A tough test: How to get kids in school on time

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New Bedford’s Superintendent Andrew O’Leary sits in his office and pulls up a dashboard that offers a suite of insights. With a few clicks, he can see a raft of information about New Bedford’s almost 13,000 students, including predictions about their future attendance based on recent trends.

In Dartmouth, a team of school counselors, attendance officers, teachers, and administrators are meeting every week about specific students. In Lakeville and Middleborough, administrators meet one-on-one with students to offer a way to erase late arrivals from their records. In Wareham, a new digital system makes tracking and examining data easier.

Around the South Coast, districts are deploying as much organization and technology as you might imagine supporting a tactical strike team to get absent kids back into schools. It’s happening in small towns and cities, and in regional districts and vocational schools, too.

In New Bedford, the new data-tracking software connects with a parent-communication platform. In Dartmouth, those data analysts and behavioral specialists are identifying student attendance trends as they’re happening. And district leaders, politicians, and teachers are rolling up their sleeves on one common issue.

“Talking about chronic absenteeism is a window into social-emotional functioning, relationship to school, and what’s happening in [students’] families,” said Sara Johnson, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s also a window into what’s happening in schools. What are schools doing? How well is the social safety net supporting kids and families?”

“It’s a really thorny problem,” Johnson said. 

The Light collaborated with Beaver Dam Partners, which publishes four weekly newspapers, to understand how schools have used this data to address chronic absenteeism and tardiness since the pandemic. 

South Coast schools are finding new ways of dealing with the realities of heightened student absenteeism and tardiness. They’re experimenting with new forms of parent communication, more rigorous data-sharing inside the districts, deeper relationships with students, and new partnerships in the community.

Yet even as these schools are innovating on new solutions, there’s still much to learn. Chronic absenteeism is “like blood pressure,” said Johnson. “If you take someone’s blood pressure and it’s high, you have to do a lot of work to figure out why.” Similarly, chronic absenteeism, and even tardiness, can be “a warning sign that tells you very little about the reason.”

“It allows us to focus on positive solutions … but it requires a lot of time and partnerships at a time when schools have few resources.”

School leaders around the South Coast all trace today’s tardiness habits back to the pandemic. Upper Cape Principal Josh Greeley said online education and more lenient rules led families and teachers to believe school is “not essential,” and the effects have lingered.

“We’re trying to break that in our culture, and we’re seeing some growth,” he said.

As for coming up with the solutions, “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation,” said Johnson.

Dartmouth and New Bedford have new systems

The first morning bell rings at 7:25 a.m. at Dartmouth High, and a second “in-your-seat” bell rings five minutes later. In years past, if students were absent at that second bell, the school wouldn’t send out a “robocall” to parents until about 10:30 a.m. — and sometimes even later. This year, robocalls are out to all parents by 8 a.m 

“We’ve made a real sustained push [to avoid] sliding backwards,” said Dartmouth High’s Principal Ryan Shea. 

The school is treating an empty seat as an urgent problem, Shea said. Teachers and parents should communicate immediately when students aren’t in school. This one change has been instrumental to getting more students to school on time, according to Shea.

“There’s a fundamental shift in the way that parents and caregivers think about the necessity of going to school,” said Johnson, the Johns Hopkins professor. Being out of school, then attending hybrid school, then being told to come back a year later — the pandemic disruption may have made school feel less important. 

“After the pandemic … this so-called sacred cow was no longer sacred,” Johnson said. “We made kids feel like school was no longer a sustaining place for them because we disrupted that relationship for so long.”

To make school feel like “a place that students want to be,” Shea said that faculty and staff are encouraged to send once-absent students and their families a quick email or phone call, saying, “I’m really proud of [the student] making it here all week.”

“Punitive measures are less effective than the relationship piece that lets our kids and families know that we care when the student is not in school,” said Dartmouth Superintendent June Saba-Maguire. 

Saba-Maguire said the positive, relationship-based interventions have been more effective than disciplinary interventions. Every week, councilors and social workers have dedicated time in their schedules to check in with students who have attendance gaps. But Dartmouth has reconfigured punishments too, including a “social suspension” from after-school sports or clubs. 

Just a few miles away, the student population at New Bedford High is significantly different. But the approach to getting kids back to school has been remarkably similar. 

New Bedford also has revamped its “attendance teams,” so that every school has a squad of teachers, nurses, and administrators reviewing data every week and making a recovery plan for every chronically-absent student.

“From building leaders to classroom teachers to school secretaries … everyone owns attendance,” said Tammy Morgan, the district’s executive director of student services. A few years ago, these teams didn’t exist in many schools — and not all New Bedford schools had a nurse. Now these teams are working with full staffing. 

When students arrive at New Bedford High at 7:25 a.m., they now tap keycards to enter the building. This has made a streamlined system that automatically takes daily attendance, and frees up time for teachers. Any student absent two days in a row will hear from this team and can expect follow-up meetings. 

These teams are using software called “Open Architects” that provides specialty insights, such as identifying days of the week that some students are more likely to miss, or automatically comparing their recent attendance to previous years.

Still, New Bedford’s Superintendent O’Leary cautions that the approach for every student will be different — and that chronic absenteeism is a specialized problem among a smaller subset of students. 

