New Mexico among states with highest rates of chronic absenteeism, AP study finds

The start of the school year is always difficult for Topaz Jones McCoy and her family.

Both she and her husband are artists. So every year, they sell paintings at the Santa Fe Indian Market, where Jones McCoy estimated they make as much as a quarter of their yearly income.

The downside, though, is the market can coincide with the first day of school.

But last school year was different. Jones McCoy and her husband caught COVID later than many, and weren’t able to take their two children, now 9 and 12, to school. Buses weren’t an option, because they live outside of Santa Fe Public Schools’ district.

Then, Jones McCoy said, illness after illness — mostly the flu or other bugs, some caught at school — beset her family, forcing the kids to miss even more class time. Before she knew it, they were chronically absent, and Jones McCoy started getting calls and letters from their schools.

“It’s stressful and exhausting,” Jones McCoy told the Journal. “For my kids, I’m pretty fortunate because they’re always doing pretty good in their grades. … But I know that’s not the case for everybody.”

Stories like Jones McCoy’s — of what’s known as “chronic absenteeism,” or when a student misses 10% or more of the school year — have become more common in New Mexico since the pandemic.

When it comes to the rest of the country, New Mexico seems to be worse off than most.

In the 2021-2022 school year, New Mexico found itself in the top five of all analyzed states and jurisdictions in overall rates of chronic absenteeism, according to data collected, analyzed and released Friday by The Associated Press and Stanford University educational economist Thomas Dee.

In terms of how much that number grew since the 2018-2019 school year, which was used as a pre-pandemic baseline, New Mexico took the top spot among about 40 states whose data from both years was compared with a roughly 23 percentage-point increase.

And it’s not clear how long it will take to make up for those losses.

“We know we’re not where we need to be both in terms of attendance and in student outcomes,” state Public Education Department Assistant Secretary Greg Frostad told the Journal. “We really do want to return to pre-COVID attendance rates. I don’t know that that’s realistic by the end of the current school year, but that’s where we want to be within the next several years.”

New Mexico has heavily invested in helping students come to school, Frostad said, pointing out that showing up for class is critical for learning.

But much of the support students battling chronic absenteeism need, Frostad said, have to come at the district level.

Albuquerque Public Schools, for example, has employed school-level attendance teams to reach out to families and figure out the issues keeping students from school. In fact, APS Restorative Practices Manager Linda Kane told the Journal that’s what much of her job entails.

She said she encounters a range of issues — students staying out of school because they have social anxiety, or because they have to babysit a younger sibling, or because they’re facing homelessness, to name a few.

She then gets those students connected with programs or services that may help, like day cares to look after young children, or with the district McKinney-Vento program, which supports kids and families facing homelessness.

“There’s just so many resources out there that we have,” Kane said. “It’s just (about) making the connections with the family and offering them.”

Last school year, over half of New Mexico students facing homelessness or housing insecurity were chronically absent — the highest of any student group, according to a recent Legislative Education Study Committee analysis, seeing a staggering chronic absenteeism rate of nearly 53%.

Tailing them were Indigenous students, who were about 45% chronically absent, and then the rest of the student groups identified in the landmark Yazzie-Martinez consolidated lawsuit — economically disadvantaged students, English learners and those with disabilities, all of whom hovered around 40%.

For all students, that number was around 35% last school year. Numbers for each of those student groups last school year were lower than they were the school year before, which saw the peak of chronic absenteeism over the last five years.

The Associated Press found that in several states, Indigenous students were among the student groups that face the highest rates of chronic absenteeism.

Part of why Indigenous students miss so much school, Frostad acknowledged, is a lack of “culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum,” which can mean access to learning in and about Native languages.

Culturally relevant education is an issue advocates have frequently raised, and one that was identified by a judge’s findings in the Yazzie-Martinez consolidated lawsuit as important for providing Native American students the same quality of education as schools do for non-Native American students.

“We certainly are not seeing the attendance rates that we need to see for Native American students,” Frostad said. “I think that is a reflection that the instruction that’s being provided in schools today is not meeting their needs.”

Students facing homelessness face their own set of challenges in getting to class, among them a lack of transportation to school, not having appropriate clothes for school and food insecurity.

Some of those needs are addressed by the state’s community schools initiative, which Frostad said helps centralize the services they need into one location. Last school year, 69 schools received state funding and were implementing or planning to implement the community schools strategy, according to an LESC analysis.

Although all cite PED data, there is also a slight discrepancy in The Associated Press and Dee’s New Mexico analysis — which is consistent with what the PED shows on its online attendance dashboard — and the one from the LESC.

For example, in the 2021-2022 school year, the former cited a statewide chronic absenteeism rate of 40.4%. The latter, on the other hand, found 37.9%.

“That report also references ‘22-’23 data that we have not yet certified,” Frostad said, referring to the LESC report. “So I don’t know what data … they used.”