Emily Hays file photo
NHPS dropout prevention workers canvassing during the pandemic.
Laura Glesby photo
NHPS's Dania Torres and Gemma Joseph-Lumpkin on Thursday.
When Dania Torres knocks on a student’s door, she doesn’t know if she’ll find a kid sick with the flu, a teen wrestling with substance use, a parent reeling from domestic violence, or a family preparing for the fallout of an eviction.
As a New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) dropout prevention worker, Torres is tasked with visiting the homes of students who have missed several — or sometimes most — days of school.
She explained the myriad of challenges that lead kids to build up absences and fall behind in school during a workshop on that very topic of chronic absenteeism hosted by the Board of Alders Education Committee.
Torres is part of a growing team of now 13 people in the district devoted to addressing the absenteeism crisis on the front lines.
The Education Committee alders invited school administrators to share progress on how NHPS is addressing widespread absenteeism as part of a workshop on Thursday night at City Hall.
Alders heard about the broad spectrum of reasons why students have been missing school — and questioned whether the school system’s 13-person dropout prevention team is equipped to handle thousands of students missing school, each with complex circumstances.
NHPS administrators shared that during the first marking period, 34 percent of students across all grades were considered “chronically absent” — meaning that they’ve missed at least 10 percent of school days. That’s down so far from the 2021 – 2022 school year, during which 58 percent of NHPS students were chronically absent.
This year, NHPS Supt. Iline Tracey said Thursday night, “chronic absenteeism is decreasing, but it’s still not at the level we’d like to see.”
The chronic absenteeism numbers presented to the alders differed markedly from similar data presented a month ago to the Board of Education. During that Nov. 14 meeting, school administrators had informed the Board of Education that 42 percent of students were chronically absent during the first marking period. On Thursday, Tracey attributed the discrepancy to an error in classifying some high school students. She explained to the Independent that according to the state, high school students who attend at least half of the day’s classes are considered present for the day; the 42 percent statistic mistakenly included students who missed part of the school day but were not technically “absent,” she said
In New Haven and across the country, chronic absenteeism has spiked since the Covid-19 pandemic — partly due to Covid and other infections, and partly due to the economic and psychological ramifications of the public health crisis.
“It’s not just because they don’t want to” go to school, Torres explained to alders. “It’s because there is an issue with the family.” While some students are frequently absent due to bullying, academic anxiety, or general disengagement from school, many are also dealing with physical and mental illnesses, homelessness, language barriers, deaths in the family, and pressure to work and support their families financially.
Torres said her work involves not only connecting families with resources, but building trust with parents and students who are grappling with intensely personal challenges. “It’s not automatic. It’s something that goes in a process,” she said.
With students who experience more than 15 days of absences, the dropout prevention team makes at least three home visits, collaborates with community organizations, and engages the Department of Children and Families (DCF) if those prior interventions don’t work.
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin: "This is going to be a tough year."
Gemma Joseph-Lumpkin, the school system’s chief of youth, family, and community engagement, stressed that consistent absences — including in the youngest grades — can have long-term consequences on students’ ability to keep up in school and ultimately graduate.
“We know this is going to be a tough year, because we are seeing severe illnesses early” in the school year, Joseph-Lumpkin said, alluding to the “tri-demic” of Covid, flu, and RSV infections affecting kids across the country.
Lumpkin reported that of the city’s 459 unhoused students qualifying under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, “well over half have missed very few days of school,” a stronger outcome than expected. Care Coordinator Abigail Rivera told alders that having an administrator at central office this year dedicated to McKinney-Vento students was key to that relative success.
1,000s Of Kids ÷ 13 Staffers = ...
Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller, left, with Committee Chair Eli Sabin.
While NHPS administrators attribute the spike in absenteeism to the pandemic, Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller traces it to a change in state law as well.
In 2017, a state law prohibited the practice of referring absentee students to the judicial system through truancy court, an effort to stem the school-to-prison pipeline. Some municipalities have since bolstered Youth Services Bureaus and tasked those agencies with tracking and following up on students who are repeatedly absent from school. New Haven hasn’t built out its bureau, however, and Miller said that leaves a gap in accountability for the school system.
“It was appropriate to remove truancy from court, but it’s unfortunate that it wasn’t replaced with anything else, because it did remove an important accountability mechanism,” Miller told the Independent in a Friday interview. Now, the school system’s dropout prevention team is the last layer of support for chronically absent students.
At Thursday night’s workshop, Miller pressed administrators on the size of NHPS’s dropout prevention team and the caseload of each worker.
