A high school science teacher holding a digital tablet and explaining a chemistry model to two of his students during class. (Getty Images.)
Ohio’s schools have students from all kinds of different home situations. With that diversity comes a host of family circumstances, some with plenty of supports for children going to school, and some with barriers and issues that can lead to a student missing school to help make money for the household or to take care of a sibling when a working parent isn’t able.
“It could be everything from a basic need going on, it could be transportation, it could be a family issue, it could be something going on with the student,” said Brooklyn Brown, director of community outreach for the nonprofit Communities in Schools of Ohio.
Before she was a director, Brown served as a site coordinator for the nonprofit, meaning she was one of dozens of individuals who went to school districts in Ohio to engage with students, and help schools address the many needs of students inside and outside of traditional educational subjects.
“It is everyone’s responsibility to make sure that the students in Ohio are thriving,” Brown said. “We’re in the schools every day, just like a teacher, and we’re consistent so that the students have that.”
Much of the focus for site coordinators is at a basic level: creating a space for students to want to come to school in the first place, to avoid chronic absenteeism, a problem Ohio has been battling for years, even before the pandemic closed schools. Brown said she created attendance groups, checked in with parents, and had one-on-one meetings with students to check in on their outside life and ensure their school life didn’t suffer because of it.
“We motivate them until they are intrinsically motivated,” Brown said.
(Photo courtesy of Communities in Schools of Ohio)
Communities in Schools of Ohio partners with 52 schools in the state to help with things like academic assistance, behavioral interventions, college and career prep, mental health services and attendance initiatives. The nonprofit uses attendance data, academic statistics, resource lists and funding for services as measures for the school districts that most need their help. The group said they engaged with more than 35,000 students and 13,000 families over the last school year.
“Attendance has always been something that we work towards, but when we saw those numbers in Ohio, we said we need to do something,” Brown said.
For the CIS site coordinators, being a school-aged child has been complicated in the past with issues like food insecurity and poverty along with socialization and other normal childhood milestones, but it has only become more complex as the years have gone by.
“For me, I think it’s just that we see it now,” Brown said. “Everything was always here, we just weren’t paying attention.”
That includes student mental health, which has come into focus over the years, adding to the workloads of school counselors, social workers and other care teams, including CIS. As a result of COVID, there are further struggles with socialization for kids who may have started out or spent formative years learning online, away from their peers.
“The mental health of students is becoming a lot more challenging to manage,” said Adero Robinson, chief executive officer of CIS. “That’s why we have to think about how do we find ways to deal with depression, anxiety, cell phones and social media, those types of things.”
Ohio’s absence problem
Absenteeism is considered chronic if a student misses more than 10% of the instructional hours during a school year, whether or not the absence is excused. That absenteeism can cause negative outcomes for students, and education advocates say it can impact the student’s future going into adulthood.
“In addition to chronic absenteeism predicting low academic success, it also predicts which students may eventually drop out of school,” according to the American Federation of Teachers.
The AFT said patterns of chronic absenteeism “reflect common equity issues.”
“Students who come from low-income families, students of color, students with disabilities and students involved in the juvenile justice system are more likely to be chronically absent,” according to the AFT.
(Photo courtesy of Communities in Schools of Ohio)
Data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (ODEW) shows chronic absenteeism has gone down slightly in the last two school years, but still sits at 25.6% of all students in the state. That rate is down from 26.8% in the 2022-2023 school year, and even more from the 30.2% of 2021-2022 school year, according to state data.
In the 2023-2024 school year, the attendance rate for all students in Ohio stood at 91.3%, but that rate was different depending on the demographics of the student. While students who identified as Asian/Pacific Islander had the highest attendance rate at 94.3%, and white students saw an attendance rate of 92.3%, Black students were recorded at 86.6% and American Indian or Alaskan Native students had an 89.3% attendance rate, the state found.
Students considered economically disadvantaged saw an attendance rate of 88.9%, compared to the 94.3% attendance rate for those not considered economically disadvantaged, according to the ODEW.
State leaders pledge to fix the problem
In October 2024, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and ODEW director Stephen Dackin pledged to cut chronic absenteeism by 50% over the next five years. The leaders said the state planned to use the recommendations from an attendance task force and Ohio’s Attendance Guide from May 2024, which lays out the impact of chronic absenteeism.
The guide states that increasing attendance and addressing chronic absence “requires partnering with students and families to understand and address the challenges that occur outside and inside school” and emphasizes prevention and early intervention.
Improving attendance comes through changing “attitudes and beliefs about attendance” and taking a “positive, problem-solving approach versus legalistic and punitive approaches,” the guide recommends.
The attendance task force, who gave the state recommendations in October 2023, called attendance rates “a crisis in Ohio,” even before the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem. The task force recommended “thoughtful refinement” of state laws to focus on a “local context” for solutions to the problem.
“Policy change can allow for more effective communication with families to support increasing attendance and decreasing absenteeism and continue a statewide mindset shift toward prevention and early intervention,” according to the report.
At the beginning of 2024, two Ohio lawmakers tried to convince their colleagues that “the foo-foo stuff” (as former Republican state Rep. Bill Seitz called them) like pizza parties and extra playground time that schools used to incentivize school attendance weren’t working, and the state needed to make bigger moves.
With that in mind, Seitz and Democratic Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, proposed a pilot program that would have given $1.5 million over two years to school districts who qualified, funds that would be distributed to the students in either biweekly, quarterly or annual payments. An annual payment to a student under the pilot would have been $500.
The program would have also given an “award” to graduating students depending on their GPA.
Despite Isaacsohn emphasizing the urgency of the problem and the need for the legislature to act, he and Seitz’s bill, House Bill 348, never made it past the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee, and the bill died with the end of the 135th General Assembly.
Robinson said more funding is always appropriate when it comes to student well-being, but a program like the pilot program may not be sustainable.
Programs like CIS that bring site coordinators straight to the schools and keep consistent watch over the students’ well-being are needed almost as much as anything else.
“I think that the programs that have access to schools and teachers and parents and counselors … that holistic opportunity is a better investment that’s measurable,” Robinson said.
Robinson said he has had conversations with Ohio legislators about what the priorities in education should be, and has even had a few come to school districts where CIS participates to see the work in action.
“It’s been beneficial for them to hear from site coordinators and students,” Robinson said. “What I’ve been hearing is that the work we’re doing is very important to schools.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.