More Colorado students regularly showed up to class last school year following record rates of absences during the pandemic, but attendance rates were still higher before COVID, data released Thursday morning by the Colorado Department of Education shows.
The latest numbers signal schools are headed in the right direction following efforts among the state education department and districts to double down on getting kids to come to class every day. The majority of Colorado school districts and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services — groups of districts that pool resources — saw improvements in their attendance rates last year, but the progress doesn’t necessarily translate to a giant turnaround.
Student attendance rates jumped to 91.5% during the 2023-24 school year from 90.8% the year before, state data shows. Chronic absenteeism declined by 3.4 percentage points to 27.7% last year from 31.1% during the 2022-23 school year. During the 2019-20 school year, before the pandemic, average attendance among Colorado schools was 92.8% and the average chronic absenteeism rate was logged at 22.6%.
A particularly troubling data point has persisted: More than 1 in 4 Colorado students — 241,119 kids — missed at least 10% of school days last year. That marks the third-highest rate of chronic absenteeism since the state began gathering attendance data in 2016, according to CDE.
“We do see some patterns that are not where we want to be,” Johann Liljengren, director of CDE’s Dropout Prevention and Student Re-Engagement Office, told The Colorado Sun.
However, Liljengren is encouraged by what he describes as “good continued progress” in both reducing chronic absenteeism and increasing attendance across a variety of school districts, grades and student groups. Improvement last year largely mirrors and builds on the strides districts made during the 2022-23 school year in routing kids to classrooms every day, Liljengren said.
Gaps in attendance among different demographics of students also continue to be a challenge for schools. State data shows attendance rates improving and chronic absenteeism rates decreasing in the past two years across student groups — including students of color, students who are homeless and living in poverty, kids with special needs, migrant children and students learning English. But their attendance records continue to trail those of their peers.
For instance, average daily attendance among homeless students during the 2023-24 school year was 84.2%. Among migrant students, the average attendance rate was 89.2%.
The state education department is rolling out a statewide attendance campaign that aims to cut chronic absenteeism by 50% from the all-time high of 35.5% during the 2021-2022 school year. Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova is determined to shrink chronic absenteeism to 17.8% by the 2026-27 school year, according to a news release from CDE.
It’s an ambitious goal, particularly considering that the state’s rate of chronic absenteeism has never dipped to that percentage since it began collecting attendance data, Liljengren said.
Regardless, he believes that target is within the state’s reach. Meeting it would require schools to continue seeing an overall drop in chronic absenteeism of between 3 and 4 percentage points each year, which equals about 30,000 more students attending school regularly every year.
“When you look at individual schools and districts,” Liljengren said, “it can be a manageable challenge that folks are tackling.”
Why are kids continuing to miss school and what will boomerang them back?
Finding ways to corral kids back to school every day has become a top priority for Córdova and district leaders since students’ success in their classes largely depends on them being engaged in learning every day. The more school a student misses, the harder it becomes for them to catch up.
In an interview with The Sun earlier this month, Córdova emphasized the need to focus on getting kids to school every day “to make sure we can do the most that we can with the time that we have.”
The list of reasons why students struggle to attend class regularly is long, but turning to national research, CDE has identified four broad factors that tend to stand in the way of students committing to attend every day. Some students’ life circumstances often prevent them from consistently going to school, including kids who don’t have reliable transportation, who are battling a long-term illness or who have a sick family member.
Other students don’t feel safe at school or might have a family member who carries memories of their own difficult experience with school. Some students lose their excitement over learning and might be failing their courses.
And other families might still harbor misconceptions about the degree to which attendance matters, Liljengren said.
Motivating kids to return to school largely comes down to opening the door to an environment where they will feel welcomed, can trust the adults around them and will spend class time poring over lessons that are challenging and thought-provoking, he said.
“We have really seen that when kids are engaged and challenged and feel that it’s relevant, when they have adults that they can connect with, when they feel safe in that environment, that that is still our best preventative measure to make sure that kids are pulled in and connected to school,” Liljengren said.
The state education department has organized what it calls a “learning cohort” among districts that want to share ideas about ways to draw kids to school.
Summit School District in Frisco is among the districts within that cohort that have dramatically curbed chronic absenteeism. The district of about 3,600 students slashed its rate of chronic absenteeism by 10% in one year — from 50% during the 2022-23 school year to 40% last year, according to Superintendent Tony Byrd.
Reining students back into classrooms has taken a variety of approaches, Byrd said, including forming an attendance committee with district and school staff members, developing a district attendance campaign to encourage kids to come to school, researching why chronic absenteeism is a problem and looking into efforts across the country to mitigate student absences.
And then simply listening to students.
The district has conducted what Byrd refers to as “empathy interviews.” That means “sitting and listening and trying to understand the lived experience of students in school,” he said. “So rather than assume and apply a solution to maybe a problem we don’t understand, we try to start by understanding what our students are telling us.”
Students have opened up in raw ways, touching on the challenges many of them bring to school and the problems with the way they feel teachers and staff perceive them.
“People don’t see me,” Byrd said he has heard from students. “I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel heard. I can’t understand what the teacher’s saying because I don’t speak English well enough. I feel like expectations of me are lower because I’m a student of color. Negative assumptions are sometimes made about me because I’m Hispanic.”
Byrd urges educators and staff to reflect on their own biases and “embrace” what students are telling them while trying to understand how they feel.
Summit School District is also in the beginning stages of transforming what education looks like for its high school students, with plans to develop seven career and learning pathways and redesign school spaces to be more hands-on and animate students’ experiences in the classroom.
Byrd said district officials visited other parts of the state — Littleton Public Schools’ EPIC Campus, St. Vrain Valley Schools’ Innovation Center and Durango School District 9-R’s IMPACT Career Innovation Center — to get a firsthand look at how other districts have enlivened their buildings and rooms.
Now, the district has put a $195 million bond on the November ballot in hopes of building a career and technical education innovation center by Summit High School, expanding and renovating its CTE spaces and relocating its alternative high school next to the high school.
Many school facilities have the look and feel of schools designed for the industrial area and are outdated to meet students’ learning needs today, Byrd said. He wants to re-energize students who have become bored with their school day, giving them more of a voice in their education.
“I’ve heard this my whole career,” Byrd said. “If they feel seen, heard and valued and that the learning is interesting, they’re much more likely to come to school.”