The California Department of Education (CDE) recently recognized six Riverside County school districts for what the state considers “exemplary practices” to reduce chronic absenteeism and improve student attendance rates.
“School attendance improvement programs are a critical tool to have children back in the classroom, which is an important part of academic success and social-emotional well-being, especially for our most vulnerable students,” State Superintendent Tony Thurmond said in a release announcing the 19 award recipients.
Students who miss 10% or more of the academic year, or 18 days, for any reason are considered chronically absent. And while chronic absenteeism impacts school districts financially — much of their funding is based on average daily attendance — all of the administrators who spoke with The Riverside Record said the importance of attendance was much deeper than that.
“The system and structure of public school sets kids up for success outside of school,” Melinda Conde, director of student services at Menifee Union School District, said. “Even if you remove the academic lens, just learning how to be a part of a community and society as a whole is so important.”
Along with setting up students for future success academically and socially, schools also provide students with resources that they might otherwise not be able to access.
“The’re not accessing meals, they’re not accessing counseling, they’re not accessing just the social aspects that come with being in school,” Courtney Hall, executive director of student, community and personnel support at San Jacinto Unified School District, said. “They’re not accessing safe places or adults that they can trust if they are having issues at home, so there’s a whole spectrum of services that they are missing out on when they’re not in our schools.”
Along with San Jacinto Unified and Beaumont Unified, the state also recognized Corona-Norco Unified School District, Menifee Union School District, Riverside Unified School District and Val Verde Unified School District.
According to Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an independent, non-partisan research center led by faculty directors at universities across the state, when 20% or more of students in a school are chronically absent, the educational experience of all students is negatively impacted.
And while the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has once again fallen below 20% for the first time since 2019, the average across Riverside County remains well above that at 27%.
Covid’s lasting impact
Prior to the pandemic, the statewide chronic absenteeism rate was sitting at roughly 10%, according to the California School Dashboard. Three years later, in the 2021-2022 school year, the rate had skyrocketed to 30%.
In Riverside County, the average rate of chronic absenteeism went from just under 14% in the 2018-2019 school year to nearly 38% in the 2021-2022 school year.
“We were doing so well prior to Covid,” Steve Coehlo, director of student child welfare and attendance student services at Val Verde Unified School District, said. “So once Covid hit, what happened, right? And everyone’s trying to answer that question.”
Prior to the pandemic, Val Verde Unified had a chronic absenteeism rate of 8.3%, but after the pandemic, it jumped to 35%, meaning more than a third of the district’s students were considered chronically absent.
For Coehlo, there were a number of reasons the district’s rate of chronic absenteeism increased so dramatically, including students leaving the district during the pandemic without being unenrolled, the normalization of remote learning and the messaging around keeping students at home at even the slightest hint of illness.
“Parents, especially at the elementaries, they’re OK keeping the kids at home for sniffles,” he said. “And we didn’t help the cause either at the beginning [when schools reopened] when we said that if they have sniffles or a sore throat that they have to stay home, so we promoted that.”
Bobbi Burnett, director of student services at Beaumont Unified School District, said they also had to go through a re-education campaign following the pandemic with parents and educators about what constitutes an illness that requires a student to stay home.
“During Covid, we were really, you know, analyzing fever and the contagious nature of illnesses,” she said. “And I think after Covid, we had to kind of recalibrate the understanding of when we can send kids to school.”
Prior to the pandemic, Beaumont Unified had a chronic absenteeism rate of just under 10%. After the pandemic, that rate increased to 32%.
“Students coming back to school were very anxious,” Conde said. “And it was not only what people would assume, you know, anxiety to look like, but it was immobilizing.”
Prior to the pandemic, Menifee Union, which serves students in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade, had a chronic absenteeism rate of just under the state average of 10%, but by the 2021-2022 school year, the rate was just shy of the state average of 30%.
Another issue Conde said the district had to tackle was helping families understand what it meant to be educated in a public school system and the importance of in-person attendance. But she wasn’t the only one.
