PHOENIX — Chronic absenteeism has become a big issue in schools across Arizona and nationwide. Now, some efforts are underway to help reduce those rates.
More students started missing school because of the pandemic. When students miss more than 10% of a school year, that’s classified as chronic absenteeism. In Arizona, with 180 days of school, that’s more than 18 days.
“After the pandemic, we did what many other districts did, not just here in Arizona but across the nation, are challenged with undoing the messaging that we gave. The messaging was, ‘If you have any type of symptom in any shape or form, don’t come to school, and don’t actually come to school for five days or ten days,’” explained Betsy Hargrove, the Superintendent of the Avondale Elementary School District.
In her school district, prior to the pandemic in 2019, the district saw 10% of their students be chronically absent. During the pandemic in 2022, that number jumped up to 31%. The district says it counts students from kindergarten through eighth grade while data collected from the Arizona Department of Education is from kindergarten through eighth grade.
Chronic absenteeism is a growing problem in Arizona. Data from the Arizona Department of Education reports a chronic absenteeism rate of 12% in the 2018 school year or about one in eight students. After the pandemic, the number surged to one in three students in 2022. This past school year saw a small decline in chronic absenteeism down to 28%.
It has increased for all racial and ethnic groups as well, doubling for most. In the last school year Native American students were classified as chronically absent at the highest rate of 45%. Hispanic students were at 33%, African Americans at 28%, white students at 22% and Asian students at 12%.
Among the Valley’s largest school districts, Chandler Unified had the overall lowest rate with 12% of students classified as chronically absent. It was followed by Gilbert Public School with an 18%. On the other end of the spectrum were the Peoria and Paradise Valley Unified school districts. Twenty-six-percent of each of their students was deemed chronically absent in 2023.
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More efforts are now underway to help bring students back into the classroom. At the national level, Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego introduced a bill, wanting to create a competitive grant program for local schools, hoping to fund proven solutions for reducing chronic absenteeism.
“Tis is actually from having conversations from educators and parents and concerned neighbors that they saw a lot of students weren't coming back since COVID. Long-term that's awful for students. Every year they keep missing school. every day they keep missing school, it adds up for them, having less and less chance of good successful outcomes,” Gallego continued. “We need to have an all hands on deck approach and reducing chronic absenteeism and helping our schools figure out how to solve this.”
The Avondale Elementary School District is seeing success with its programs. Hargrove says each school has its own initiatives to help bring students back into classrooms, finding different ways that work for each site.
In 2022, the chronic absenteeism rate was at 31%. In 2024, the district said it’s now down to 23%.
“What I’ll say about children, particularly at the pre-k, eighth-grade level, 99% of the time, it has nothing to do with the student. It has to do with circumstances that are out of their control, and how we adults work together with adults in the family in our community to be able to come up with those solutions specific to each one of our children,” Hargrove said.
In some instances, schools will call home. They’ll even have staff go knock on doors to bring students to school if needed. In other cases, they may even work with neighbors and group students together if they’re in the same school. Hargrove said solutions are different for each student in need
“Celebrate those successes and if we’re having challenges, then let’s come up with another solution to be able to solve for that,” Hargrove said.
The district is working with a community organization, Read On Arizona, that’s been working on finding ways to help schools reduce those absenteeism rates. That report should be coming out in the next month.
