by Nola Renz, Community Impact Manager - Early Grade Excellence
Research shows that kindergartners who miss 10 percent
of school, or just 18 days have lower academic performance when they reach
first grade. When chronic absence becomes the norm, the loss in academic
performance continues to grow each year, leaving the child further and further
behind their peers who are regularly attending school. Across the nation, 11 percent of students kindergarten
through grade 12 are chronically absent, but in Tacoma one in four kids K-3
missed 10 percent or more days in the 2012-2013 school year. Alarmingly, 28 percent of our kindergartners
missed 18 or more days of school. Unfortunately the statistics don’t
improve greatly for first, second and third graders. Their numbers indicate
that 24 percent of students in each of these grades missed 18 or more days
annually. Equally alarming is that nearly half of the Tacoma School
District’s students between kindergarten and third grade missed 10 days or more
in 2012-2013.
Many parents and community members don’t recognize
that good attendance means providing our children with more and better
opportunities to learn. There is a lack of understanding of the extent to
which absences, even when excused, negatively impacts learning. Additionally, many people presume that
attendance only matters when the child is in middle school or high
school. We must deliver a clear compelling message, backed by research,
that every day missed is a day of instruction missed, a day of classroom
interaction with students and teachers that can’t be recovered. Through this
message, we must focus on creating a culture of attendance and personalize the
school environment to address the specific needs of each child.
The
facts include:
- Students
have to be present and engaged in order to learn.
- Early
chronic absence can leave children unable to read well by the end of third
grade.
- Early
chronic absence sets a pattern for poor attendance, academic failure and
potential drop out.
- During
the early elementary years, children are gaining basic social and academic
skills critical to ongoing academic success.
- Among low-income
children, chronic absence in kindergarten predicts the lowest levels of
educational achievement at the end of fifth grade, exacerbating the
achievement gap.
A recent Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department survey indicates that one
of the key drivers of missed days in Tacoma is asthma, which can be attributed
in part to poor air quality. The air
quality is typically good in the Puget Sound region, where Tacoma is centered,
for most of the year. However, in the
fall and winter months, there are very high levels of fine particle pollution
in the air in Tacoma and most of Pierce County. The biggest source of our wintertime pollution is wood smoke which comes
from heating units and fireplaces in some of the poorest households in the
region. Pollution levels from wood smoke are so high that they violate the U.S.
Clean Air Act and have resulted in our region being designated as a
nonattainment area by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Though there are efforts to respond to the
EPA mandate that we clean up our air by 2019, kids continue to suffer.
Our strategies
for improving attendance fall into these areas:
· building awareness of the importance of attendance
· building a culture of respect and partnership with families
· developing and implementing strategies for early
intervention
· recognizing and rewarding good attendance and
improved attendance
· consistently tracking and monitoring of attendance
and the reasons for the absence or tardy
Now with the
initiation of the Tacoma Campaign for Grade Level Reading, our city is taking
another giant step toward assuring that all of our children, especially those
in the most need, are assured of success in their homes, in their schools and
in society. This coalition of partners
that has come together to make this Campaign a reality is larger and more
reflective of our city than any that has come before it. The Tacoma Campaign
for Grade Level Reading focuses on three specific areas: school readiness,
school attendance and summer learning loss. The coalition has developed
strategies and outcomes around each of these areas and has garnered agreements
to track data and gather qualitative information in order to align and assess
our work. We are excited about the opportunities this collaboration provides,
and see it as an opportunity to significantly impact the success of our
students. As we go forward, we will
utilize our learning to create nimble, necessary responses to the issues that
arise for our students. Additionally, we will take what we have learned into
our future plans to move forward toward engaging other Pierce County School
Districts in this work.
For more
information about the Tacoma Campaign for Grade Level Reading, please review
our Community Solutions Action Plan that has been submitted to the Campaign For
Grade Level Reading.
Students from Ferrucci Junior High, Mt. Tahoma High School,
Annie Wright, Fife High School and several other schools signed up for projects
at L’Arche Farms, Gateways for Youth and Family, Edgewood FISH Food Bank, and
St. Leo’s Food Connection. The volunteers helped with everything from
planting plants, cleaning up greenhouses, packing Power Packs and passing out
food at the food bank. 