Show Notes
In this episode, Ellen Vorenkamp chats with Joe Musial, Cindy Cook, Jolia Hill, and Marvin Franklin about how Wayne RESA's Attendance Resource Team (ART) uses research and data to help combat chronic absenteeism, as well as challenges the pandemic has presented with respect to student attendance.
Length - 30 minutes
Transcript
Ellen Vorenkamp: Welcome. My name is Ellen Vorenkamp, and I am moderating this episode of Getting to the Core with Wayne RESA: Where Pedagogy meets Practice. In this episode, we will be examining the work of the Wayne RESA Attendance Resource Team. It is my pleasure to introduce the members of the team, beginning with Miss Jolia Hill, Dr. Cynthia Cook, Mr. Marvin Franklin, and Dr. Joseph Musial. Greetings, and thank you for being here with us. Is it okay if I call you all by your first name?
Marvin Franklin: Fine by me.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Jolia, would you like to introduce yourself?
Jolia Hill: Sure. I’m Jolia Hill. I am a manager at Wayne RESA. Some of my responsibilities include supporting state and federal program directors such as Title I directors or folks who oversee 31A. I also work with homeless liaisons and their students, foster care liaisons and their students, to support the needs that they have in emergency situations and just making sure they have access to school and the resources needed to do school. And then, I also was blessed to be able to work with this amazing team the Attendance Resource Team, where we are here to support our schools and districts with getting to the core of going to school.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Yes, thank you so Jolia. Cynthia, would you like to introduce yourself?
Cynthia Cook: Sure, my name is Cindy Cook. I’m a school health consultant at Wayne RESA. Some of my work involves looking at the whole child and seeing how we can implement that in schools, as well as social emotional learning and health education: K12 comprehensive health education.
Ellen Vorenkamp: It's so necessary right now. Thank you, Cindy. Marvin, what about you?
Marvin Franklin: Hello everyone. Marvin Franklin, Ed Improvement Consultant. Some of my work primarily is centered around school improvement; helping schools get on the right track and help them get to a better place.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Awesome. Thank you, Marvin. And Joe?
Joseph Musial: Yeah, hi. Good morning, thanks, my name is Joe Musial, and I'm an assessment and evaluation consultant at Wayne RESA. A lot of my work is primarily focused on evaluating educational interventions that are occurring. Also, I’m evaluating numerous state and federal grants that we've had. I'm also serving as Vice President of the Michigan Education Research Association.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Thank you very much. Awesome group here, thank you guys very much for coming to be with us here today and share some information with our audience about the purpose and work of this Attendance Resource Team. So, I'm going to start with the first question just kind of set the stage: a year ago districts were pivoting to remote learning. Educators from across schools and districts in Wayne County raised concern of, shall we say, missing students; students who are no longer attending classes and as a result contact with those students have been lost. At that point it's my understanding that the Attendance Resource Team was initiated so tell us, Jolia, what is the purpose of the Wayne RESA Attendance Resource Team, and how does it impact chronic absenteeism here in Wayne County.
Jolia Hill: Thanks Ellen. Great question first of all, you know, I wonder if you know and the folks out there in Wayne County know that our Wayne County school districts and public school academies actually implement the compulsory attendance law firsthand so in other counties. The ISD or the RESA has a truancy officer or truancy department or an attendance department. Well, in Wayne County we don't have that. Our actual locals are working hard to make sure that families get students to school every day, all day. And so, with that the Attendance Resource Team works collaboratively with our local districts to identify resources and systems of support to help them implement the law at the local level, to make sure the kids are getting to school.
