As many as 50,000 students attending the Los Angeles Unified School District were reported absent on the first day of the 2022-2023 school year on Monday.
San Francisco-based outlet The Mercury News reported that the 89 percent attendance rate was still an improvement from the previous school year.
About 11% of students enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District were no-shows on the first day of school, underscoring the fact that more work needs to be done to re-engage those students, the district said Monday, Aug. 15.
The 89% attendance rate was a 12% improvement over last year – and could be adjusted higher once attendance data for the district’s six new virtual academies are reported.
About half the students in L.A. Unified were chronically absent last year, meaning they missed more than 10% of school days.
Reportedly, the school district has dealt with “chronic absenteeism” since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. School district employees and school board members visited the homes of chronically absent students last week to hear what challenges they were facing to attend school. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the district will dedicate 600 staff members to re-engage chronically absent students. They plan on continuing the visits throughout the school year as needed.
In addition, the school district hired 1,500 new teachers after dealing with a teaching shortage last year. Five hundred additional teachers are in the process of being hired. Carvalho said that this is the first time in more than a decade that the district will be fully staffed and not relying on substitute teachers.
The New York Times reported in the spring that chronic absenteeism in schools skyrocketed during the pandemic. In one school district, more than 40 percent of the students were chronically absent last year. A school district in Maryland reported that 38 percent of students were chronically absent. The Times noted that many absences have been driven in part by anxiety and depression among students that worsened during the pandemic.
“What we really learned from this pandemic was that many families who were already in situations where they were struggling, who had high basic needs — those needs were exacerbated,” said Erin M. Simon, the director of student support services for the Long Beach Unified School District, told The Times.