FARMINGTON — At the Regional School Unit 9 board of directors meeting on July 25, Superintendent Christian Elkington shared with the board an article with a list of ideas on how to tackle chronic absenteeism in the school district.

“Chronic absenteeism is something that we have been looking at and we’ll be making a focus of our time this coming year,” Elkington stated at the meeting.

“The issue of absenteeism is of grave concern,” he added.

Chronic absenteeism is defined by the Maine Department of Education [MDOE] as “missing 10 percent or more of school days, including excused absences.”

The article, written by Evie Blad & Marina Whiteleather of Education Week, suggested ideas such as steering away from a “‘one size fits all’ solution”, stating, “the job of improving attendance can’t be restricted to one single school department because everyone from the bus driver to the principal affects students’ engagement in school.”

The article also suggests overly punitive approaches are not as effective as intended and students need more engagement and personal attention from the school to identify the heart of the problem.

Unlike truancy, chronic absenteeism campaigns aim to help students avoid absences, including those that are excused for reasons like illness, rather than punishing them after they’ve crossed a legal threshold of poor attendance, the article states.

Chronic absenteeism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has been subject to extensive conversation and observation among the school district, with several administrative reports showing that each school, from the elementary schools to Mt. Blue High School, is contending with students missing school.

Since returning to classrooms after a period of remote learning, RSU 9 has seen a slow but steady return to form with the rate of attendance in the student body. Former Mt. Blue High School Principal Monique Poulin reported that chronic absenteeism had dropped 20% from the end of the school year in 2022 to the first semester of the 2022/2023 school in January.

Over at W.G. Mallett, Principal Tracy Williams reported in February an improvement in student attendance, but was still contending with staff attendance. When asked for an explanation, Williams offered stomach and respiratory illness as the best explanations for the cause of those absences.

Elkington corroborated this explanation by mentioning the retirement of older staff members, making way for younger staff to take their place.

“Younger staff have what? Children,” he stated. “What happens? Children get sick. It’s an issue that we have with staff too, because our staff absences have been larger than we would like, but it’s a confluence of several events that are occurring at the same time.”

Nichole Goodspeed, principal of Cascade Brook School, also reported a high amount of absenteeism in her administrative report that she gave in December of last year. When prompted by the board for an explanation for the absenteeism, Goodspeed said it was primarily illness over anything else.

“It’s illness,” she said. “For two years, we told everyone to stay home when they were ill.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across the country were forced into remote learning and finding strategies to circumvent mandatory social distancing. Once the restrictions were lifted, many schools did not see the attendance rate they had in the years prior to the pandemic.

According to NPR.org, roughly 8 million U.S. students were considered chronically absent before the pandemic. The data, which was produced by the research group Attendance Works, showed that by spring of 2022, that number had doubled to around 16 million.

In the state of Maine, data from MDOE that was published in February of this year showed that one in five Maine students suffers from chronic absenteeism. The primary groups most affected by this are homeless youth, children from migrant families, and American Indians.

Students whose first language is not English and students who come from economically disadvantaged families also suffer higher than average rates of chronic absenteeism, the report states.

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