Missing students: The problem of absenteeism on the South Coast

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Absenteeism can look vastly different, depending on the student. While Dartmouth High Principal Ryan Shea was figuring out how to get newly-relocated Haitian immigrants to school, he was also dealing with what he referred to as “the Dunkin’ trend.”

In fall 2023, a small group of immigrant students from Haiti and Venezuela were living in nearby hotels while adjusting to a new school and a new life. Several may have been fleeing violence in their home countries, living in “incredibly unstable” situations, as Shea described it. They were often absent from class.

Meanwhile, another group of students was also missing when the day’s first bell rang — and the reason likely had nothing to do with hardship. Some Dartmouth students, especially seniors, were arriving late to school every day because they were visiting the nearby coffee and donut shop. 

“Having a Dunkin’ within 500 yards of our building is not easy,” Shea said. 

In Dartmouth, as in schools across the South Coast and the country, an empty classroom seat has represented a vast spectrum of challenges. Teachers, principals, and district leaders have been figuring them out on the fly. 

Getting kids back into schools is one of education’s biggest challenges in the 2020s. Absenteeism spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and, for many schools, it still hasn’t returned to 2010s levels. 

While causes of absenteeism vary from student to student, chronic absenteeism has become the signature challenge facing schools because, in short, it matters. Research has found chronic absenteeism to be highly correlated with poor academic performance and mental and physical health issues. It is also among the “most robust predictors” of dropping out.

The Light collaborated with Beaver Dam Partners, which publishes four weekly newspapers, to analyze 10 major public high schools around the South Coast, and found that every one of them is experiencing higher rates of chronic absenteeism than before the pandemic.

Finding solutions to the problem first meant understanding it. And data practices that have emerged in the 2020s have given South Coast school leaders new insights into their own student populations. 

In addition to chronic absenteeism, which measures how many students have missed 10 percent of school or more, Massachusetts has started requiring districts to track more data about students whose absenteeism is “highly chronic”. Tardiness data has become a crucial metric for teachers and principals, but varying definitions still means it’s not tracked statewide. Some South Coast schools have started collecting data about teacher attendance — highlighting the lengths educators go to for their students and persuading the state to track this measurement, too.

Chronic absenteeism remains higher across the South Coast

Public schools across the South Coast are living in a new reality. 

In the last full year of available data, some suburban high schools like Dartmouth and Fairhaven experienced more than double their rates of chronic absenteeism than in the  2010s. Regional Voc-Tech schools — such as Greater New Bedford and Old Colony — tended to have overall lower rates, but are still experiencing the disruptions of heightened absenteeism. Meanwhile, system improvements at New Bedford High are addressing the problem, but chronic absenteeism remains well above historic norms.

All these schools have seen improvements, but a leveling off in the data suggests a new reality may be here to stay. 

In Dartmouth, the high school’s chronic absenteeism rate peaked in the 2021-2022 school year, the school’s first full in-person year after the pandemic shift to remote learning, with 28 percent of students missing 18 days of school or more that year.  

At the same time, the high school recorded 21,197 instances of tardiness. The tardiness peak was a staggering change from pre-pandemic — roughly three times as many students were arriving late. The senior class accounted for the most tardies by far, with the average senior recording nearly 30 tardies that year.

This left administrators to deal with two concurrent, never-before-seen problems.

First, some vulnerable students — including newly-arrived immigrants and those from low-income families — faced significant barriers to getting to school at all. So the school rushed to find translators and ensure that language-learning teachers were prepared, and a number of local charities gathered food, donations, and other resources.

Meanwhile, many longtime students weren’t arriving at school on time. The disruption of virtual learning had broken the habits and severed the social bonds that used to get them to their first classes. Without them, the allure of an iced coffee may have been too much.

Shea stressed that students consistently struggling to get to school are “a different population than those coming in late,” he said. “Chronic absenteeism is so student-specific. It’s different than tardies.”

In New Bedford, Mayor Jon Mitchell has taken notice of the absenteeism issue, which at its height saw nearly 70 percent of students become chronically absent at New Bedford High, also in the 2021-2022 school year. 

