‘Getting kids to want to be here’ – Salem schools cut down chronic absenteeism

SALEM, Mass. — As students head back to school, educators want to make sure kids are literally back to school.

Chronic absenteeism is a problem many districts have been grappling with even before the pandemic.

In Salem, educators are going to expand a successful pilot program which reduced chronic absenteeism among middle schoolers.

The chronic absenteeism rate for students at the Collins Middle School was about 23% among all students before the pilot program was rolled out.

Two years later, the participants in the trial program are attending school at a markedly improved rate.

The chronic absentee rate for those students has fallen to the low teens.

“We wanted to reinvent the middle school experience,” explained Dr. Stephen Zrike, Salem’s school superintendent.

The state defines chronic absenteeism as missing more than 18 days in an academic year.

In many school districts, the number of students in that category has blown up in recent years.

“It was pretty startling for us to look at the chronic absentee rates, the levels of disengagement,” Zrike said. “We were really struggling as a community, particularly in the middle school grades more than anything else.”

The Salem school system partnered with the WPS Institute, an education think tank based in Newton and launched a pilot program in the Collins Middle School.

“When we started, it was about getting kids to want to be here and to love school,” explained Chelsea Banks, the dean of innovation for the city’s middle schools.

She says administrators reached out to students, parents, and teachers to come up with new ways to generate some buzz about school. That was something that had been difficult to accomplish with erratic attendance.

“When 25%, 30%, and 35% of kids are missing school at a chronic rate, it becomes really, really hard for teachers to facilitate learning because, on any given day, it’s a different set of kids who might not be there,” added Banks.

The new approach put a focus on experiential learning by getting out in the community more to participate in so-called learning immersions.

Increased focus was put on interactive projects that build connections among students.

A more aggressive attendance team now looks for troubling trends earlier.

“We also wanted to make sure how we were doing and part of that is student reporting,” said Banks.

Gavin Softic is the principal of the Collins Middle School where this program will be rolled out to all students this year.

He says getting kids in school is so important because once a student gets off track, it is hard to get back on.

“You miss a couple of days of school, and you’re really putting yourself back, and we’ve seen with students, then that builds up that level of anxiety and it prevents them from coming to school. So a couple of days can really trend in the wrong direction.”

A survey of students in the pilot program found more than a quarter of them reported loving school most of the time.

Teacher morale also improved.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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