States across the country are reporting a significant decline in the number of students enrolled in public schools due to the coronavirus pandemic, leaving experts and educators concerned about the trend and its potential long-term consequences.
A remarkable number of students seem to have simply fallen off the network, failing to show up for online or in-person instruction, their whereabouts unknown by school officials.
Given the chaos caused by the pandemic and the lack of data, it is difficult to determine the exact magnitude of the problem, which appears to have a disproportionate impact on the already vulnerable student populations – including homeless students, children with disabilities, children of immigrants, children in foster care and children of color.
A recent study by Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit that targets underprivileged communities, estimates that about 3 million of the “most educationally marginalized students in the country” may have disappeared in school since March 2020, when the pandemic ended. schools. . The group said it came to the number by calculating a “likely percentage of at-risk groups out of school, based on media reports and available data.”
ABC News contacted education department officials in all 50 states and found that the problem appears to be nationwide.
While some states reported not keeping such information, many others said they have seen a significant drop in their enrollment numbers, and still others have reported having thousands of missing students.
Thousands ‘missing’
In Michigan, the number of K-12 enrollments fell this fall by about 53,000 students from about 1.5 million students. In a December op-ed, State Inspector Michael Rice said much of the decline was due to factors such as an annual decline in enrollment over the past 10 years, parents choosing to keep their children away from kindergarten, and a increase in the number of homeworkers. -skilled students, ultimately accounting for about 40,000 of those students.
But, he said, “of great importance” are the approximately 13,000 completely missing students.
“The gritty work of finding children has to be done locally,” Rice wrote. “Every child is important. There is even one to lose. “
In Dallas, Texas, where about 153,000 students lived last year, about 9,000 high school students, 2,000 high school students and 1,000 elementary school students are missing, Robyn Harris, a representative for the Dallas Independent School District, told ABC News.
And in Florida, officials are trying to determine the whereabouts of nearly 88,000 students who were expected for the 2020-21 academic year and did not show up in the fall. Last year, the number of registrations with the state was 2.8 million, but that number has since fallen to 2.7 million.
In a Feb. 11 letter to school district leaders, Florida House speaker Chris Sprowls called this decline “ alarming, ” stating that the number represents more than 3% of the state’s total student population. By posting his letter to Twitter, Sprowls urged districts to use whatever means available “to locate these missing children. We have a moral obligation not to let any of these children slip through the cracks of the system.”
Miami-Dade County, home to the country’s fourth-largest school system, with nearly 335,000 students, opened the district this year with more than 10,000 fewer students than in 2019, Chief Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told ABC News.
After several steps had been taken to find these students, the majority had been located. However, the district says there are still about 1,000 students who are considered ‘truly missing’, which Carvalho calls ‘very disturbing’.
“We think these were the students who were in a crisis prior to the COVID-19 crisis. These were probably poor students, probably English language learners, students who may have had a disability, may have had home insecurity, food insecurity and may have had a vulnerable immigration status, ”said Carvalho.
School officials in Miami-Dade continue to look for these students, while also dealing with more than 13,000 families whose children opted for distance learning but appear to be “seriously deteriorating” or dropping out of school.
Why are children missing?
In many public school districts, enrollments for preschoolers across the country have declined. While kindergarten is not a requirement in any of the following states, Minneapolis saw a 16% decline, Los Angeles saw a 14% decline, and Colorado experienced a 9% decline in their annual kindergarten enrollment.
Many students also lack access to essential technology tools, such as Wi-Fi or computers, to participate in distance learning.
A National Education Association (NEA) digital equality report found that an estimated 25% of school-age children do not have broadband access or an Internet-enabled device, such as a computer or tablet.
As of the start of the pandemic, there were about 17 million students who were not sufficiently connected to the Internet, said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit, two-tier network of state and district education leaders from around the country.