NHPS Dropout Prevention Coordinator Charles Blango explained that the district has just hired seven dropout prevention workers who will go to students’ homes and check in with families. Those workers will start in January and bring the prevention team’s size to 20 people, plus four part-time workers. Each dropout prevention worker will be responsible for two schools, he said.
“We have thousands of kids who are chronically absent,” Miller said. She repeated her question about how many students each dropout prevention worker is responsible for.
A graph of student absences so far this year.
Blango replied, “It’s not just 20 people who have all this work. It’s a collaboration” — one that includes local organizations and the city’s YouthConnect program focused on violence intervention.
“We need all hands on deck,” Joseph-Lumpkin added. She said she is in conversation with the teachers union about offering part-time positions in dropout prevention to part-time teachers.
“What’s their caseload?” Miller asked.
Joseph-Lumpkin responded that she would need to check that number.
Later, on Friday, Miller criticized the school system for this response. “Their staffing is clearly not sufficient to handle the demand. It’s disingenuous for the district to say, ‘We got this, we’re following up with each kid thoroughly,’ when it is impossible for that to be happening given the numbers,” she said. When the school system resorts to “papering over a problem or overestimating their capacity, we miss an opportunity to solve problems,” she argued.
Maria Harris: "Why would I send my child back to New Haven Public Schools, where she is not safe?"
When members of the public had a chance to testify Thursday, one parent, Maria Harris, spoke to the reason behind her own daughter’s absences: bullying, she said, from both students and staff. Harris alleged that her daughter’s school hasn’t supported her attempts to create a “restorative circle” with her daughter’s bullies. She said that her daughter’s doctor and therapist both recommended that she keep her daughter home from school due to the bullying, and she decided to listen — she hasn’t sent her child to school all year.
“They don’t reach out to the families. That’s a bunch of hogwash,” Harris said, although she noted that the district has called DCF about her.
“Why would I send my child back to New Haven Public Schools, where she is not safe?” Harris asked.
Fair Haven Community Health Care CEO Suzanne Lagarde approached the alders with a proposal: to utilize school health centers, such as the five that the Fair Haven clinic operates, as an additional layer of outreach. She said that Fair Haven’s health centers offer telehealth services for students in need of substance use treatment or therapy “so there’s no stigma.” Health center workers could be better integrated into the dropout prevention program, she argued.
Other Variables: Sickness, Trade School, Parents?
City youth services director Gwendolyn Busch-Williams.
Other committee alders raised possible sources of absenteeism on Thursday.
Fair Haven/East Rock Alder Claudia Herrera asked about how the school district is offering support to students who experience bullying, including psychological support. (Administrators didn’t address this question, and Herrera later asked them to follow up about it at a later time.)
Herrera also reported that some teens have said to her, “Why do I need to go to school if I am not going to college?” She wondered about job training programs offered in schools.
Asst. Supt. Paul Whyte listed a host of job training programs that the city is building into high schools, such as manufacturing programs at Career, Hillhouse, and Cross; a culinary program at Cross; forthcoming health, accounting, and teaching career preparation programs; and a “Twilight School” program with evening credits for students who are behind, or who don’t want to go to school during the day, slated to begin in January.
Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen asked about the measures that schools are taking to protect students from falling ill, given the triple threat of Covid, flu, and RSV. He noted that his daughter has chronic asthma, and frequently misses school because of severe reactions to run-of-the-mill sicknesses.
“I’m a firm believer that there should be remote options for kids who are sick,” responded Tracey. She said she supports a system that would allow kids to virtually view their classrooms if they’re ill, but that the state is still working with teachers’ unions on the feasibility of such a program.
City Youth and Recreation Director Gwen Busch-Williams, whose department includes the YouthConnect program that provides wraparound services to kids deemed at risk of engaging in violence, pointed out another barrier to the school district’s efforts to reduce absenteeism: parents who distrust government and police.
She recalled one student on the YouthConnect team’s radar who was suspected of being involved in gang-related activity. Busch-Williams remembered spending three weeks with police, parole officers, and Clifford Beers mental health care workers trying to connect the student’s family to resources, knocking on their door to no avail. “The parent blocked us,” she said, suggesting that the family hoped to protect the child — but in the process, they “denied services.” At that point, Busch-Williams lamented, there was nothing that the city could do.
Beyond working on getting chronically absent students back into school and connecting to whatever services they need, what happens to the student academically? Are they retained, are they moved into an intensive academic "catch-up" program, are they slotted to attend an intensive summer program, etc.? What are the extra-intensive mechanisms to help these students academically?