But the upbeat mood belies the more serious reason that brings many of them here: They’re missing too much school. A short distance from southern California’s famous theme parks, the bright blue stucco building has become an extension of the Buena Park School District’s response to soaring absenteeism. The club is a place to make friends and for many, offers the only stability they’ve had during the pandemic.

“We are serving a need that the school hasn’t been able to fill,” said Luz Valenzuela-Trout, director of operations.

The district’s partnership with the club is an example of the extensive steps many educators nationally are taking to track down students missing school and reverse unprecedented levels of disengagement. But those efforts are rubbing up against the sheer scope of the problem. Chronic absenteeism has hit 40% in, New York City and Los Angeles, and is reaching dangerously high numbers in many districts in between.

“The pandemic radically changed norms about going to school,” said Emily Bailard, CEO of , a company that partners with school districts to improve attendance.

It has compounded issues that have always contributed to absenteeism, from lack of food at home to bullying in school, she said. Many teens began working or added more hours at their jobs to help out their families. Now educators “have to be able to address four or five things instead of one or two.”

Elsie Briseño Simonovski, the Buena Park district’s director of student and community services, sometimes scours apartment complexes with granola bars in her pockets to round up children who might otherwise not make it to class. She escorts families to gas stations to fill up their cars — courtesy of a state grant that covers fuel costs if parents show they’re taking their kids to school.

Yvette Cantu, the district’s chief academic officer, said even high-achieving students have racked up more absences than usual during the pandemic. Such students often thrive on positive feedback from adults, she said, something they missed during closures and quarantine.

‘For no reason’ 

In some districts, chronic absenteeism far exceeds the 10% a year that typically defines the problem. In March, the U.S. Government Accountability Office showing that over a million teachers — nearly half — had at least one student during the 2020-21 school year that never showed up for class. 

Some educators say they haven’t seen any improvement since then.

Jenevieve Jackson, a digital photography and video teacher in the Orange County Public Schools in Florida, has some students who have only been in class twice the entire year. Others have racked up over 80 absences. 

“Many of the absences are for no reason. The students who were not that excited about school in the first place are even less motivated,” Jackson said. The district hired “intervention teachers” to help struggling students, she said, but “they’re often used to cover the massive teacher and sub shortage and to proctor exams.”

Schools are under pressure to reduce chronic absenteeism because most states track it for federal accountability purposes. Those rates, however, offer little information about what schools are doing to improve attendance, according to Jing Liu, an education professor at the University of Maryland. 

He thinks that needs to change. In published by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, he recommended reporting attendance in a way that goes beyond chronic absenteeism. He proposed an “attendance value-added” measure that would reveal schools’ contributions to reducing absenteeism and offer “a much fairer” comparison.

Focusing on ninth graders, Liu analyzed 16 years of attendance data from a diverse, urban school district in California with 60,000 students. On average, students in the sample — he would not identify the district — missed 79 class periods each year, or roughly 11 school days. 

But when he disregarded characteristics that schools can’t control — like race, gender and poverty level — attendance rates leaped by 28 class periods, or about four days, in schools with a strong value-added result. In some schools, the average rates increased as much as eight days. 

Todd Rogers, a public policy professor at Harvard University who studied absenteeism and launched , said the concept “seems like an amazing idea.” Nudging parents to get their children to school and showing them how absences add up — Rogers studied — only reduces chronic absenteeism by 10% to 15%. 

“There’s no silver bullet, so the goal is to do everything you can that works,” he said.

But for the time being, schools are struggling to address the problem in front of them.

“It’s going to be really hard in the short term until behaviors and school norms stabilize,” Rogers said.

‘The heavy lift’

In the Metro Nashville Public Schools — with a 30% chronic absenteeism rate this year — Carol Lampkin, the district’s director of attendance services, said students are less likely to come to school if their teachers are absent, a problem that has intensified with staff members out because of COVID.

The issue has fueled creative approaches to reminding parents of the importance of keeping their children in school. Staff members recently gathered at a local Baptist church as part of their newest strategy — offering information on COVID vaccines, housing and transportation assistance in hopes of pinpointing the reasons children miss school.

Families whose children have at least half a dozen absences were more likely to get an invitation or a knock on the door, urging them to attend the event.