So, when a district determines that they've got a high level of absenteeism they reach out to us and ask for help and ask for assistance. So, the help and assistance can look anywhere from training staff, training those individuals who are the truancy officers or the engagement officers to assisting districts with identifying local level policies to heighten student attendance, improve student attendance… all the way to identifying Community partners to serve as an at-the-elbow partner to combat chronic absenteeism and Wayne County. So with this current health pandemic, looking at attendance, attendance is different, but combating chronic absentee, that's a completely different animal. So I’m proud to say that this resource team has looked at innovative ways to support chronic absenteeism in this new realm of attendance, remote attendance and virtual attendance.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Thank you, I was not aware, because, that fell on to the actual this whole reporting of the attendance actually fell on to the districts here in the in Wayne County. as opposed to having truancy officers. That's pretty interesting and it could explain the overwhelming-ness of this job and making sure that all of these policies and partnerships are really solid so that we can do what's best to really help those districts; do what's best for kids. I was not aware of that, so thank you for that.
Jolia Hill: Yeah, Ellen. You know, the thing that I think about is you know before all of us were in these roles our districts made a decision with our administration that they wanted to hold on to that role of serving as their own attendance officer truancy officers. So, we really serve as a support to those districts, as they do that.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Yeah, and I heard a couple of really key words there: collaboration, partnerships with other community members, and resources and really thinking about the policies. And how the Attendance Resource Team can help the school districts here in Wayne County with all of those different things and actions. So Joe, I’m wondering, then what specifically have you guys been able to do in terms of this this this team and helping the districts here in Wayne County to combat this?
Joseph Musial: Yeah, sure. So, about a year ago, when we went to the initial lockdown, our leadership had approached us and asked us to assemble and to, you know, to actually address this, you know, baptism by fire. So, during the, if you recall, during the actual shut down all of us were bombarded with numerous communications, PDFs, and a lot of states had begun to respond to the COVID issue impacting absenteeism. And what we found was that these documents for all intents and purposes were not that efficient and not that practical in terms of getting people to go through you know 100-page document. So, we took a different approach and we actually tapped our RESA consultants and district-wide educators who actually had experienced both at the classroom level and building level, implementing programs that either directly or indirectly address chronic absenteeism. And by chronic absenteeism, we're saying that the child misses about 10% or more of instruction. To the extent of the problem, a recent article in the Washington Post noted that, in the City of Detroit there are 3,000 children that they can account for. Which is a very alarming number. We don't have all the full data, yet, but we're concerned that it may rise between 5 to 15% in some districts. So, for example, we…through the expertise of our colleagues, I'll use nursing as an example. Beginning with asthma: a typical asthmatic child misses about on average 10 days of school per year, so our nursing consultants actually developed research-based methods and suggestions that can help schools counter the issue of the asthmatic child. And we were able to develop very you know evidence-based videos with references that last between 15 and 25 minutes. Our analytics have shown that if you go beyond 30 minutes with any type of educational electronic communication, that 30 minutes is too much in terms of viewership.
In addition to this I'll give you a current example that we're working on right now in real time our curriculum director Garden City, Dr Alex Nice is emerging to be a national leader and engagement. In fact, he has just completed his dissertation and published his book based on his research findings. And he actually will be sharing how his interventions actually countered and improved absenteeism based on the evidence base and based on his research. So, he'll be discussing that talking about his book as well as actually providing real-world data based on what he did. So again, ideally going forward we envision buildings, educational leaders actually going to our MIStreamNet where will be housing all these videos and they can actually share this with your staff in small chunks and actually consider doing some of these suggested interventions that are based on the best evidence to counter chronic absenteeism. And so, this is an ongoing process and we're doing multiple interventions, one of which our colleague Cindy Taraskiewicz shared her experience in Southwest Detroit. In Southwest Detroit for homelessness as an example, so that's kind of like in a nutshell, what we're working on.