“Trying to re-engage students was really complicated and difficult,” Crystal Lopez Carroll, instructional support coordinator at Corona-Norco Unified School District, said. “We came back to school part-time, and we were still having all of these restrictions, and so kids were just really not feeling connected.”
In 2019, Corona-Norco Unified had a chronic absenteeism rate of 5.3%, the lowest in the county, but by 2022, that number grew to 21.8%. In 2023, it was still sitting at 20%. Last year, Conde’s first with the district, the rate dropped to 12.6%.
“We have a really strong multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) that the district has been working on for a number of years to make sure that schools are safe and supportive for kids,” she said. “Every school has an MTSS site team that actually pulls data around attendance, discipline, grades and puts that all together, and they identify kids [who might need additional support].”
Better data, better results
Across all six of the recognized Riverside County districts, access to high-quality, accurate data was a crucial step in tackling chronic absenteeism.
At Beaumont Unified, Burnett said one of the biggest successes has been in sharing weekly data across the district in a way that allows individual schools to make adjustments to their site plans to address the specific needs of their students.
“I think what’s been really important is just the constant analysis of data,” she said.
Ayala said Riverside Unified, which has a student population more than three times larger than Beaumont Unified, takes its data analysis a step further.
“Looking at our local data, we can analyze and determine the reasons for kids missing school for a district like ours,” Raul Ayala, director of pupil services at Riverside Unified School District, said. “And we’re a large district, with over 38,000 students.”
In 2019, Riverside Unified had a chronic absenteeism rate of just under the state average of 10%. In 2022, that number jumped to 28.3% before starting to come back down in 2023 with a rate of 23.7%. In 2024, the district fell back below the 20% threshold to 18.8%.
“We’re always looking at the data and reviewing what was done and what has worked,” Ayala said. “It’s an all-in effort to get kids to attend.”
That data includes both daily attendance data to identify individual students who might be at danger of becoming chronically absent as well as historical data to determine district trends in absenteeism.
“We know that our highest absenteeism rates are when kids enter the system and when kids leave the system,” he said. “So, [transitional kindergarten] through third grade and our juniors and seniors [in high school].”
In an effort to address these issues, Ayala said the district had implemented 20-day challenges that focus on the days surrounding longer break periods such as spring and winter breaks, offering students incentives to come to school during what are typically high absenteeism days. It’s a tactic being used across the six recognized districts.
“We looked at days where there was a very high absenteeism, the prior school year, and then that school day, we would do an activity that was fun to get kids into the school,” Conde said. “One principal took water balloons, and every kid that walked through the door, they got to pelt him with a water balloon.”
Conde said the district also implemented a number of fun challenges for students, like its no-absence November push to get attendance rates up in a month that generally sees a higher number of absences.
At San Jacinto Unified, Hall said the district takes a holistic approach to addressing chronic absenteeism, but also uses data to customize priorities for different student populations based on their specific needs.
“There’s a good amount of money in our [Local Control and Accountability Plan] reserved for our enrichment activities for African American students, because they were in the red for attendance and behaviors and academics,” she said as an example. “And so we knew that we really need to do a bit more for them.”
In 2019, San Jacinto Unified had a chronic absenteeism rate of 8.4%, which spiked to 26.2% in 2022 before dropping to 21.4% in 2023 and 15.9% in 2024.
Hall said that while a lot of the activities and support provided to student populations with higher chronic absenteeism are not directly tied to attendance, they often end up improving attendance as students become more involved in their school and academic careers.
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Understanding the root cause
The administrators said accurate data was crucial to understanding overall trends and pinpointing where an issue might exist, but also acknowledged that the data is often lacking important context that can only be gotten through making contact with students and their guardians.
“Our real guiding principle is to get engaged and find out what is the reason you’re not coming to school,” Carroll said. “What are those barriers that seem to be keeping you from being able to get to school on a regular basis?”