“The idea was to take the heavy lift off of the schools,” Lampkin said. “Our schools, our teachers, our principals 
 are dealing with so much.”

Lampkin thought grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, served while DJs spun family-friendly tunes, would be more effective at getting frequently absent students back in class than stern warnings about truancy. 

Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy organization, said she appreciates what the district is trying to do, but thinks officials could be overlooking important reasons students are absent. 

“I don’t think it has anything to do with affordable housing,” she said. She urged educators to ask themselves, “What does the school culture look like when [students] enter the building?” 

She’s worked with families whose children have been suspended multiple times this year for dress code violations, and she recently held a to draw attention to a Black student who reported being called the N-word by a paraprofessional. (A spokesman for the district said the employee has been placed on administrative leave and will “face appropriate disciplinary action” if the report is substantiated.)

“We’ve got to dig deeper. Is that child being bullied at school?” Thomas asked. “Is that child feeling like they’re not doing well?”

Liu’s research backs up Thomas’s concerns. Examining three years of survey responses from students, he found that the most likely way to improve the value-added measure was to increase their sense of safety at school.

Meanwhile, Simonovski in Buena Park developed her own method of recognizing schools for reducing absenteeism. Instead of just giving awards to those with the highest attendance — which meant a lot of repeat winners — she highlights schools showing the most improvement.

Winners get what she described as a sort of “Publishers Clearinghouse” ceremony — balloons, certificates and trays of treats. 

That tells schools, “we’re paying attention,” she said, “and we’re celebrating these checkpoints with you.”

Lead Image: Boys did their homework in the teen room at the Boys and Girls Club of Buena Park. The local school district’s partnership with the club is addressing chronic absenteeism. (Linda Jacobson)

When her daughter entered Huntington Park High School in Los Angeles this fall, Vega asked if tutoring was available, but was told only students with F’s or a teacher’s referral were eligible.

Vega picked up extra shifts cleaning offices on nights and weekends to pay the $470 a month to get a private tutor. She wonders, however, why that was necessary: The Los Angeles Unified School District is receiving in federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan — 20 percent of which has to be spent to address learning loss, according to the law. 

“The district is really …concentrating on people getting their vaccines,” Vega said in Spanish through an interpreter. “Let’s let doctors and pediatricians do their job and focus on that. The district needs to focus on learning loss and getting to a good academic level.”

Under the law, tutoring is just one way districts can address learning disruption caused by the pandemic. But with research showing that so-called can provide struggling students the academic boost they need, both parents and policymakers expected to see districts use relief funds on such programs.

Thus far, however, the enthusiasm over tutoring has not translated into widespread adoption. A from Burbio, which tracks schools’ responses to the pandemic, shows that out of 1,037 districts nationally, only about a third are spending federal relief funds on tutoring. The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s ongoing review shows that while 62 out of 100 large districts offer tutoring, most don’t provide details on their programs and how many students they serve. 

Some districts have addressed learning loss by lengthening the school day or providing small group instruction. Others that have launched tutoring programs either restrict services to specific students or limit the number of sessions available. A shortage of available tutors has only exacerbated the problem.

“There is good research that high-dosage tutoring has really transformative potential and it’s also true that school systems are struggling mightily to meet the demand,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change.

In October, another Los Angeles Unified parent, Ada Mendoza, was offered tutoring for her two youngest children twice-a-week at Manchester Avenue Elementary School. One hitch: It only lasted a month.

She signed them up, but had doubts that a month would be enough to make up for a year of distance learning. Eight-year-old Juan Jose was beginning to read when schools shifted to remote instruction, but now struggles with words of three or more syllables, reading comprehension and writing complete sentences.

Her children got the flu in October and missed some sessions. She said Juan Jose’s teacher told her he is still reading far below grade-level. “They lost a lot of learning, and they need a lot of help,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

According to the district, tutoring is available for children with disabilities, long-term English learners in grades three through eight, and foster, homeless and low-income students “based on performance indicators as identified by school sites.”

Mendoza said she can’t afford a private tutor, but some parents have gone that route. October from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that 3 in 10 families with at least one school-age child had spent their first three monthly child tax credit payments on school-related expenses, including tutoring and afterschool programs.