“The strategies are different,” O’Leary said. The district created a bike raffle at Normandin Middle School to encourage attendance among occasionally absent students. But a bike raffle “won’t help with chronic absenteeism,” he said, since a chronically absent student likely faces higher barriers than simply not wanting to go to school.

Chronically absent students are often experiencing housing instability, loss of transportation, or health issues, so they need help with those barriers, O’Leary said. The district has partnered with the Immigrants’ Assistance Center to provide help with housing applications, and is adding new types of partnerships.

New Bedford is now revamping its partnership with pediatricians, and sends a one-page memo to area pediatricians at the beginning of every school year. The district also holds Zoom sessions with local pediatricians to stay in touch about what health recovery services students can receive in school. 

“Health problems can be both the cause and the consequence of a lack of attendance and engagement in school,” said Johnson. For example, mental health and struggles with anxiety have increased significantly since the pandemic, and “as kids miss more school, that anxiety worsens.”

That can become a “vicious cycle over time,” Johnson said.

Even for students’ physical health, missing school has consequences. “Especially for students with high levels of economic need and [students with] disabilities, schools are a place where they get a lot of health and mental health services,” Johnson said.

“Schools are providing direct services, but they’re also a place where adults have eyes on kids and can see when things are not going right,” Johnson said.

Meanwhile, vocational schools have seen some of the lowest rates of absenteeism and tardiness — but they’re still not immune. “We saw a doubling of tardies that’s been working its way back to a pre-COVID level,” said Superintendent Michael Watson, of Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech. 

“There is a difference in the way we educate,” Watson said, and the hands-on skills in shop classes have resulted in overall lower rates of absenteeism and tardiness. Still, the surge compared to historical levels has led Watson and his teachers to view absenteeism data differently. Like other districts, they are using new data dashboards to identify trends sooner and communicate with parents more often. 

“It’s appropriate for everyone in the education of our young people to be considering” these recent attendance trends, Watson said. 

“We are working every day to try and be student-centered,” Watson said, “[making sure that] students are here and ready to learn and in front of an educator ready to engage them.” 

Tardiness policies elsewhere on the South Coast

At Upper Cape, weekly administrative meetings to review tardy data have helped quickly identify patterns and enforce the school’s policy.

Upper Cape’s approach to reducing tardiness is two-pronged — a blend of punitive and supportive measures. 

“Having a personal relationship and good communication with parents and students goes a long way,” Greeley said. “We really have boots on the ground with our students.” 

At Wareham High School, like at Upper Cape, reviewing tardy data at weekly meetings has helped confront the problem.

Shortly after the pandemic, Wareham switched to E-Hall Pass, an online system that has “given us a great platform to be able to track students and hold them accountable,” Principal Scott Palladino said. He and his staff then meet with students to determine the cause of their tardiness. 

Strict punitive measures encourage Old Rochester Regional High School students to get to school on time. 

Every two tardies count as an absence from class. Students who often arrive late for the first period can lose class credit and harm their ability to graduate on time. Chronically tardy students also receive Saturday detentions.

Principal Michael Devoll said this has particularly helped older students, as most tardiness at Old Rochester is due to student drivers running late.

Administrators also reach out to families to determine if there are underlying reasons when students consistently arrive late.

“I always joke with my staff that we know that most families in the morning are pulling off minor miracles to all get out at the same time and on the road,” Devoll said. “If there’s some type of pattern that we can identify and work with a family on, we’ll do that.”

Old Colony Principal Gary Linehan said he sees two distinct groups of tardy students at his school.

For students who occasionally show up late with coffee in hand, he said a simple call home and a detention often fixes the problem. 

Chronic tardiness, he said, is most common among students from low-income families or who struggle with their mental health. In these cases, administrators involve parents and counselors to find a solution.

“It’s a complex issue because every kid’s different,” Linehan said. “We try to be as consistent as we can with the policy, but we also try to be understanding of certain situations.”

At Old Colony, this means finding the root cause of the tardiness and creating a plan to address it, usually including frequent check-ins with the adjustment counselor, a state-licensed mental health professional. 

Some schools also offer “buyback” programs for students to earn excusals for tardies when they arrive on time for a set number of days.

For every 10 consecutive school days Apponequet Regional High School students show up on time, one tardy is removed. 

Assistant Principal Nicholas Pilla said committing to never being late again can feel overwhelming for students, and this program gives them a short-term goal to focus on. 

Using late slips has also helped humanize disciplinary measures, a process that’s “old school, but I like because it forces me to go up and have a face-to-face conversation,” he said. 

Principal Kahlan Dessert said communication with students and families and consistency in policy enforcement have helped reduce tardiness.

Despite these reductions, not riding the bus is one of the most common reasons students arrive late.

Assistant Principal Jeffrey Gallant said post-pandemic, the number of parents bringing students to school has risen. He said that due to greater awareness of infectious diseases, more parents now opt to drop their kids off instead of sending them on the “tight, confined space” of a bus.  

Chronic tardiness at Middleborough High School results in a loss of after-school privileges, when students are put on social probation after their 10th tardy in a quarter.

Similar to Apponequet, Middleborough has a buyback policy. Along with excusing tardies, Middleborough students can also earn an end to their probation.

This has been effective, according to Assistant Principal Andrew Dizel.

“Students genuinely do not want to miss out on dances or going to a Friday night football game or a basketball game.”

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.

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