Attendance in R.I. public schools is on the rebound after pandemic plunge

Rhode Island kids aren’t skipping school as much as they used to.

In the 2023-2024 school year, there were 244,375 fewer absences across Rhode Island’s public schools, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) announced at a Tuesday morning presser. The department estimated that’s equivalent to about 1.3 million hours of learning time. 

Overall, the increased attendance numbers represent a 4.2 percentage point decrease in chronic absenteeism from the previous academic year. There were 5,955 fewer students who were chronically absent, which is defined as missing at least 10% of the school year, or about two days a month. 

Angélica Infante-Green, the state’s education commissioner, said those numbers are a big win, even if chronic absenteeism rates still exceed pre-pandemic levels.

“For people that may say, ‘That’s not big enough.’ You’re right. But it’s big,” Infante-Green told the audience gathered in the Governor’s Room of the Rhode Island State House. “We cannot support students if they’re not in school.”

Students in kindergarten through fifth grade saw the biggest reduction (5.1 percentage points) in chronic absenteeism. Three public charter schools — Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts, Excel Academy and The Compass School — saw the highest reductions in their absenteeism rates. Providence Public Schools was the most successful school district with a loss of 12.1 percentage points. Some districts already had lower rates of chronic absenteeism, the commissioner added, so decreases seen this year weren’t as dramatic. 

The commissioner was joined by several education stakeholders as well as Gov. Dan McKee and Rep. Joseph McNamara, the Warwick Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Education. Tuesday’s assembly was meant to publicize successes in the past year as well as RIDE’s refreshed efforts in its Attendance Matters campaign, launched in November 2023. As the school year approaches, the anti-absenteeism campaign will see an increased media presence with bus ads and TV and radio commercials.

“You know those videos on YouTube that you see before you go to the information you wanna see? We’ve got those. So don’t click by them,” Infante-Green said. 

Marketing campaign makes school cool

The 2024-2025 school year will begin with a returning ad campaign that includes a new batch of promotional interviews with notable Rhode Islanders — like Tropicana Danny, a Providence Place Mall security guard known on TikTok for his dancing. The Partnership for Rhode Island provided $50,000 for the suite of interview videos and interviewees donated their time. WellMet Digital produced the content, which is now available on RIDE’s YouTube channel.

“If you’re not present in school, you’re gonna miss out on a lot of stuff,” says Tropicana Danny in one video.

A separate budget of $15,000 was used on an animated spot with both English and Spanish voiceovers. It was produced by DDL Advertising, who has also done work for the Rhode Island Lottery, PVDFest and Rhode Island College’s Hope scholarship.   

Chronic absenteeism reached its apex during the pandemic, with 46,328 students consistently missing classes in the 2021-2022 school year. Before the pandemic, chronic absences hovered around 26,000 for three years in a row and dipped to their lowest in the 2019-2020 school year. 

But in the 2020-2021 school year, there were over 37,794 students who took more than a few days off from school.

Students who regularly miss school fall behind on learning, sometimes to significant detriment. WWhen it comes to standardized tests like the SAT or Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS), RIDE data suggests 20-26% of chronically absent students lacked proficiency compared to their peers with better attendance. The achievement gap was most severe on the SAT’s English language arts portions.

Math scores have trouble breaking 40% proficiency even among student demographics with good attendance. But only about or slightly above 10% of chronically absent students were proficient on math assessments. 

The state’s attendance data is robust and monitored in real time, with numbers submitted daily by local school districts and then synchronized with RIDE’s databases. This leaderboard, along with social media posts that shower praise on schools who buck the trend with good attendance, has led to national attention for Rhode Island’s efforts.

“We are the only state that has this leaderboard,” Infante-Green said. “Great Britain came to us. Hawaii came to us to build this. There are other states now that are looking at what we’re doing and starting to build it for themselves.”

“I’m OK with the national attention, but I’d rather see the results right here in Rhode Island,” McKee said.

Educating parents

Rhode Island’s absenteeism strategy was also examined by a report published Tuesday by think tank Future Ed. Report author Liz Cohen relayed an anecdote from Infante-Green, who described calling a parent whose child had missed three weeks of school. Was there a doctor’s note? No, the mother said, but she was giving her daughter medicine — and it made her sleepy during the day. So the daughter stayed up late playing video games, making her unable to attend school the following day. The mother lamented that her daughter didn’t listen to her.

“What was clear to me is that habits have fallen. People have abandoned the habit of going to school every day,” Infante-Green told Cohen.

She reiterated that sentiment to reporters Tuesday: “We’ve heard from parents that they don’t feel that two days a month was a big deal. It is a big deal. It adds up to 18 days a year, which is almost a month of school.”

Could the reduction in chronic absenteeism be attributed to a natural dip in pandemic-associated absenteeism? 

“Well, I think, maybe,” Infante-Green told reporters. “However, when we have parents that were saying to us that attendance didn’t matter —  that is speaking to us on the shift that has happened. So that is the real shift.”

Correlating parental attitudes to attendance trends is relatively new for RIDE, Infante-Green said, and it’s contributed to the collective effort to restore attendance to pre-pandemic levels. In the 2024 SurveyWorks, when asked how much missing two days of school a month impacted a student’s chances of graduating high school, 57% of parents said the negative impact was either “tremendous” or “quite a bit.” A little over 3,000 parents thought missing that much school did not affect their students’ graduation chances at all. 

But 74% of parents whose own education never went past the eighth grade thought it was a serious issue indeed, and responded that the impact would be serious. Conversely, only 54% of parents who had four-year college degrees answered the question affirmatively. 

This story was updated. An earlier version of this story had an incorrect name for The Partnership for Rhode Island.