Students switched from in-person learning to online education during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in March. Now, the Los Angeles Unified School District is struggling to bring their students back into the classroom.
Chronic absenteeism rates maintained a rate between 11% to 18% in the three recorded school years before the pandemic according to the California Department of Education.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate more than doubled in the 2021-22 school year. This was the highest rate of chronically absent students since the state of California began tracking the data in 2016.
According to the California Department of Education, over 136,000 students in the district were categorized as chronically absent in the most recent school year, 2023-2024. The recent absenteeism rate improved from the 2021-2022 school year which saw over 207,000 students chronically missing class.
Chronic absenteeism is defined by the U.S. Department of Education as being absent at least 15 days of the school year. Absent students are at risk of falling behind their peers in their academic career, according to Thomas Dee, Stanford professor and chronic absenteeism researcher. The issue was aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no clear determining factor that contributed to the loss of student retention.
“So many moving parts of the pandemic make it hard to understand which part of the pandemic was really driving chronic absenteeism,” Dee said.
Chronic absenteeism does not have a singular driving cause. University of California Davis professor and chronic absenteeism researcher Kevin Gee said, “It could be family level issues. It could be broader community issues.”
“The massive increases we saw during the pandemic are likely to be linked to the lack of connections that kids felt. Especially during the pandemic, when all schools went to online learning,” Gee said.
Distance learning and Zoom classes were implemented in 2020 and carried through the 2020-2021 school year to mitigate the risk of contracting COVID-19. This decision may have protected the physical health of students, but Gee said mental health may have suffered.
“I think a lot of students and a lot of parents just felt really disengaged and so when schools reopened… those feelings of disengagement perhaps carried over,” Gee said. “That’s why some parents were not only disengaged, but that’s why they were like, ‘Okay, if my kid is going to be absent, I think that’s that’s fine.’”
Los Angeles school officials are aware of this issue and are attempting to bring their students back into their classrooms.
Rocio Rivas, an LAUSD Board member representing district two, said there are various programs in place to get students involved again after the pandemic.
“The district has been really active in hiring more social workers, more counselors… and having those data digs to look more at chronic absenteeism,” Rivas said.
Door knocking is one of these programs. Rivas said school officials from her district make house visits to students that have been absent from school for five days. This results in an open dialogue regarding the reason for the absence and what helpful resources are available. This program, like many others, is contingent on the amount of funding available after inevitable budget cuts.
“This September, the federal funds from the COVID funds are ending. We’re not getting any more money,” Rivas said. “So we really have to be strategic in the funds we have, how can we optimize efficiently and effectively the funds we have.”
The district faced a budget cut for this school year, and with $400 million less than last year, LAUSD has $18.4 billion dollars to operate with for the 2024-25 academic year.
“There’s this second financial pressure too… the flight from public schools during the pandemic. Roughly 1.2 million students left public schools… and they haven’t returned and they’re unlikely to return,” Dee said.
In California, a portion of district funding is dependent on how many students attend its schools. Dee said many California school districts are under-enrolled and are facing financial pressure to close.
Chronic absenteeism impacts different demographics more harshly, which can potentially lead to closure of schools in minority communities.
LAUSD’s district two, which is primarily attended by Latine or Hispanic students, saw a spike in chronic absenteeism at 55.4% in the 2021-22 school year according to the Los Angeles Unified open data source.
This fell by 18 percentage points the following year, suggesting that these implemented programs might be helping bring students back to school consistently.
In the 2022-23 school year, 38% of Latine or Hispanic LAUSD students were classified as chronically absent.
This rate among Latine or Hispanic students is causing concern as they account for nearly three-quarters of all K-12 students within LAUSD.
Thousands of K-12 students are suffering from the post-pandemic spike in unattended classes, limiting their academic understanding and capabilities.
“We have quite good evidence that chronic absenteeism is harmful to student learning,” Dee said. “Nearly 20 years of test score gains have been wiped out during the pandemic and we haven’t really gotten those back.”
According to the California Department of Education, chronic absenteeism in the district dropped five percentage points between the 2022-2023 and the 2023-2024 school years.
While these rates are not falling fast enough for many, education officials hope to bring students back into the classroom despite having lower budgets.
“The district is doing everything possible to really get those numbers back to where they were in 2018 and 2019,” Rivas said.