Strengthening Schools by Strengthening Families

Not surprisingly, these are the same districts with the greatest levels of chronic absenteeism in the early
grades. And these problems are substantial. According to our analysis of city schools’ attendance data:
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Last year, in 12 of New York City’s 32 school districts, well over 25 percent of primary school
children were chronically absent from school, missing more than 10 percent of the school year.
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In five of these districts, fully 30 percent of primary school children, kindergarten through fifth
grade, were chronically absent.
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In six of these districts, between 8 and 11 percent of primary school children missed 38 or more
days of school during the 2007/2008 school year.
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And in 123 individual New York City primary schools, at least 30 percent of the children were
chronically absent.
Notably, not every school in these districts has this problem. Some have learned how to reduce
absenteeism. Others work with community-based organizations to reach out to families, to find
resources to help them, or to seek intervention when problems are dire.
This research project began as an effort to determine whether community organizations and the city’s
public schools could work together to ease the burden on the city’s child welfare system, which was
swamped by reports of suspected abuse or neglect after the much publicized murder of Nixzmary
Brown in early 2006. New York City experienced a 25 percent increase in reports of abuse and neglect
from 2005 to 2007. By far the most substantial increase came from educational personnel. Today,
reports from schools continue to come in at a historically rapid pace.
Many of these reports are filed because of excessive absenteeism in the early grades, which can be
defined by authorities as “educational neglect.”
We soon learned of research currently underway in other U.S. cities that reveals associations between
early-grade chronic absenteeism and poverty, on the one hand, and children’s poor educational
achievement on the other. With this knowledge, we decided to assess the degree of chronic
absenteeism in the early grades in New York City—and to explore effective school- and communitybased
counter strategies that might benefit families while improving attendance.
We wanted to see if efforts to build close working relationships between community-based
organizations and schools might serve a dual purpose: stronger families and higher levels of student
achievement in the schools.
We found notable efforts in various neighborhoods, ranging from the all-inclusive “community
schools,” with a wide range of social services, to more targeted programs that offer roving social
workers to assist with behavior issues or family problems. Some of these efforts are designed to address
absenteeism directly, while others are geared more toward providing mental health care or some other
type of family support that can prevent a severe family crisis.
Strong research has found that chronic absenteeism among primary school children is often associated
with “poverty, teenage motherhood, single motherhood, low maternal education, welfare, maternal
unemployment, food insecurity, poor maternal health and multiple siblings.” 2 The authors of a recent
study, Hedy Chang and Marajosé Romero, found that rates of chronic absenteeism “jumped significantly
once families were confronted with three or more risks . . . Multiple risks were most commonly found
among children living in poverty, from a racial/ethnic minority group or in poor health.”
In the following pages, we provide data on the full extent of early-grade chronic absenteeism in New
York and identify the neighborhoods and schools most affected. We also provide data on chronic
absenteeism in middle schools: In 96 of the city’s 366 middle schools, more than 30 percent of
1 This is a conservative estimate based on the number of children interacting with child protective services, preventive services and foster care,
and accounts for the duplication of the substantial number of children who interact with more than one of these systems.
2 Chang and Romero, “Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades,”
National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University, September 2008. Page 14.
In many
neighborhoods,
the challenges
of child and
family poverty
are immense,
and problems
in school
overlap directly
with problems
at home.
3