“The most glaring problem, here and across urban America, was the dramatically increased rates of chronic absenteeism,” Mitchell said in his recent State of the City address. “You don’t have to be an education expert to know that when a student is out of school for long stretches of time, that student is unlikely to learn much.”

Mitchell, as ex officio chair of the School Committee, has expected regular attendance reports and intervention plans from all district principals. A special district subcommittee regularly hears these reports throughout the school year. 

Still, the chronic absenteeism rate at New Bedford High is 36 percent. 

At other schools in the region, like Old Rochester Regional High, chronic absenteeism is leveling at 24 percent. Even vocational schools, with overall lower rates, have begun to level out at new rates of chronic absenteeism that, a few years ago, would have been aberrations.

What students think

Members of the Student Council at Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Bourne said their peers who are often tardy are the ones who aren’t connected to the school. These council members said strong friendships, relationships with teachers, and involvement in extracurricular activities motivated them to show up on time. They said their peers who come to school late, if at all, tend to lack those connections.

Junior Penelope Heaslip said her teachers make her feel “supported at the school, even on my bad days.” Fellow junior Bria Pavlisko said she stays busy after class and “knowing that I have something after school to look forward to” helps keep her motivated.

Senior Ally Webb said classmates who aren’t involved in a club or sport are more likely to be tardy. “The kids that are really invested in the school and their commitments often are the ones that show up just because they have a reason to be here,” Webb said. 

Other reasons council members gave for their peers’ tardiness include missing the bus and struggling to find alternative transportation, poor sleep habits that make it hard to wake up in the morning, and mental health struggles. Ivy Mesple, a junior, said she’s noticed how the seasons affect her timeliness, and she finds it harder to get up early during the winter. 

Tardiness data 

South Coast schools are dealing with the related — but distinct — problem of tardiness.

Similar to absenteeism, the number of tardy students shot up in the early 2020s in many schools and has not returned to former levels. School and district leaders across the South Coast say that tardy students often represent a different population than their chronically-absent peers. But both demonstrate how entrenched the pandemic disruption has been — and how no school or district is immune.

Coming to school late sometimes is an early warning sign of a student’s disengagement, or maybe that they’re dealing with challenges outside of school. For classes in the early morning, tardiness can have the same effect on student learning as being absent. 

Across the South Coast, tardiness has surged in recent years, according to records from local high schools.

Reflecting on these changes, “it’s pretty clear that the pandemic created an isolation in the way that we interact with each other that had not happened before,” said Mike Watson, superintendent of Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech, one of the largest high schools on the South Coast. 

“The important part of the work is to make sure we’re monitoring and engaging,” Watson said.

Though tardiness data is very valuable to educators, it does not yet appear on the state department of education’s data-tracking website. In part, that’s because every school has different definitions of when a student becomes tardy. 

Many area schools stopped tracking tardies during the pandemic, often because of the difficulties managing remote classes. While attendance was tracked, most schools found it difficult to keep track of students logging into class late.

The difficulty with interpreting tardies, said New Bedford Public Schools administrator Tammy Morgan, is that individual context can change how to view the numbers. For example, if a chronically absent student starts coming to school, but is frequently late, “We’re happy that they’re there at all,” Morgan said. “I’d rather a student show up late than… not at all.”

This also means that tardies and absences don’t necessarily correlate. Sometimes fewer absent students might accompany an increase in tardies. In many cases, like in Dartmouth, the numbers might represent totally different students facing separate problems.

At schools like Wareham High School, tracking strategies have changed in the past five years. Last year, the school began to differentiate between a student arriving late to school and arriving late to an individual class. Previously, all of these tardies were reported as a total sum. 

This allows Principal Scott Palladino and his team to see whether kids are tardy because they are talking to friends in the hallway, or are struggling to get to the building before the first bell rings. 

Because tracking tardiness requires context, it’s hard to compare from one school to another. But for teachers and administrators, staying on top of tardiness figures has been a key to understanding the behavior patterns of students in their own buildings. 

