This story has been updated to reflect the status of Minnesota legislation addressing chronic absenteeism.
It’s been one year since school districts across Minnesota tried new approaches to the problem of kids not showing up to school. Under state law, after just seven days of unexcused absences, school officials must call child protective services to investigate.
These days in Mankato, a team of educators, counselors and a new family engagement specialist confer over how best to reach out to families when kids first stop going to school. In Windom schools, a new “attendance coordinator” makes occasional pre-scheduled home visits to meet with parents, so CPS workers and frightening unannounced visits can be avoided.
These are some of the efforts to combat “chronic absenteeism” in 12 school districts statewide that are participating in a state-funded pilot program to enhance attendance and reduce reports to CPS that can lead to parents being accused of “educational neglect.” The problem is not new to schools, but worsened during the pandemic.
Colleen Kaibel, director of student retention and recovery at Minneapolis Public Schools, said a common thread among all 12 districts participating in the three-year pilot is having “a caring adult in every building.” Each district developed some kind of mentorship program to make sure that happened.
Newly released data show that the efforts are paying off. At the end of this school year, educational neglect reports filed due to poor school attendance in Mankato Area Public Schools — a growing district of about 7,800 students in southern Minnesota — had been reduced from 32 to 20 students, a 38% decline.
Scott Hare, director of student support for the district, credits the decrease to heightened communication and being proactive early on, before absences mount — which wouldn’t have been possible without the nearly $400,000 the district received from the state.
“Our social workers work with our counseling teams and our elementary principals regarding when to make that report to child protection,” Hare said. “They will do everything they can do before they make that report. They will reach out to the family, they will make home visits, they will have the parents come in — they will have all of those discussions.”
In Minnesota, school attendance is the responsibility of the parent or caregiver of children under 12. A student is considered chronically absent if they miss more than 10% of school days in a year. But if at least seven of those absences are unexcused, schools are required by law to file an educational neglect report to the county child welfare agency. Students 12 and older are reported for truancy — with a possibility of ending up in juvenile court.
“The reality is that kids have to go to school, and if a parent just won’t send their kid to school, the child welfare system is responsible for ensuring that happens.”
— Traci LaLiberte, Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota
Educational neglect accounts for approximately 8% of all child welfare reports in the state. Last year, there were more than 1,800 of these reports, according to the Department of Children, Youth and Families. Though educational neglect cases make up a small percentage of the state’s overall chronic absenteeism problem, they initiate involvement with CPS that in some cases can help families with immediate needs. In others, they can lead to a child being removed from home due to other household safety issues social workers discover during their investigations.
‘Low-risk’ reports that can escalate quickly
Educational neglect reports are often the “tip of the iceberg” in child welfare officials getting involved in a family’s life, said Traci LaLiberte, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota.
When educational neglect reports are filed, the county child welfare agency will often conduct a family assessment that results in an offer of voluntary services for the family.
LaLiberte said educational neglect reports tend to be low risk, meaning that officials making the report do not believe there’s an imminent threat to the child’s safety. But if a family doesn’t participate in the voluntary services, and a child continues to be chronically absent, the child welfare agency can take them to court.
“The reality is that kids have to go to school, and if a parent just won’t send their kid to school, the child welfare system is responsible for ensuring that happens,” LaLiberte said.
Racial disparities loom large in these cases. In 2020, the most recent data available from the Minnesota Association of County Social Service Administrators, children of color were named in about 70% of the state’s educational neglect reports, despite representing only 36% of the student population as a whole.
A 2021 study published in the journal AERA Open found that U.S. school absenteeism policies lead to students of color being overrepresented in the juvenile court system. This is explained in part because white students’ absences tend to be excused, while the absences of non-white students who miss school go down in the books as unexcused, the researchers found.
Last year, Minnesota legislators introduced a bill that would provide grants to child welfare agencies to help combat absenteeism, but it did not advance. In contrast, the attendance pilot program shifts the responsibility to the schools. LaLiberte says oftentimes, the school is in a better position to find out what the family really needs — and to avoid involvement with child welfare officials, a collective goal.
A similar bill passed this year, but a funding request for grants to support community-based efforts to prevent absenteeism did not advance.
Lowering absenteeism
In her coordination of the statewide pilot, Kaibel and her colleagues have spent the last several months surveying students and families to try to understand the root causes of absenteeism and how to address them. In Mankato, Hare said, homelessness, poor mental health, parents who work the third shift and transportation challenges are all common reasons students miss school.
Mankato schools are addressing these challenges in a myriad of ways: holding more meetings with families, making referrals for therapy and connecting families to resources that promote community, like the YMCA. For older students, the district is working with interventions like the Katallasso Group’s truancy prevention program, which focuses on family mediation and dispute resolution.
In Windom Area Schools, a small district in southwest Minnesota that’s also part of the pilot program, school leaders have had to contend with another cause of chronic absence. In recent years, Windom has seen a substantial increase of immigrants who come to work in meat-packing plants. High school principal Bryan Joyce said kids sometimes miss days, or even weeks, of school at a time to attend funerals of relatives in other countries. He believes these absences should be excused, thus avoiding educational neglect or truancy reports, but this requires communication with the parents — a challenge beset by language and culture barriers.
“In our community, we’ve got very positive parents and a community that supports students, but they don’t always have the same norms when it comes to communication and maybe don’t know the processes or just don’t have time in their lives to follow the processes,” Joyce said. “So we knew we were missing a piece there — and that was the attendance coordinator.”
With an extra $60,000 a year from the state, Windom hired Craig Taylor, a retired police officer who now works as the attendance coordinator for the district’s roughly 1,200 students. On a typical day, Taylor starts his morning by picking up any students who missed the bus in a school van. Those are the straightforward cases, where parents called in to alert the school their kids missed the bus.
“I don’t want them to feel like I’m either a county worker or law enforcement where I’m coming to their home and looking around and judging. The only goal that I have is to get your kid to school.”
— Craig Taylor, attendance coordinator at Windom Area Schools
For those who don’t show up and don’t call in, Taylor starts to look deeper. When the kid shows up at school later, he’ll ask them why they missed school the day before. He’ll also talk to parents, teachers, cultural liaisons, translators and even administrators to try to find out what the family’s difficulties are and to direct them to resources, including school social workers and counselors.
Though Taylor used to be a police officer, he makes it clear to the students and families that he is not a school resource officer or a dean, and he’s not there to dole out any kind of punishment. Unlike CPS workers, he does not make unannounced home visits, instead scheduling them with parents who can’t come to the school to meet.
Over the last year, Taylor has built trust with many students and families, so he finds that they often come to him now, and communication among the families and the school has improved. As a result, attendance rates have gone up. Though Windom doesn’t typically file many educational neglect reports, the district has had zero this year.
“I don’t want them to feel like I’m either a county worker or law enforcement where I’m coming to their home and looking around and judging,” Taylor said. “The only goal that I have is to get your kid to school.”
