APS superintendent says it takes a village to stop excessive student absences

As Albuquerque Public Schools works to improve student outcomes, chronic absenteeism is one of many obstacles it faces. 

Superintendent Gabriella Durán Blakey targeted the issue last week during a media event and said she’s hoping the community at large will help — specifically those who employ parents. 

“We have the students during the day, and our business community has their parents,” Blakey said. “So, if we could work together to make sure that parents feel like they have the support to be able to get their kids to school on time and that attendance is important for the whole community, I think that we can really see some big increases (in attendance).”

She said focusing on educational outcomes is nearly impossible when kids are not in class.

“There’s little we can do in building foundational skills if their attendance is not consistent,” she said.

By the numbers

APS, according to its attendance dashboard, had a 30.8% rate of chronic absenteeism during the 2023-2024 school year. That percentage represents how many students were out of school more than 10% of the academic year, or about 18 days.

FutureEd research showed New Mexico’s rate for the 2022-2023 school year was 39.2 percent — higher than all states except Alaska and Washington, D.C. Albuquerque’s 34.1% for that year was slightly better, but Blakey said the rate must go down even more. The 2023-2024 rate is nearly double the rates of before the COVID-19 pandemic (15.8% in 2019-2020 and 18.8% in 2020-2021).

Albuquerque’s absenteeism might be higher than the national average, but it’s an issue the entire country is dealing with.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2022 reported that chronic absenteeism rose during the pandemic and hadn’t returned to pre-COVID levels.

Blakey said the problem cuts across grade levels and is present in all socioeconomic groups. She said the pandemic may have changed the routines of some households, and those changes have become entrenched in some cases, to the detriment of school attendance.

Another culprit, she said, is family vacation time, which often overlaps with the start of the school year, a crucial time for establishing a grasp on the subject matter.

“[Absenteeism] is especially costly in the first weeks of school,” Blakey said.

New law, APS response

The excessive absences is a statewide problem as well. In 2019, New Mexico enacted the Attendance for Success Act, which “turned the state away from a truancy approach,” APS Spokesperson Martín Salazar said.

The law requires districts to monitor attendance at each school, organize students into four tiers, based on how much school they miss and provide intervention according to absentee status.

A provision in the law calls for school authorities to refer students who continue to have unexcused absences after a written notification to the Children, Youth, and Families Department.

Salazar said APS responded to the law by developing an attendance support unit made up of social workers. As part of the process, he said, APS has instituted an early warning system and a student success system, which alerts school staff of students developing attendance and academic challenges.

School staff then provide interventions to support students and families, he said.

“These efforts are built upon a strong foundation that includes the implementation of the community school strategy as a transformational model for schools,” Salazar said.

A national problem

Caitlynn Peetz, writing in Education Week, said more than a quarter of students nationwide were chronically absent during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years.

Peetz cited research from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. Robert Balfanz of the Everyone Graduates Center wrote that close to 15 million students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, and two-thirds of K-12 students were attending schools where 20% or more of the student body was chronically absent.

Rhode Island is one state that’s had some success — reporting that 90% of its schools saw fewer absent students than it did a year ago. The governor credited this improvement to a dashboard that reports daily absence rates at each school.