“From a learning perspective, that was potentially catastrophic,” explained Magee. “What we’ve learned over the past 12 months is that, from both a learning and health perspective, there are millions of students for whom virtual learning just doesn’t work.” In addition, he said, “there is currently a subset of those students who are completely separate from their school systems.”
‘They have unsubscribed. They don’t feel connected enough with their own learning to log in every day, ”he added.
According to the NEA report, most children who lack the right technology are from low-income and minority families, with “this inequality being systematically linked to the historical classification of race, socio-economic status and geography.”
Another major problem affecting the education of low-income families is the economy. Millions of low-income families have been hit hardest by the economic downturn, and many were suddenly faced with unemployment and housing insecurity, putting these children at greater risk of missing school.
“Many of our students live in multi-generational families where mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles all live in the same space. And many of them have experienced COVID in a real way, with death unfortunately taking its toll on their families. Some of them are uncomfortable with the face-to-face piece. They’re just trying to maintain daily survival, ”Harris explained.
Additionally, with ongoing job or wage losses in the country amid the coronavirus, some of these teens are choosing to work instead of returning to school, helping their families make ends meet, or caring for younger siblings. while their parents work.
“At the moment, knowing about their education is not the first thing to do, because it’s really about making sure their family is sustained,” Harris said.
Sickness absence
The pandemic has also dramatically increased the number of students who are absent on a typical school day, regardless of whether learning is done remotely or not.
Chronic absenteeism, defined by the U.S. Department of Education as missing at least 15 days of school, has increased significantly, especially among vulnerable populations and students of color, said Hedy Chang, who leads Attendance Works, an initiative that focuses on chronic absenteeism. .
In some neighborhoods, student absenteeism doubled during the start of the pandemic.
“In Connecticut, for example, chronic absenteeism has increased from 12% in the 2019-2020 school year to 21% in the first half of the 2020-21 year. For English learners, the percentage has doubled from 17 to 35%; and for students eligible for free meals, it is up from about 20% to 35%, ”said Cheng.
What schools do
Across the country, teachers and school officials are doing their best to connect with students who are missing or chronically absent.
Dr. Chad Gestson, Superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District, and a member of Chiefs for Change, has created a program to contact every student every day by having adults make a phone call to the more than 30,000 students in Phoenix to check how they are doing.
Likewise, the “Operation Comeback” campaign in Dallas is trying to recapture the missing students. Teachers and volunteers have contacted students, Harris said, with postcards or emails, asking “where are you, we’ll miss you when you get back. There’s still time.”
Door-to-door visits began earlier this month, but were cut short after the cold winter weather hit Texas last month.
Miami-Dade, in Florida, uses a “multi-tiered approach, using all of our resources together to reach these families,” Carvalho told ABC News, as door-to-door visits by school officials, in partnership. with police officers, social workers and provincial entities, tracking students in subsidized housing through the county housing authority.
The district works with community organizations to reach out to migrant communities in particular and to convey information through mass media and social media.
Officials want to “make our community aware of the plight of these families,” Carvalho said, including by contacting the friends of the missing students to see if they knew where they were. “So it is an all hands on deck approach to determine where the students are.”
The ‘catastrophic’ consequences of learning loss
The long-term consequences for these “missing” students “are disastrous,” say experts.
‘You get a whole generation of children who are not well enough prepared for school and career. You will have a significant increase in mental, social and emotional well-being problems in children, ”said Magee.
It can also be difficult for a student who has left school for a while to get back into the education system and adjust.
There is hope, however, because “interrupted training is a challenge that can be addressed,” Chang said.
Students are resilient and if they receive adequate academic and social support and are offered ‘engaging, supportive and powerful educational experiences that provide paths to a brighter future’, they will be able to make up for lost learning opportunities as a result of the pandemic, she added.
“We must use the necessary resources to bring these students up to a level appropriate to their age in this regard as soon as possible,” Carvalho agrees, or America as a whole will lose its position on the world stage.