Officials: Missed school days equal less funding for Austin ISD
Austin ISD loses $45 in state revenue each time a student is absent, and if the district had 100 percent attendance for an entire school year, it would receive an additional $25 million in state funding annually, according to AISD.
Southwest Austin is not immune to attendance issues, said parent Casie Wenmohs, co-chairwoman of Oak Hill Elementary School's campus advisory committee.
"We have quite a culturally and socioeconomically diverse population, so our challenges run the gamut from parents scheduling an extra day of vacation when it's a school day to children in family situations where if they miss the bus, they have no other way to get to school," she said. "I do think most parents don't realize that our state funding is tied to attendance."
If school districts throughout Central Texas could increase attendance by 2 percentage points, the region could get an additional $34 million in state funding for education, said Susan Dawson, president and executive director of the Austin-based nonprofit E3 Alliance.
That's the message E3 hopes to spread with the introduction of its task force for Missing School Matters, a regionwide campaign to increase awareness of the importance of attendance.
"If you look at every single grade, Central Texas students have worse absenteeism than the rest of the state average," Dawson said.
E3 Alliance is a regional, data-driven education collaborative that aims to improve education and drive economic prosperity. E3 asked superintendents throughout Central Texas what issues it should focus on, and attendance was the top suggestion, Dawson said. By 2014, E3 hopes to boost attendance by 2 percentage points overall in 12 Central Texas districts.
The task force includes 21 parents, educators and business leaders. This summer, the group will mobilize and inform the public, task force co-chairwoman Amy Jones said.
"We're going to be addressing subgroups in a variety of different [ways, for example]—back-to-school nights, PTAs, church groups, nonprofits like the Boys & Girls Clubs and Communities in Schools or Big Brothers Big Sisters so that everyone in our community is talking about the fact that missing school matters, and there are small things that we can all do to make a difference," Jones said.
Attendance in Southwest Austin
AISD numbers show attendance is relatively high but in some cases still short of targets in Southwest Austin, a region Community Impact Newspaper defines as south of Southwest Parkway, west of I-35, north of FM 1626 and east of FM 1826.
AISD school board trustee Robert Schneider said that the better off families are economically, the more likely their children are to have high attendance. While Southwest Austin schools have better attendance than some other areas, getting children in the classroom is still important to parents as well as the business community, he said.
Attendance dollars are part of the overall formula the state uses to determine district funding, he said, and that money is not subject to recapture, the process in which a portion of local tax funds are paid back to the state and redistributed to poorer districts.
"If you don't have kids or you're a parent who lives in AISD but you're sending your kids to a private school or a charter [school], you're still paying property taxes. ... Your money's staying locally and educating kids that are ultimately going to be part of the economy in some way," Schneider said.
Overall, attendance was up in AISD in the 2012-13 school year, Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said.
"What we try to do is instill good habits around attendance, going to class and doing your homework, because we know that those are factors that will lead to better outcomes like graduation and college for our students," Carstarphen said.
Akins High School's attendance decreased in 2011–12, but Principal Daniel Girard said it has improved during the past five years.
A few years ago, Akins began analyzing attendance data weekly, according to Regina McGough, a science, technology, engineering and mathematics academy coordinator at Akins. If a student misses a class, teachers contact parents. One trend she noticed is that lists of students with good attendance and honor roll students often overlap.
"When we put them together, they are the same kids," she said. "The attendance really impacts the grades."
Absences' consequences go beyond academic struggles. AISD policy states that a school may file a truancy complaint in court if a child misses 10 days within a six-month period. It is up to staff whether to initiate a withdrawal for nonattendance, but becomes mandatory after 20 days of absences.
"Before we get there, we try to intervene," Girard said, explaining that Akins makes multiple efforts to help students improve.
In 2012–13, Akins students with chronic absenteeism opted in to a pilot program and carried handheld GPS systems that offered attendance reminders, he said.
Schneider pointed to AISD dropout recovery programs at Lanier and Travis high schools, as well as to Garza Independence High School, an alternative learning school of choice for students who complete two years of high school and want to graduate.
"It's turned out to be a great way to get kids back into the system," he said.
Wenmohs said dropouts have lower earning potential, making their need for public services higher.
"The whole community benefits when we can keep our kids in school and on track to finish high school," she said.
More information is at www.e3alliance.org and www.missingschoolmatters.org.
