by Ty Tagami | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The closure of schools during COVID-19 caused a massive downshift in attendance as nearly one in four Georgia students simply stopped attending class, double the rate before the pandemic.
Fewer students are routinely cutting class now, but one in five were still deemed “chronically absent” last school year, meaning they missed 10% or more of the school year, typically 180 days.
The problem has caught the attention of state lawmakers.
“That’s 360,000 school children in our public school systems in Georgia that are chronically absent, meaning they are missing 18 days or more of the school year,” said Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon. “They’re not going to learn to read. If they don’t learn to read, they’re not going to be literate. They’re not going to graduate, and they don’t have a chance at the Georgia Dream and the American Dream.”
Kennedy is leading a study committee on this “quiet crisis,” as he called it. That illustrates just how serious the Senate thinks it is. Kennedy was until recently the highest ranking senator but stepped down as president pro tempore to run next year for lieutenant governor, the statewide officer who presides over the Senate.
And the Georgia House of Representatives has its own study committee on the issue.
Many states and school leaders de-emphasized attendance during the worst of the pandemic. By the 2020-21 school year, 31 states and the District of Columbia had reinstated daily attendance-taking, but Georgia was not among them.
The state required attendance to be taken but not on a daily basis, the non-profit initiative Attendance Works reported in 2021.
Hedy Chang, the group’s executive director, testified to Kennedy’s fact-finding committee Thursday about how students are affected by chronic absence.
“They’re less likely to read by the end of the third grade, have lower achievement, even disciplinary issues in middle school,” she said. “They’re more likely to drop out, but it’s not just the academics that are affected; it’s educational engagement, social emotional development, executive functioning.”
Chang said these students affect other students when they are present, creating distractions and making it harder for teachers to keep kids on track. And absenteeism appears to be contagious, she said, with more students missing class by the end of a school year if they start class with students who were chronically absent.
There is a wealth of data about the impact of missing school, starting with academic performance.
In 2024, nearly half of Georgia students who took a Georgia Milestones test in English and math scored at least proficient, but only one in four chronically absent students made that mark in English and just one in five in math.
Chronically absent students are at greater risk of dropping out, which leads to unemployment, lower lifetime earnings, and even a shorter life.
A landmark study published last year found that completing a dozen years of school — about the equivalent of finishing high school — was associated with a 24.5% reduction in mortality risk compared with no education. That translates to a reduced mortality risk of 1.9% per year of education, said the Norway-based study published in The Lancet.
Likely reasons for better health outcomes were higher earnings, better health care, more health knowledge and other “social and psychological resources.”
Lawmakers were given multiple reasons for the increase in absenteeism.
Students are tired because they are working a job to help the family or are effectively raising younger siblings, in some cases because a parent died or was incapacitated during the pandemic. They are falling ill and lack health care. They cannot see or hear well and lack resources for health screenings.
Often students just lack necessities, said Carol Lewis, president and CEO of the group Communities in Schools, a non-profit with the mission of keeping kids in school.
“In one of our communities, it was something as simple as clean clothes, hygiene products, and you can almost track it to the time of the month,” Lewis told the House study committee at its first meeting last month. She added that many kids are still traumatized by the death of a family member during the pandemic.
Garry McGiboney, a former official with the Georgia Department of Education who volunteered his time to lead a statewide attendance study group, said bullying and other contributors to poor school “climate” discourage attendance.
“If students want to be at the school, they will find a way to get to the school,” McGiboney told the Senate committee. “If they want to be at school, it’s because they feel engaged. They feel like somebody cares about them.”
To some, all of this sounds like excuses.
Absenteeism results from “pure unadulterated failure to perform parental duties,” said O. Wayne Ellerbee, a Valdosta lawyer who served four decades as a Lowndes County juvenile court judge. It was a big problem when he became a judge in the mid-1970s, he said, so he implemented a simple solution: he required parents to appear in court after their child had three absences.
“They’d have a 12-, 13-year-old kid and they’d say, ‘Well, judge, I can’t keep up with them 24 hours a day.’ And I said, ‘Well, why in the hell did you have them?’ They would look at me like I was crazy, but they soon learned and soon adapted,” said the former judge, who is not part of the legislative study process but has read about it.
Ellerbee, who retired from the bench in 2012, said that when some of those kids grew up, they relayed to him what their parents had told them: “You got to go to school cause I ain’t going to court.”
He also blamed the schools. Kids who skip can be disruptive when they do attend, and that can be a burden on teachers and administrators, he said. “So they’re not too unhappy when the bad ones don’t come to school.”
But that’s old-school thinking to everyone who has testified so far at the House and Senate hearings.
“We started off using the hammer, which definitely did not work,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods told senators Thursday. Instead, educators should focus on building positive relationships with students, so they can learn why they are skipping school, he said.
“We don’t want to just mask the symptom,” Woods said. “We have to address the real root of the problem.”
That approach appealed to Steven Teske, the former chief juvenile court judge in Clayton County. Teske, who retired from the bench four years ago, led an interagency task force to address absenteeism for nearly two decades.
“I wanted to stop the traditional stuff where there were limited resources, you were put on a diversion plan to go to school, telling kids who aren’t going to school to go to school, which is stupid,” said Teske, who moved to Arizona and has not testified in these hearings. “We know there are issues much deeper that are driving these kids to not go to school. They really don’t give a damn about what an adult is telling them.”
Teske avoided punishing absent kids and their parents, but he said “restorative justice” wasn’t enough. He said he was impressed by an approach that seemed to be effective at one high-poverty high school in Clayton: feeding the kids after classes ended.
“I was just so amazed about the passion of these teachers that were staying there and helping the kids with their homework and feeding them,” he said. “I mean, bringing in Chick-fil-As and stuff like that. Kids didn’t want to go home.”
People who did testify said the state should expect to spend money to address absenteeism. Georgia schools need more social workers, more nurses and other interventions, such as screenings for vision and hearing, lawmakers were told.
Dan Sims, the Bibb County School District superintendent, shared an anecdote with senators that crystallized the challenge. He visited a single mom of four whose fifth grade son, a “cherished” student, had gotten into trouble with the law.
During his 15 minutes with her, one child came down the stairs asking for food, another had a question about the next day and another interrupted the conversation, too, all before the boy, who was outside playing, had returned home.
“I sat and watched her face and the stress that was in her body in that moment,” he said. “And she even mentioned to me, ‘Dr. Sims, it’s just me.’ “