Ellen Vorenkamp: So, it sounds like you're busy, number one, and it sounds like you're doing a lot of really at the classroom level and really helping the teachers in the classroom and the personnel within those buildings really think about what teachers are doing within the classroom to really engage kids and get them back into those classrooms so that they're wanting to learn and engaging in those learning processes that are going to help them. It also sounds like you're really trying to make sure that you're being very clear and concise with much of this information and not making some big, long programs but doing really short, concise, clear things to help with that collaboration. And I really like the fact that you're doing this, based on research, and that brings us to our next point. When we think about the research, and we think about some of the recent articles like you mentioned earlier. I know that there was one that was recently published by the Detroit Education Research Partnership and in it, they noticed that, even before the pandemic that students in Detroit as many as, more than half of the students in Detroit were considered to be chronically absent, which, as you stated before, means that they were missing up to 10% or more of the school year. And we know that other school districts within Wayne County are struggling with similar numbers and it's become even worse because of this COVID situation. So, I’m wondering if Cindy might be able to share with us some of the research that the Attendance Resource Team has engaged in and maybe explain these numbers are so high?
Cynthia Cook: Thank you, Ellen. One of the things we've looked at is the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model in our research and basically, you know… for those of you that know don't know the Whole Child - it's the CDC the health people and ASCD - the education people - coming together and talking about that. Do we need to be concerned about the academics? Absolutely, that's what schools are for, but we also need to be aware of the mental, physical, social emotional well-being of the child, also. And so with the 10 components of the whole child… what those 10 components are already available in schools, in most schools and what we would like to do is it would like to see as those components communicating with each other to find out what types of programming they're doing at the tier one level to reduce chronic absenteeism. And if we can get those 10 components communicating and sending consistent messages about the importance of attendance, then our kids are going to be healthy, safe, supported, engaged, and challenged. So that's what we've been working on, and one of the things, as Joe talked about, is looking at policy, processes, and practices, and making sure that our attendance policies are not punitive. You know, that we try to work with the family and the child in order to keep them really focusing again on that physical, social emotional well-being of the student and not just the academics. So, that's where a lot of our research has gone looking at tiered approaches, which I think Marvin is going to talk about and yeah, looking at the whole child.
Ellen Vorenkamp: I think it's really awesome that you guys - that's not a great word - but I think you guys have taken that approach and thinking about the whole child and not just about, you know, the child sitting in the seat, but what's entailed with that and what do we need to do to support that whole child. And bring them back to that learning environment where they can have that level of safety and have those other emotional and social needs met in a really meaningful way. And I love your three p's: the policy, the process and the practices and how those work together. I think they really, really come together. That collaboration piece, and that that way they can be intersecting to have that foundation…I think that's great and really that full frontal push to really ensure that these kids get back in and get the support that they need.
So, yeah let's talk to Martin now and find out, maybe some of your relevant findings and hear some personal experiences with this and some things that Marvin might have been able to do within his own context as a building principal. Welcome.
Marvin Franklin: Hello everybody. So, the first thing I'll say is the root causes of chronic absenteeism, especially this year, are pervasive and extremely complex to solve. Many of our districts and schools pulling out all the stops and teachers and principals are doing drive-bys to try to get kids back in school. And what we would tend to say what chronic absenteeism collects prior to the pandemic, we definitely have to expand as we talked about this year. So there are high school kids that have made adult decisions to work instead of go to school, to help support their families due to family crises. There are middle school kids who are doing the same. And there are elementary children who are watching their brothers and sisters and helping their brothers and sisters as young as the fourth and fifth grade, making sure that they get done while their parents are working during these challenging times.
At the school level, attendance teams report that teachers with the most…the best strategy to capture those kids are the one teachers that make great relationship bonds with their kids. And I'd like to break it and put it in a big nice pretty bowl but that's basically it's it: those teachers that make those great connections outside of just school. They really are the ones that yield the best results. Harvard University has a group called Making Caring Common Project, which illustrates the importance of relationships. It has developed a highly effective resource called the Relationship Mapping and we have introduced that to some of our Wayne County schools as well. And it has had tremendous success to identify those kids that don't have those relationships with an adult in the building and to try to find other ways to capture those kids to make sure that they're logging on. This relationship mapping provides data to the school to identify those who are not connected with those adults and they make a necessary adjustment to put positive connections together. And it is one of the things. There's also Attendance Works that's another resource that districts are leaning on. There's a lot of data and research, as well as ideas to try to improve getting kids in school.
