How some Minnesota schools are tackling chronic absenteeism

A group of school districts across Minnesota say they are figuring out better ways to get student attendance back on track, with the rate of chronically absent students stubbornly high even years after COVID school closures.

Earlier this year, the Legislature voted to send $4.7 million to 12 school districts to try to figure out how to get attendance rates back up. The districts — Burnsville-Eagan-Savage, Chisholm, Columbia Heights, Cook County, Mankato, Minneapolis, Moorhead, Northfield, Red Lake, Rochester, Sauk Rapids-Rice and Windom — presented early results from their year of experimentation to a legislative commission on Dec. 2.

The districts say the funding is making a difference, helping them buy software to better track attendance, and hiring people dedicated to dealing with attendance.

“Not many districts the size of Chisholm have the opportunity to have someone committed to that role,” said Carrie McDonald, the director of teaching and learning for the district of about 650 students situated about an hour and a half north of Duluth, during the Student Attendance and Truancy Legislative Study Group meeting.

While a small district like Chisholm is using the personal relationships its new attendance coordinator can develop with students, bigger districts like Moorhead are trying to find systems to keep students on track.

“Having a staff person who notices a kid is not in school and reaching out to that kid is not a system we can rely on,” Moorhead’s Isaac Lundberg told the commission.

Though different school districts need to use different ways to reach out to students and families, they agreed on a need to find uniform systems to document attendance in schools, and compare results across districts.

Students are missing school for all kinds of reasons, and chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% of school days or more— was a growing problem across the country even before the pandemic.

COVID-19 school shutdowns magnified the problems, and in 2024 the Legislature voted to spend some money to help the 12 school districts address the problems. The districts represent a mix of urban, rural and suburban and are scattered across the state, so the hope is that their experimentation can be broadly applicable.

In nearly all of the districts, the process started with understanding exactly how much school students are missing. Administrators speaking at the legislative commission said they found schools in the same district had different ways of tracking absence — for example, one school counted a student absent for missing the first few classes in a day, and another school counted an absence as not attending class the entire day.

Another common problem was finding patchworks of programs built up over the years to try to stem this tide of absenteeism, targeting different groups of students and using different systems to communicate with families.

In Chisholm, McDonald said attendance campaigns are targeting everyone, not just students who seem to be slipping academically or whose families are having a hard time.

“We have families that take two- and three-week vacations throughout the year,” she told the commission, “and just explaining to them that any time your child is out of school, that does have an effect.”

Columbia Heights is also taking a broad approach, said Bondo Nyembwe, the district’s executive director of educational services. Messages about how much it matters to show up to class are posted around buildings, and families are getting regular postcards showing how often their children have missed school.

Students’ anxiety and other mental health concerns are also at the root of some chronic absenteeism. In Northfield, administrator and school psychologist Carrie Duba said that district is trying to give students more tools to deal with those issues and still be in school.

Students being absent from school can also get students and families involved in the child-protective services system.

Angi McAndrews, Rochester’s student engagement director, said leaders in her district have been working on a partnership with Olmsted County’s youth behavioral health system and the child protection system to understand patterns and engage more with families before problems wind up in court.

“We did not have a great safety net in place,” she said.

The largest share of the money, $1 million, went to Minneapolis, where Colleen Kaibel explained some schools are rolling out peer support groups for students, and a program that matches teachers and other staff with a handful of student mentees to make sure their attendance is on track.

While building relationships was a common thread, Moorhead’s Lundberg said relationships alone will not solve the problem, especially in bigger districts.

“We have families who need to navigate relationships with multiple schools,” he said. “We have to figure out how have a system that leverages those relationships.”

Building systems is also a focus for schools that want to make change sustainable.

“We can’t watch them disappear when the funding disappears,” said Scott Hare of the Mankato school district.

With legislators nervous about a small surplus in the coming biennium and a projected deficit after that, ongoing or expanded money for these attendance pilot programs is far from assured.