New bills look to track student absenteeism data faster, hopes to find solutions

[MUSIC PLAYING] NINA MOINI: It's our top story this afternoon. Minnesota lawmakers will begin considering legislation to help make sure kids are showing up to school. According to the most recent data from the Minnesota Department of Education, which is from 2023, more than a quarter of students missed at least 10% of school. Some lawmakers say there need to be more effective ways of tracking who's missing a lot of school and who completely withdraws.

Matt Shaver, pardon me, is testifying today before lawmakers. He's the policy director for EdAllies, an organization advocating for students here in Minnesota. And Matt joins me now on the line. Thank you for being with us this afternoon, Matt.

MATT SHAVER: Thanks so much for having me, Nina.

NINA MOINI: I wonder if some people don't even know how big of a problem absenteeism is right now, both across the country, here in Minnesota as well, and since the COVID-19 pandemic as well. Would you start, Matt, by just defining what absenteeism really is and why it's so harmful?

MATT SHAVER: Yeah, you bet. Absolutely. So the reason we're here, and the reason that this is gaining so much attention and momentum to do something about it in Minnesota, is that our chronic absenteeism rates in Minnesota doubled from 2019 to post-pandemic. And that's a trend that we saw nationwide, but has become a particularly acute challenge here in the state of Minnesota.

So pre-pandemic, the 2018-2019 school year, about 15% of Minnesota students were missing at least 10% of school days over the course of a year, which is high and not what you want to see. But our first full year back in schools, that rate jumped up to a 30%. So almost a third of all students in Minnesota are missing at least 10% of those days.

And so the chronic absenteeism measure, it combines excused absences, unexcused absences and suspensions. So the idea is just any kind of missed instructional day, we're adding those days together. And so that 10% of days works out to about 17 missed school days. So a chronically absent student has missed at least 17 days of school.

But it's a kind of a noisy measurement, because I can't tell you how many of the 25.5% Minnesota students who are chronically absent missed 40 days of school or more, or 30 days of school or more. All I can tell you is that they missed at least that amount, which points to the need for better data.

NINA MOINI: Right. So what do we know about why kids are missing school? You mentioned the pandemic, which obviously was harder to keep track of students when they weren't in the school building. But what are some of the reasons that you've noticed through your work?

MATT SHAVER: This is what makes this such a challenging issue to tackle, right? Because if you think about it, a student who misses a month of school, right. The reasons why a six-year-old is missing that amount of time and a 16-year-old are missing that amount of time are very, very different. And the reason why a student might be missing that amount of time in the metro versus in rural Minnesota versus in Rochester or Saint Cloud could be completely different.

And what those barriers and those issues are, to get to the root causes of those, we need to have a better understanding of the severity of the absenteeism. The mix of excused/unexcused to suspension data as well. Things that we've heard through the work of in the legislative off-season, as it were, there was a student attendance and truancy legislative study group, which is essentially a task force that the legislature passed last year to bring together a bipartisan group of lawmakers from the House and the Senate to try and do a deep-dive into what are the root causes?

Let's hear from school districts, counties, families, students for why the absenteeism has grown so much. And there are a variety of different reasons. And each sort of level of absenteeism that we're seeing requires different tiers of responses and different supports. But we can't do nothing with that.

It's a big hairy problem, but we're not going to be able to adequately solve it until we have a better sense of who is missing how much and why.

NINA MOINI: It could be really different depending on the individual student, but there could be some overarching themes, maybe transportation, maybe they are taking care of someone at home, or maybe they're somewhere they're not supposed to be. I mean, it could really depend.

So how is, could you explain absenteeism tracked now, and how would this proposed legislation that's being brought up at the Capitol now change or adapt that?

MATT SHAVER: Yeah, so I'll start with this-- really, really moving the needle, ensuring that all students are consistently attending school on a regular basis in the state of Minnesota is going to require an attendance agenda, a statewide attendance agenda that goes well beyond what can be done in a K-12 committee.

One of the messages we want to make sure lawmakers understand is the Transportation Committee, the Health and Human Services Committee, the Housing Committee, the Tax Committee all need to be thinking about what policies and resources we are creating in the state. They either make it harder or easier for kids to get to school, that provide the supports that families need to ensure that they have the resources and the ability to get kids to school on a regular basis.

The bills that are being proposed today and being discussed in the K-12 committee, they will help bring about a better response to students who are showing attendance concerns. And so one of the challenges that we see is we have this huge data lag for our statewide attendance reporting. So every single day-- we just did it today-- every school in the state takes attendance for around 900,000 students. It's almost a binary choice, right, the child is either in the school or they're not in the school.

That data is then coded and put into computers at the school level and sent to the district. That data eventually makes its way up to the Department of Education, where we won't know what our statewide attendance rates are for the 2024-2025 school year for another two years. That won't be reported statewide. And so we have this huge multiyear lag that puts us really out of step with the rest of the country.

And several of the bills that are being considered today at the k-12 committee would speed that process up significantly to make sure that we're getting closer to not quite real time data, but data that we can make decisions about as a state to figure out what's working and where. Where are the bright spots and what can we replicate to support better response to absenteeism as it comes along?

NINA MOINI: Yeah, you're saying we, as a state, have to figure out a way to be responding to what the problem looks like now, not two years ago.

MATT SHAVER: Right.

NINA MOINI: Let's talk a bit about the withdrawal or enrollment process when a student just stops coming to school altogether. How is that tracked? And then at that point, is the student likely to come back?

MATT SHAVER: Yeah, this has been one of the areas that I've learned a lot about in the last year as my organization has started to work more and more on addressing the absenteeism. So the way it works right now is if a student misses 15 consecutive days of school, the district is required to drop them from their rolls. They stop receiving funding from the state for that pupil. And then it becomes a game of "Hot Potato," but with nobody having their hands out.

There isn't really a very clear line of responsibility for who is in charge of that child's education, and who's responsible with reconnecting that child to school. So students, their family may move across county lines, which is when we start getting into county level responses and the abilities for counties to communicate with each other, for school districts communicate with each other across county lines. They're much, much smarter people out there who are working to make sure that data-sharing agreements and definitions line up so that we're not wasting time looking for kids who just moved to other counties and are enrolled somewhere else, but that information hasn't gotten back to the previous school or to the county where that student was enrolled.

So there are a number of challenges that happen. And so one of the bill proposals today would change that 15-day drop from excused or unexcused absences to just unexcused absences. That means that the school hasn't heard from the family at all. A student who has excused absences, that means that family is checking in some way, shape, or form.

If a school hasn't heard at all from a family about their child for three weeks, that's a real canary in the coal mine kind of a situation. And it's deeply concerning. And kids are getting lost in the cracks, and we have a responsibility as a state to ensure all kids are being educated and that they're safe. And schools are often that first touch point in the ability to marshal resources and services for that family and to support that kid.

Schools are often that first touch point. But once they're dropped, they don't really have a fiduciary responsibility to keep checking in with that kid anymore. Literally, the funding from the state to support that student's education is gone.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, there are a lot of individual things that students are dealing with, and a lot of things that could probably be improved and a lot of efforts that are going on currently to try to improve absenteeism. I really appreciate you, Matt, coming by today and telling us about the introduction of these bills, and we'll follow it throughout the session and continue to see what happens there. Thank you so much.

MATT SHAVER: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the time.

NINA MOINI: Matt Shaver is the policy director for EdAllies. We did reach out to the Minnesota Department of Education for comment on these bills, but did not hear back in time for this segment.