Attendance rates plummeted among Centralia Elementary School District children during the COVID-19 pandemic just as they had in local educational agencies throughout the country. Prior to the pandemic, the district boasted just a 5 percent chronic absenteeism rate, which spiked to 22 percent.
“That’s a fifth of our student body absent every single day. We don’t like that,” said Superintendent Norma Martinez. “If the children are not in school, they can’t take advantage of all the great services we’re offering. But we recognized that we were doing the same old thing, and so now I do feel like we have a much more restorative approach. We are much more supportive, we listen to parents, we listen to the school, we provide what they need.”
Preliminary data from the last school year shows the district’s chronic absenteeism rate is down to 8 percent, with every school site reporting declines.
How they did it
“We were doubling down like everybody else, making phone calls and just doing all the same things we had been doing before COVID, and nothing was working. So, we had to reinvent and rethink how we approached attendance in the new era,” Martinez said. “It really required us to, for a lack of a better word, partner with parents rather than fight parents. We have made a lot of changes to how we work because we listen to our parents and we just want to support them and address the barriers. We are a ‘whatever-it-takes’ district.”
Here’s what it took: The district simplified the process that allowed families to have students make up absences via independent study. It also piloted a shift in bussing — which was previously only available to special education students — that allowed drivers to pick up general education students on rainy days when attendance tended to decline.
“It doesn’t cost us anything more. We didn’t have to hire any other drivers, and it’s an opportunity that parents really appreciated,” Martinez said.
Then Centralia ESD re-examined its School Attendance Review Board (SARB) process. These boards, composed of representatives from various youth-serving agencies, seek to help chronically truant students and their parents or guardians address school attendance and behavior patterns through school and community resources. While the goal of SARBs is to keep students in school, they also have the power to refer students and families to court.
In Centralia, SARB meetings were held at the police department, which Martinez explained was seen as punitive and made families come in feeling immediately defensive. The district began to use an empty room in its Neighborhood Resource Center (NRC) — staffed by a long-time employee whom everybody in the community knows and trusts — to host SARB meetings to make it feel less intimidating.
Fully utilizing the NRC has been core to the district’s attendance-improvement efforts, Martinez explained. “Before COVID, we used to do the annual giveaway of clothing and stuff like that. We would collect new and gently used items from the community and then we would do this one-day giveaway. And honestly, for me, it was one of the saddest days,” she said. “Everybody would be like, ‘Isn’t this so cool? It’s 7 o’clock in the morning and there’s already a hundred people in line.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s terrible. It shows that there’s such a high need.’ I grew up the kid that would get in line to get the free American cheese. I’m not a fan of waiting in line to get something that you need. And so, I just kept thinking about ‘what can we do? What can we do to give with dignity?’”
The answer: Centralia Boutique.
The Centralia Boutique
The Centralia Boutique found its home in a different empty room next to the NRC. Through donations and purchases, the district keeps it stocked with everything from diapers to laundry detergent, and furniture to clothing. When families are in need, they’re allowed 20 minutes to go through the boutique and take what they need free of charge.
The district uses the NRC strategically too. “In talking with some of our schools and the trends that we were seeing, we noticed that when it rains, parents send their kids less frequently to school,” Martinez said. “We purchased things like raincoats, galoshes, umbrellas. So, when it’s getting ready to rain, our principals start to say, ‘Hey, you don’t have an umbrella, if you don’t have a raincoat, just come in.’
“You learn there really is a story behind every absence. We had a student at one of our schools with absences in excess of 60. We finally got them on SARB,” Martinez continued. “It takes some trust for the parent to be able to disclose that the reason that she wasn’t sending her child to school was because her child would cry because they didn’t have shoes that fit, and so some days the child would go to school with shoes that were so tight that they hurt and other days the child couldn’t handle the pain. They’re proud people, so it’s hard to say, ‘I just don’t have money to buy my child’s shoes.’ So, we get their size and call the NRC, they send the child some shoes. The parent was so thrilled. The child is no longer missing school.”
Martinez noted that cash-strapped LEAs may see these strategies as impossible to replicate in their own community, but that “the reality is that the kids are not in school, it costs way more from a societal factor.”
“I encourage people to be creative with the resources they have and to really identify one need and address that,” she said. “And you will see success and that will motivate you to identify another need and address that. That’s how we did it.”