Carroll said Corona-Norco Unified’s team of two social workers, the school nurse, a counselor and the district attorney all work together to touch base with students and their families to find out why they’re not at school.
“And then we try to solve that problem as a group with all the resources that we have at the table,” she said.
One way Val Verde Unified is meeting some of those needs, Coehlo said, was through its community school and its community center that has a laundromat, a community closet and health clinic to provide services to students and families in the district.
“We’re trying to take those barriers out by building these community centers,” he said.
It’s work that Conde is also doing at Menifee Union, where she said many of the barriers students face when it comes to attendance have gone back to those experienced prior to the pandemic, including housing and food insecurity and the myriad issues that accompany those challenges.
“One family couldn’t get tires on their car, so we pounded the pavement to get tires on the family’s car so they could drive their kids to school,” she said.
Conde, who said her entire role is to support families, said that sometimes that looks like getting other members of the community involved. Regardless of the support needed, Conde said ensuring that the school is coming to families with empathy rather than sympathy is key.
“It’s always ensuring that you’re checking your biases at the door and making sure that what you’re doing is supporting kids in getting to school,” Conde said. “Your judgment about what the parents are doing is none of your business.”
All of this work is predicated on a district’s ability to build strong relationships with students and families, which Burnett said was Beaumont Unified’s “number one” strategy.
“That has been the focal point of our teaching and our tools,” she said.
One way the district is doing that is through non-contigent attention and awards, meaning that all students are given the attention they need to build relationships with peers, teachers and other school administrators.
“Just really giving every child acknowledgement, seeing them for who they are, learning about them and creating that space where they feel a connection,” Burnett said. “In addition to that, we are a proud advocate of restorative practices.”
At Beaumont Unified, that means reaching out to parents and guardians to figure out why students are not attending school and getting them the services they need first instead of immediately seeking out a more punitive response to chronic absenteeism.
“Beaumont believes that good attendance begins and ends with a healthy school climate and culture,” Burnett said. “So if there’s anything that you can do in your school buildings to create that, kids are going to show up, adults are going to show up and they’re going to be happy, they’re going to be healthy, and they’re going to be able to engage in healthy relationships.”
It also means changing the way the district talks about absenteeism and how it welcomes back students after a prolonged period of absence.
“Saying, ‘I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome back. We missed you,’ that changes children’s perception,” Burnett said. “And that work is so important.”
It takes a village
And while all school districts talked about the importance of data and understanding root causes, the biggest impact to increasing attendance was buy-in at all levels, both in the district and the community.
“You really need all hands on deck,” Ayala said. “How do we enact site attendance teams with guidance and support at the district level to do that and empower them to be creative and look for solutions and to review their plans?”
At Riverside Unified, Ayala said he credited the success the district has seen to the school board’s decision to invest in the necessary personnel to focus on attendance both at the district level and at each individual school. The same is true at Menifee Union, Conde said.
“Everybody was on board with increasing attendance, positive attendance, and not because it was for funding purposes, because at that time, we weren’t having chronic absenteeism counted against us,” Conde, who joined the district in the wake of the pandemic, said. “But we knew that getting kids in the seat was going to be the most beneficial thing for them moving forward out of the pandemic.”
For Conde, the first step was creating what she called an attendance playbook that not only defined the terms used when talking about attendance, but also the processes and the steps that the district would take in order to get students back into school.
“If something’s truly important, build the system, teach the system, communicate the system, and then support it so everybody can implement it,” she said. “It has to be a collective commitment that everybody is talking about attendance and understanding and communicating. That’s where we saw success, and we’re really, really proud.”
Burnett and Carroll also emphasized the importance of having a districtwide system and sticking to it. But for Coehlo, improving attendance goes beyond district boundaries.
“We’re all in it together,” he said, noting that there are a number of students who go between area districts. “We’re all in the same boat.”
For him, collaboration is key to really emphasizing the importance of getting students to school.
“We’re trying to talk to each other and work together to figure out how we are going to make this work,” he said. “We share the kids, so let’s share our ideas.”
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