“Guess we’re not all spending it on getting our nails done and filet mignon,” quipped Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization. The group’s recent polling showed that more than a third of parents consider not having enough tutoring or to be a major or moderate problem.

The union has launched — or EPIC — a “watchdog campaign” to follow the $122 billion K-12 schools are receiving through the relief bill. And in Los Angeles, Vega has joined other Los Angeles parents taking part in the nonprofit , which monitors how the district is using relief money to help students get back on grade level.  

Parent Revolution, another Los Angeles advocacy group, wants the district to create an “ for every student. Even if students can get free tutoring, it’s often a “blanket approach” that might not target their needs, said Jay Artis-Wright, executive director of the organization. 

“We work with populations of families who have academic challenges that preceded COVID and now have a wider gap,” she said. “There is a surplus of funds that can support them, but only if we can agree that each child’s academic recovery is unique and should be treated as such.”

‘This giant puzzle’

Districts that have launched tutoring programs say they can’t serve everyone — especially as a tight labor market and quarantine requirements continue to fuel personnel shortages.

The Metro Nashville Public Schools, for example, has been able to sign up 500 tutors — a mix of teachers, paraprofessionals and community volunteers, said Keri Randolph, the district’s chief strategy officer. But that’s half the number they had planned to recruit, which means less than 1,000 students are receiving tutoring instead of the 2,000 the district expected to enroll through its $19 million Accelerating Scholars program.

The Delta variant, Randolph said, affected the size of the volunteer pool and she wasn’t as successful hiring retired teachers as she’d hoped. 

The program — 30-minute sessions, three times a week for 10 weeks — currently targets low-performing first- through third-graders in literacy and eighth- and ninth-graders in math. 

“It’s this giant puzzle,” Randolph said, adding that tutoring is “hot right now, but people have no idea how hard it is.” 

Staff members at the 46 schools now offering tutoring manage the schedule so teachers aren’t “overburdened,” she said. The district tries to schedule the tutoring sessions during the regular school day to avoid the need for extra transportation.

But there are exceptions. Kindall Maupin, who has a daughter in eighth grade at DuPont Hadley Middle School in the district, was only offered a 7:30 a.m. slot for math tutoring — a time that doesn’t work because her daughter has ADHD and can’t focus that early in the morning.

“I feel like if they can have football practice and cheerleading practice at the end of the day, why can’t we do this then,” Maupin said. She added that she’s even considered refinancing her house to afford private tutoring. “I have been there, literally sitting down to crunch the numbers to see how I could do this.”

Maybe next semester

Experts said the current pressures on local districts affect whether they can pull off a new program on a large scale. 

“Many educators are understandably exhausted from these past 18 months of school disruptions,” said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. “Implementing a new program — no matter how much funding is available for it or how much research supports its effectiveness — takes effort.”

Jonathan Travers, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts address budgeting and staffing challenges, said many districts have contracted with vendors to give students 24-hour access to online homework help.

“We are trying to be clear that that is not the same thing” as high-dosage tutoring, he said, but added that with districts focusing on filling vacancies and managing quarantines, some are only now shifting to “actually putting canoes out in the pond around accelerating learning.” 

That doesn’t stop districts from adding tutoring programs next semester, he said. And he added that some who are frustrated with the pace of implementation may push for districts to reimburse parents spending their own money on tutoring.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, alluded to Travers’s idea in an this week, suggesting that districts share some of those federal funds with parents who are spending their own time and money helping students catch up. 

“Given all the labor shortages, and the willingness to pay parents for , it is interesting that districts haven’t done more to go the route of paying parents to tutor their kids,” she said in an interview. “We thought we’d see some by now.”

Randolph, in Nashville, said she thinks her district needs to do a better job of communicating the other ways the district is to address learning loss, such as funding $18 million for summer school and $6 million for computer-based literacy and math programs.

“It’s not just tutoring or nothing,” she said.

Still, she said leaders plan to continue tutoring beyond this period of recovery. That’s one reason why the district decided to build the program in-house, instead of contracting with a private provider, which can cost per student for a year. That’s not a sustainable solution, Randolph said. The district is spending $400 per student for the 10-week period.

“We don’t think tutoring is just for a COVID response,” she said. “If it’s the right thing to do now, it’s the right thing to do later.”