By the 2021-22 school year, chronic absenteeism rates in Rhode Island had ballooned to 34% from its 19% pre-pandemic levels, despite the availability of vaccines and the resumption of regular in-person schooling. Now, rates are the lowest they’ve been since the onset of the pandemic. Here’s how.
In 2023, Gov. Daniel McKee launched a statewide strategy to boost attendance rates. Rhode Island became the only state to begin tracking and publicizing real-time attendance data to spur a sense of urgency among community and state stakeholders, according to a new report from FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
As a result, absenteeism rates dropped to 24.7% by the 2023-24 school year. Nearly 90% of school districts throughout the state lowered their chronic absenteeism rates from the prior school year.
“It is too early to know whether Governor McKee’s strategy will ultimately lift student learning in Rhode Island,” the report reads. “But its success in bringing students back to school is both a model for other states and a testament to the power of political leadership, data and community-wide collaboration to address challenges in the education sector.”
Education leaders in Rhode Island realized that students and parents were starting to believe that attendance wasn’t important following virtual and hybrid learning during the pandemic. By shedding more light on the issue, McKee was able to change the public perception surrounding student attendance.
The state’s education department launched the Student Attendance Leaderboard, which displays the percentage of chronically absent students in every public school. Principals also have access to their own dashboards that allow them to track specific students’ attendance patterns. Principals can click a button that sends a student a “nudge” via text message or a printed letter sent home in the student’s backpack.
Rhode Island has also relied on support from local businesses and leaders outside of education. For instance, Hasbro Children’s Hospital, the state’s only children’s hospital, has added a video on the importance of school attendance to the post-hospitalization care videos parents watch when children are discharged.
That’s not all the state has done to curb this issue. We encourage you to view the comprehensive report here to learn more about the state’s efforts to address chronic absenteeism.
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