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Detroit public schools imail6/12/2023 ![]() Looking beyond the district for solutions Vitti said the goal for the coming year is to maintain an attendance rate above 90% at each school by standardizing the initiatives the district introduced years ago and improving on them. The district will revisit its previous allocation of one attendance agent per school to instead target support to schools with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism. Forming Attendance Action Teams, consisting of attendance agents from across multiple schools, that will focus on targeting subsets of students based on geographical trends.The district will continue to collaborate with community partners to execute these intervention plans. Having the team study data to determine which students need to be placed on a specialized attendance intervention plan. ![]() The team will meet weekly to discuss and analyze “all elements of school culture, including attendance,” Vitti said. Creating a Culture Leadership Team at each school, consisting of an attendance agent, dean of culture, counselor, social worker, nurse and others.So it’s putting in place some new initiatives for the 2022-23 school year. Meanwhile, a small group of students were learning in person from a teacher, or in teaching centers where they could log in for remote learning with adult supervision.īut now, after a year of mostly in-person learning, the rate of chronic absenteeism is even higher, and the district is increasingly concerned about absenteeism undermining efforts to recover from the pandemic. The 2020-21 school year, which began with online learning for the vast majority of the district, presented a major challenge for tracking attendance: ensuring that some 40,000 students were logging in from their homes to attend school, with wide disparities in access to the internet. The district also pledged to collaborate with community partners like the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that students and families at risk of chronic absence were having their basic needs met.įrom 2017 to 2019, the rate of chronically absent students dropped from 70% to 62%. The plan included a new code of conduct that reduced the use of out-of-school suspensions and increased staffing for the district’s Attendance Intervention Team, assigning one attendance agent to each DPSCD school. “I think there’s this impression that Detroit parents don’t care about school, and that could not be further from the truth,” said Sarah Lenhoff, an associate professor at Wayne State University’s College of Education, adding: “Families want their kids to be in school.” Pandemic reversed a positive trend in attendanceĭetroit’s 2018-19 attendance plan laid the groundwork for a holistic approach to improving attendance through wraparound services for students. Researchers say the figures are further evidence that the district needs to do more to address the broad range of causes for Detroit’s long struggles with absenteeism, including socioeconomic and transportation factors. In the latest school year, 77% of Detroit Public Schools Community District students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days, Vitti reported at the July board meeting. The district can’t move forward in its academic recovery efforts if students don’t consistently attend school, Vitti said, because “chronic absenteeism directly impacts districtwide and school level enrollment, which impacts funding and student achievement.” They involve broadening the circle of district and school officials with responsibility for monitoring student attendance, using data to understand the “challenges that prevent school attendance and then working to resolve those concerns as a team,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said. The measures are aimed at bolstering an attendance plan that was showing some success in reducing chronic absenteeism rates before the pandemic struck. Detroit school district officials are planning more aggressive steps to reverse a rise in chronic absenteeism, a huge obstacle to their efforts to help students recover academically from the impact of the pandemic.
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