SALEM, MA — Salem Superintendent Steve Zrike touted the district’s very public campaign against chronic absenteeism amid several broadcast news stories on its ongoing efforts and, apparently, some pushback from families he allowed may be “exhausted by it.”
“I appreciate the feedback,” he said in defending the campaign during his Facebook Live session on Wednesday as another report on the schools’ efforts was set to air on WCVB-TV during that evening’s newscast. “But it is important for us to communicate this because the stakes are so high.”
The district said in another broadcast report that the effort is showing results with chronic absenteeism (defined as 10 percent of the school year or more, or 18 days absent per year) dropping from 23 percent of students at Collins Middle School two years ago to the “low-teens” in the most recent numbers.
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“We are committed to making sure that we are paying attention to this,” Zrike said. “Research is really, really clear about the negative consequences of chronic absenteeism. That is very correlated with lower achievement rates whether you use MCAS, STAR, grades, any type of achievement data.
“It’s very clear that chronic absenteeism impacts performance.”
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Zrike said the level of missed schools is shown to result in lower grades, higher dropout rates and lesser engagement from those students while in school.
“We totally understand that there are going to be issues with students getting sick,” Zrike said. “And we don’t want sick kids to come to school. But other than that we want students to be here every day, all day. If there has to be an appointment during the day we want the child to return to school, if possible, before the end of the day.
“We want to maximize the precious time we have with young people. We cannot do the work that we do — we have very talented educators — if kids are not in school every day.”
He said the campaign and outreach to families of children who often miss school “is not to be punitive” or to label those families as “bad parents” but is meant to find out why kids are absent and to gain feedback about making school more engaging so students will be more excited about coming to the classroom.
(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)
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