Tracking students who are very, very absent

Amidst the typically turbulent backdrop of teenage-hood, some students face more severe barriers: poverty, illness, language. In the last five years, districts discovered their blind spots. They’ve also found new data points that have told them more about their own students, especially those who are absent most often. 

Chronic absenteeism was long the standard of the disengaged student. And yes, it rose during the pandemic. Identifying those chronically absent students — and designing interventions to reach them — used to be how districts approached their absenteeism problems. 

In 2021, however, a new data point shed light on an even more severe problem: students who missed 20 percent of school days — or those absent at double the rate of regular chronic absenteeism. Across a school year, that means missing 36 days of school, or more than an entire month of classes. 

At New Bedford High that year, the rate of those at double chronic absenteeism was 40 percent. That means close to half of students were missing an average of at least one school day per week. In other high schools, such as in Fairhaven and Middleborough, more than 10 percent of students met this standard.

Across the South Coast, the 10 high schools analyzed by The Light and Beaver Dam Partners have seen the rates of this double chronic absenteeism decrease from an average of 12 percent of students down to 8 percent in the last four years. 

Still, these double chronically absent kids represent a new frontier. 

Looking at sub-groups can lead to more granular insights: students with learning disabilities and English learner students have consistently had among the highest rates of double chronic absenteeism every year recently.

Teacher attendance tracked too

Another data point has emerged in the attendance conversation that has nothing to do with the students themselves. Following the lead of several South Coast schools, the state has begun tracking the attendance rates of teachers. 

“Teacher attendance may impact student attendance,” said Andrew O’Leary, New Bedford’s superintendent. New Bedford was among the earliest places to track and publish its teachers’ attendance rates, in the 2024-25 school year, to test the theory that students may not want to come to school if teachers aren’t there. 

The Light and Beaver Dam Partners’ analysis has not found a consistent pattern demonstrating that teacher attendance is linked with student attendance, but O’Leary and other school leaders say tracking the data has still been worthwhile. 

“It may not follow that one causes the other,” O’Leary said, but he added that, “healthy buildings have all of these.” New Bedford has made changes based on this new data source: it found that teachers and students alike had lower attendance on half days, such as those around the holidays and summer break. So it got rid of these days in its calendars.

Across town, Mike Watson of Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech agreed that tracking teacher attendance was worthwhile: “Students can’t learn if [teachers] are not there,” he said. “We need teachers here.”

The hunch that teacher attendance precipitated students’ disconnection with school was based on a real trend: teacher absences in some schools did increase during the pandemic. 

In Dartmouth, teacher absences went up and have remained elevated since the pandemic. But administrators say this reflects more generous family leave policies, and not teacher disengagement. Still, “we’re not ignoring it,” said June Saba-McGuire, Dartmouth’s superintendent. 

The South Coast’s leadership on this data trend led to statewide adoption this year. Now, teacher attendance is tracked in every school in the commonwealth. And South Coast schools stack up well.

New Bedford’s district teacher attendance average is better than the state’s. 

All told, South Coast schools — like those around the state and country — have found themselves digging much deeper to combat student absenteeism. Educators are looking beyond absences themselves to uncover the trends that tardies, demographic sub-groups, and even teacher attendance patterns might unveil.

The result is a toolkit that’s much bigger, too. 

In Dartmouth, for example, a mix of consequences and incentives has driven down tardies related to those early-morning Dunkin pitstops. Calling parents right away when students become tardy has been effective, as has staff members (such as attendance officers, guidance counselors, and trusted teachers) building personal relationships with students. 

“Our teachers do a really good job” of reaching out to students when absences start to accrue, said Shea, Dartmouth’s principal. “It comes from a different voice than the social worker.”

Tomorrow: South Coast schools fight back, finding solutions for the wave of absenteeism and tardiness

This series is a collaboration between The New Bedford Light and Beaver Dam Partners, which publishes the weekly community newspapers Sippican Week, Nemasket Week, Dartmouth Week, and Wareham Week.

Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org and Grace Roche at editor@sippicanweek.com.

---