A high school is combating chronic absenteeism by connecting every student with an adult mentor in the building because research shows that bond improves children’s attendance, mental health and behaviors.
Four years after the pandemic forced schools across the country to temporarily close, millions of students are still missing out on regular instruction. Student absences remain at crisis levels, with 1 in 4 missing at least 10% of the last school year. Without swift action, this crisis will have severe consequences for both individual students and for our country as a whole.
Credit: Contribute
Credit: Contribute
Fortunately, some schools are confronting this challenge with the urgency it deserves. At Demopolis High School, it’s all hands on deck to reengage students. Every adult in this rural west Alabama school, from teachers and counselors to custodians and cafeteria workers, serves as a mentor to at least one student.
It’s just one part of a strategy to strengthen the connections Demopolis’ nearly 700 students feel to school. And it’s the kind of relationship-focused effort more schools should adopt.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Research shows that when students feel connected to others at school, they have better attendance, improved mental health and less misbehavior. Strong connections come in many forms. For some students, it’s participation in an extracurricular activity like band or football. For others, it’s having a supportive friend group or an encouraging teacher who regularly checks in with them.
For schools in rural areas like Demopolis, strengthening connections is particularly important — and challenging. Students in rural schools generally have less access to school counselors and psychologists. They often face more obstacles to accessing mental health care. And extracurricular activities may be more limited due to transportation or staffing challenges.
While connection has always been a key part of what keeps students engaged and motivated, it’s not always been a primary focus for school leaders. But the disruption and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged feelings of disengagement for many students. Even as schools have returned to some semblance of “normal,” student absences have skyrocketed.
That was the case at Demopolis High School. Following the pandemic, efforts to help students recover academically were stymied by the same harsh reality that many schools have faced: Students can’t learn if they aren’t in class. Its percentage of chronically absent students rose from 10% in the 2020-21 school year to 27% in the 2021-22 school year.
Given the magnitude of the challenge, Demopolis realized it needed to rethink how it identifies and supports struggling students. With help from the University of West Alabama and the GRAD Partnership, in 2022 the school began implementing a student success system — an approach in which teams meet regularly to review student data and identify those who need extra support.
The teams consist of teachers, administrators, counselors and coaches. Together, they look at students’ attendance, behavior, grades and existing school connections. Research shows that these data points are highly predictive of whether a student will graduate on time. Reviewing this data on a regular basis helps the student success teams connect struggling students with extra support such as mentoring, tutoring or counseling.
The mentorship program has been key to the school’s efforts to reengage students. Weekly meetings between mentors and mentees ensure that the students struggling most have someone at school who they can talk to and trust — no small thing for students who may otherwise feel isolated.
These relationships also help the school. Adults gain a deeper understanding of the challenges students are facing and can better identify the solutions that might be most helpful. For example, students have opened up about struggles with anxiety and depression. The school is able to ensure these students receive counseling services and get help accessing mental health care.
Demopolis administrators say the real-time data collection and schoolwide mentoring program has been key to bringing its rate of chronic absenteeism down. From the 2021-22 school year to the 2022-23 school year, the school’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped 8 percentage points. These results are in line with those from the broader GRAD Partnership cohort of nearly 50 middle and high schools. After one year of implementing student success systems, nearly every school saw reductions in chronic absenteeism and course failure rates.
Rebuilding students’ relationships with peers and adults at school is more urgent than ever. It’s time more schools — urban, suburban and rural — prioritized strengthening connections with and among students. As Demopolis and other GRAD Partnership schools show, doing so is not separate from academic recovery, but a prerequisite for it.
Robert Balfanz is director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Terina Gantt is the principal of Demopolis High School in Demopolis, Alabama.
