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By Elizabeth Shockman, Minnesota Public Radio News

The number of Minnesota students chronically absent from school doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the state Education Department determined more than 1 in 4 students missed at least 10 percent of school days due to unexcused absences or suspensions.

Chronically absent students tend to do worse academically and are less likely to graduate than kids who attend school regularly. Those facts are well-known. Finding solutions has been the problem.

Now, after months of quizzing students, advocates and school leaders on Minnesota’s high rates of absenteeism, some state lawmakers are ready to talk through their findings at the Capitol. They’re focused on better data collection, along with improving outreach to families and changes around transportation that could make it easier for kids.

“The hard part is, the root cause in every case is different, so there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Rep. Ben Bakeberg, R-Jordan, co-chair of the Student Attendance and Truancy Legislative Study Group who also works as a middle school principal. “We won’t be able to say … if we address X issue, it’s going to address attendance and truancy.”

‘Terrified of school’

Every student’s absenteeism story is different. For some, the barrier is transportation. For others it’s diabetes flare-ups or grief from a death in the family or homelessness. The wide variety of issues is part of what has made solving absenteeism so difficult for school leaders and lawmakers.

Bakeberg and other lawmakers say they’ve learned a lot the past few months just hearing from students struggling to get to school.

That included testimony from Maddie, a junior at Minneapolis Southwest High School. She said she’s always liked school and consistently gotten good grades. But in eighth grade that changed. She started to struggle with obsessive-compulsive behavior related to an allergy. Attending class started to feel like an ordeal.

“I was terrified of school just because of having to be in an environment that I thought was contaminated and putting me in danger. Every day of school was basically torture for me, having to be with other people,” Maddie told state lawmakers in September.

It wasn’t until Maddie got connected to her school’s clinic, which offers mental health services, that she found the help she needed. The waiting list to meet with someone was at least a month. But when Maddie finally started seeing a mental health professional she found strategies to help handle her compulsive behavior and return to classes.

“When students are missing school, we cannot assume it’s because they don’t want to be there,” said Rep. Heather Keeler, DFL-Moorhead, a co-chair of the legislative panel. “There’s many different things that happen in a child’s life that we have to be considerate about and provide wraparound services for.”

Besides the benefits, going to school in Minnesota is also required by law from ages 7 to 17. When students reach a certain number of missed school days, districts begin the process of contacting the county, truancy officers and child protective services investigators.

“Addressing attendance is, in my mind, addressing family preservation,” said Keeler.

‘What is a tardy? What’s an excuse?’

Describing the problem, it turns out, is also part of the problem.

State and local leaders say truancy is inconsistently or vaguely defined and tracked.

“How do you even determine what is a tardy? What is a half-day? What’s an excuse? What’s not excused? What does educational neglect mean on the education side versus when it transitions over to Child Protective Services?” Keeler said.

One of the group’s recommendations is to update existing state statute to clarify definitions and make sure the law fits the way the current education system works. They’re also asking groups like the Minnesota School Boards Association to update their definitions in order to better advise school districts.

Lawmakers also want better definitions to help with tracking how well schools are doing at getting students to attend as well. Among the study group’s recommendations is a plan to get the Minnesota Department of Education to do more to track absenteeism statewide.

Getting students from home to school is more difficult for families with transient housing. It gets even harder in the winter.

“Transportation is a really, really big issue, especially in greater Minnesota when you have a little bit more of a geographic spread to actually get to school and to get to your school bus stop,” Keeler said.

Lawmakers also want to edit the regulations on what types of school employees and vehicles can be used to get students to class when their regular modes of transportation fall through.

“It’s a very complex web of stakeholders, and I think the one thing we learned is we have to slow down and just get all the stakeholders on the same page,” Keeler said.

Some districts have pushed ahead on their own to boost attendance. That includes the Columbia Heights School district, one of 12 districts receiving state grant money this year to combat truancy.

“Our goal is to increase the number of students who are consistently attending school from 68 percent to 80 percent by 2026,” assistant superintendent Bondo Nyembwe told lawmakers.

To do that, the district has established teams of employees at each of their sites who meet regularly, review attendance data, make calls to families and work to figure out what students who are struggling to show up need to help them get to school.

They’re also hiring a nurse to answer early morning phone calls from families wondering if their students are too sick to attend classes.

“We’re already seeing the benefit,” Nyembwe told lawmakers, adding that the number of students referred for truancy has fallen over the first few months of the school year.

Lawmakers want other schools to see the advantages Columbia Heights is gaining. One of their recommendations is to fund district truancy and attendance liaisons — staff positions that can help students and families troubleshoot the issues that are keeping them away from school.