The Poughkeepsie City School District is increasing outreach to find solutions for chronic absenteeism, and introducing an attendance incentive program beginning next month.

The moves come as data from the first two months of the school year showed an increase in chronic absenteeism compared to the same period last year, but also an increase in the average number of students attending school daily.

A report on student attendance and suspension trends is scheduled for the Board of Education workshop meeting tonight, Nov. 20. The report and a link to watch the meeting live or a replay afterward are available through the Board Docs webpage on the district website.

The workshop meeting follows a productive session Saturday in which roughly 20 parents and community members joined the Parent Advisory Committee to the Superintendent to discuss hurdles to attending classes – either at school, at home or in the community – and possible solutions. The district is also encouraging all families to provide their own feedback to these questions through an online survey available now.

While the attendance percentage for the district increased from 89% for the first two months of 2023-24 to 91% for the first two months of this school year, the percentage of students characterized as chronically absent – absent 10% to 19% of the school days – increased from 27.9% to 31.9%. Both of those numbers are drastically smaller than the year-end absenteeism figures recorded over the past half-decade that began with the onset of COVID-19.

For the first 41 school days of 2024-25:

• Students were absent, on average, 4.3 days; chronically absent students missed an average of 9.1 days.
• Poughkeepsie Middle School had the highest attendance percentage (94%) and the lowest percentage of chronically absent students (17.9%).
• The Smith Early Learning Center, with pre-K and kindergarten students, had the highest percentage of chronically absent students, 57.1%, followed by Poughkeepsie High School, 37.3%.

For the full 2023-24 school year:

• The percentage of students chronically absent was 41.5%, which was slightly down from 2022-23 and marked the third consecutive year of improvement.
• The percentage of students severely chronically absent, or missing 20% of school days or more, was 18.7%, also the third consecutive year of improvement.

The district has been taking steps to reduce chronic absenteeism in recent years through prioritizing engagement with families, incentivizing and acknowledging attendance achievements and instituting the Everyday Labs system for notifying families of attendance trends.

More is in the works, and the district is seeking input from families to find solutions.

What parents shared

Community Schools Executive Director Natasha Brown said parents offered a variety of factors at Saturday’s meeting that may be encouraging absenteeism, including:

• Childcare gaps and the fact that many older students are asked at times to stay home and watch younger siblings.
• Too few transportation options.
• Families may not have the resources to keep children’s clothes clean.
• Peer pressure in which students may be encouraged to skip due to a friend skipping.
• Concerns over safety on the streets.
• A bell schedule in which many schools are beginning the day at the same time.

 “One parent said she had three kids in three different schools and the start times are similar,” Brown recalled. “So some of her kids are always late all the time.”

She said many parents cited a lack of motivation to prioritize school.

“Right now families are consumed with their immediate needs,” Brown said, noting the simple needs for food, shelter and safety may be increasingly difficult to achieve. “Those things have such an impact on how the value placed upon education had shifted. We’re taking the approach now that we’re going to try to alleviate as many of those external factors as possible.”

The group also suggested solutions that included:

• Further increasing family engagement.
• Increasing incentives for attendance and academic achievement.
• Increasing the number of mental health workers in the schools.
• Instituting voluntary uniforms, should families show an interest in that solution.

Brown is also looking into other ideas, such as:

• Increasing transportation by creating afternoon bus sweeps in which district buses circle the area after their regular runs are completed.
• Staggering elementary school start times.
• Creating laundry facility availability at Saturday Morning Lights.

She and the Parent and Community Engagement Committee planned to discuss these topics at its meeting Wednesday before the Board of Education Workshop meeting. Brown said the committee plans to create its 30-day action plan for how it will engage the community to support attendance initiatives, with 60- and 90-day plans also in the works.

Incentive plan beginning

Schools in December will begin competing each month to see which has the highest attendance percentage, in a program financed through a My Brother’s Keeper Family and Community Engagement grant.

Each month, the school with the highest percentage will receive roughly $500 to spend on items that will directly be given out to the students, such as books from a book fair or school supplies.

The school with the highest attendance at the end of the school year will receive $2,000 to spend on a year-end field day or festival.

Brown said she wants to incentivize attendance through a variety of routes, such as more in-school acknowledgement.

“Getting an award is an incentive. Getting your name announced on the announcements is an incentive,” she said. “We need more pride-boosters to celebrate our students.”

To that extent, she’s in the early stages of planning a “Rally for Excellence” in the spring, where achievements of all sorts across the district would be honored, be it perfect attendance, a spot on the Honor Roll, a sports team winning, and art display being picked to be shown in the community, or anything of the sort.

“We would showcase and highlight the amazing work of our students to show the community at-large the excellence we do have,” she said. “That will encourage them to get more involved to support us.”