehi parent Autumn Cook said any sensible parent would agree that consistent absences have an effect on education. But she is skeptical of efforts that focus on or incentivize high attendance.
She said reports on chronic absenteeism rarely distinguish between excused and unexcused absences, which ignores the worthwhile reasons a family might pull their child from classes throughout the year.
And she worries about where attendance initiatives could push the state, noting policies in other parts of the country where students are forced to attend summer school or even face criminal consequences for missing school days.
"Education operates best when it operates on a model of opportunity, not compulsion, and where these attendance initiatives are pushing is compulsion," she said. "They're all pushing this idea that you have to have your bottom in the seat to succeed and it's not true."
But Salt Lake City School District Superintendent McKell Withers said schools in his district have seen positive results from celebrating high attendance. He said the district starting hosting No Empty Seats Today, or NEST Days, during which students received t-shirts and were greeted at school by members of the community.
Withers said overall attendance would typically increase on NEST Days. But, he added, a school culture also needs to promote attendance throughout the year.
"What it told me was we're not paying attention to helping kids understand that we'd like to have (them) here every day," he said.
Utah Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox read the governor's declaration of September as Attendance Awareness Month in the state at the meeting.
Cox said efforts to improve instruction and create innovative educational programs are moot if children are chronically absent.
"It doesn't matter if kids aren't there," he said. "It seems so obvious and it makes so much sense, and yet we're not talking about this very often at a policymaker level."
Chronic absenteeism
Highest school districts:
Daggett • 35.5 percent
San Juan • 26.9 percent
Tintic • 24.3 percent
Ogden City • 22.2 percent
Duchesne County • 17.8 percent
Lowest school districts:
Piute County • 3.9 percent
Millard County • 5.6 percent
North Sanpete • 6.4 percent
Morgan County • 6.7 percent
Cache County • 6.9 percent
Source: Voices for Utah Children