When it comes to school attendance, there have been many absent students these past few years. While there are many reasons why students stay home from school, the matter has caused a problem for many teachers who then have to work harder to get their absent students caught up. However, according to principal Frank Bell, this is not just an issue in GEHS, but one across the nation.
“I was recently with a lot of peer high school principals, and [chronic absenteeism is] a common problem at high schools in general,” Bell said. “I think it has a lot to do with COVID, but I’m just continually surprised at how many students are staying home.”
Whenever those students stay home, however, they are usually not being very productive and thus do not learn much while at their house. This is much different from how many people were raised some years ago. They were usually not allowed to ever miss school, especially so much of it.
“They’re doing non-productive things at home,” Bell said. “And just generationally, it was never an option for me or my peers to miss school, so it wasn’t even in our mindset. It was just like, you don’t go there. So it’s just something real that we have to deal with, and we are doing a lot of initiatives to try to battle, specifically chronic absenteeism.
A common reason for this chronic absenteeism is anxiety. Some students facing anxiety just find it hard to go to school, and when their parents let them, it can become a regular occurrence.
“When we call home we talk to the parent, [and] the parent’s just frustrated, saying, ‘I can’t get the kid out of bed,’” Bell said. “And when I sit into meetings or I’m on the phone with these families, I just go right to the question and I’ll just say stuff like, ‘Do you let your son or daughter have their cell phone when they’re not going to school?’ ‘You let them play video games when they’re at home?’ And the answer is yes. They don’t want that fight either.”
While this is a tough situation, constantly staying home instead of going to school may not be the solution. There are many different parts that are played in these types of situations, and one of those parts is played by the school itself.
“Parent, school, teenager, we all have a role to play here,” Bell said. “We all have a part to make it better. So my plea to parents is, if you’re going to let them stay in bed [and] you’re not gonna make them come to school, then take away the privileges at home and make it to a point where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I want to go to school because I’m- I’m out of my mind here.’”
While some people may view those actions as harsh, if done correctly they may be just what the student needs. Students who struggle with anxiety have a safe space at school talking with the counselors, and they are not alone in their troubles. Teachers and administrators want to stay home some days as well.
“What I’m saying some might deem insensitive, like I don’t believe that some students battle mental health real challenges, or that they don’t have an anxiety problem,” Bell said. “That’s not what I’m saying [though]. When they turn 18, 19, 20, when [their] career, real life, all those things start to really happen, if we haven’t prepared them for adversity and struggle and all that, we’re not doing our job as their school. Guess what? There’s some days I’d like to stay home [too, but] I don’t. I come to work, I come here. I try to make a difference. I try to do my best. So that’s what we try to wire into our students.”
While chronic absenteeism is an issue, Bell acknowledges that it often comes from that place of anxiety and fear. To help those students going through those challenges, GEHS is trying to make it known that those students are cared for.
“We’re trying to make sure that each one of those students know that we care about them, that they matter, and that they are missed when they are not here,” Bell said. “We do a lot of things here, a lot of work goes into the experience here, and we want them to be a part of it. We have planned for them to be with us. When they’re not here, we miss them. So, we reach out to them. Phone calls, emails, handwritten notes. We do all of those things in an effort to try to get them to come to school.”
The whole situation is very difficult and often very complicated. Mental health is really important, however, the solution for anxiety may not be staying away from one’s fears, but instead facing them head-on.
“It’s hard,” Bell said. “I mean, anxiety is real, and mental health challenges are real. For staff too, by the way. So we’re sensitive to those things while knowing we have an obligation to do our absolute best to get them in school. It is the law. School’s not optional, so there is some pressure on us to get kids at school.
The school has constantly been trying to help fix the absentee problem. While the improvements have been occurring very slowly, the situation has gotten a little better from last year.
“We’re on a full-out blitz trying to improve chronic absenteeism, and we’ve improved it less than a percentage point from where we were last year,” Bell said. “So chronic absenteeism is trending in the wrong direction at all schools. It’s not a Gardner Edgerton High School thing, it’s not a USD 231, thing, it is nationwide. We’ve got some new ideas for second semester, so I’m gonna remain optimistic on this, that we can let kids know we miss them when they’re not here.”
During early release hours, students and administrators have been working hard to help reduce this current rise in chronic absenteeism. They have been trying to make sure that those absent students know that they are cared for.
“We want to make sure every kid knows that they matter,” Bell said. “We’ll be doing an exercise during early release. One of the exercises we’ll be doing, we did this first semester too, is we reach out to all these kids that are chronically absent, and we’ll do so with handwritten notes, phone calls, emails, all of them. Not just one of those things, all of those things. We’ll make an effort to reach a kid.
Most students in high school have a good relationship with at least one of their teachers. Bell wants to use those good relationships some teachers have with chronically absent students to let them know that they are loved and cared for.
“Typically in our school, someone has connected with all of our students,” Bell said. “If they haven’t yet, we got to keep [trying] and [working] even harder to make connections. I want every student in this building to feel like they have an adult here in their corner. So, whoever that adult is that has that relationship with the student that’s chronically absent, we want to leverage that relationship and see if we can get them to know that they matter, and we want them here.”
There are also many resources in the school for students struggling with anxiety. Anyone dealing with that can feel free to speak to any one of the GEHS counselors or another trusted adult at GEHS.
“Our counseling service department is first class,” Bell said. “They are top-notch. We [also] have two social workers [and] a co-responder here. So we can get to the heart of it. We go all in. And one other thing that’s very important to me, is that we leverage that one person that has made a connection with the student. It could be that coach, that [club] sponsor, or maybe the math teacher. Whoever [it] is that has that connection, let’s work on that connection to get them here. And if we don’t have that connection, we got to work harder as a school, because everyone deserves to have an adult connection here.”
While the school understands how hard it can be to overcome such a challenging feat, going to school is still very important and a law. This means that a punishment, or a lack of reward, may have to be put in place for those people who do not come to school very often.
“There’s going to be a stronger attendance component in finals opt-out for next year,” Bell said. “I have a feeling that the finals opt-out will be a little tougher next year to obtain. Fair, but tougher to obtain.”
Overall, however, Bell remains optimistic. While this is an issue that likely started with COVID-19, it is something that is trying to be minimized, slowly but surely.
“I just remain optimistic,” Bell said. “There’s factors that we can’t control that impact this, but it’s a school improvement goal. It’s quantitative. I mean, we have set percents that we’re trying to hit that show improvement from last year, and we just keep doing initiatives to do the best we can for that.”