Addressing chronic absenteeism begins, developing the best way to do it is by developing a multi-tiered system approach. And with three tiers of support, providing everyone with an identified core staple of supports. It's also called universal supports. These typically include some level of relational connections to the students that make school a place where kids absolutely, positively want to be.
The second tier is geared for smaller group of students that need a little more targeted support in those conversations between the school and not just those kids but the families. This is a group of students who have past history of moderate chronic absenteeism or they may have a risk factors something like what Joe mentioned as asthma or in our area sickle-cell anemia those types of things, and needing a higher level of more individualized support, in addition to those universal supports that I just mentioned.
Now the third tier the most intensive one is what we are at right now with not just chronic absenteeism but, in the middle of a pandemic. And this is what I speak to many principles right now and teachers, they are on high alert as it relates to developing those relationships. and getting in the car and driving to those families and finding out at the core what they need. And what I've seen and heard more than anything is…school is like Cindy said earlier - Dr. Cook I’m sorry we've been working too close together so she knows that I mean all the respect in the world - but they've figured out like what she said that component has one of the missing components. You've got to make those connections with those children. If you don't make those connections, they will find other things that are more important, which at this level during the pandemic is survival. So, this looks like about four or more days a month, though, that tier three that highest group of absence. And that's a lot. And the kids are missing a lot more than not logging on not for that amount of time. Many students in Wayne County and across America have exceeded this threshold. The typical risk factors are definitely expanded and we're trying to make sure that we get a hold on those.
Ellen Vorenkamp: You bring up some really great points and that whole piece about the relationships. I just would like to reiterate that, for our listeners and building those relationships with our students is huge. And I really like the fact that you brought in the families. That sometimes this isn't just a child issue; this is a family issue and therefore becomes a community issue which really takes us back to that Whole Child Model that Cindy - Dr Cook -was talking to us about. So, awesome. You have some great resources in there for us also Marvin. Thank you, I appreciate that. I think our listeners, will be able to take advantage of those.
I'd like to ask all of you to unmute and just if there's anything else anybody would like to add to our discussion if there any other relevant resources that any of you would like to share. Where can people find out a little bit more about your team and the work that you've been doing? And just open up the floor.
Cynthia Cook: The Whole Child Model can be looked at on the either the CDC website or the ASCD website to get a better understanding of how those pieces and parts work together to make sure that those kids are engaged. And I just want to reiterate again what Marvin said, is the importance of those relationships in school and out of school and getting Community members to understand the importance of attendance also so we can be sending consistent messages to kids.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Thank you.
Joseph Musial: You know the other point that we collectively realize, too, that as if a child is not in school, they are at risk for dropping out of school and the outcomes are very, very poor when a child drops out of school in terms of the whole prison pipeline and other adverse events, too.
The other issues that that are going to take many, many more people to table includes bandwidth. Does the child have adequate bandwidth by which to participate from distance learning? And Marvin also spoke to about the whole tier three where that's really the one-on-one, the intense interventions, too. And we also realize too that many of the children in Wayne County have experienced, you know, serious illness and death, with their elders and their family. And sometimes grandparents may actually have to take over the role of the parents, too. So, this is a very multi-faceted issue, too. And going forward again all of our work that we're doing with our colleagues will be placed on MIStreamNet and there'll be a strong robust library, by which our educators can actually access.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Thank you. You know one thing that just sort of is resonating with me as I’m listening, and this comes from my own ignorance, and so thank you very much for helping me see some more and understand a little bit better about this. But when I think of chronic absenteeism, I'm always thinking of like high school kids, but we're not talking just about high school kids here, are we? We’re talking about K12; we're talking about kids all throughout the system, and I think I think that's a sort of, “Aha!” I just had that that moment, like even listening to Marvin and all of you talk about elementary school kids being the parent in the house, maybe helping younger brothers and sisters and I’m sitting here thinking, “Wow!” I just kind of always thought it was a high school issue.
Cynthia Cook: That's a really good point, Ellen. When we look at kindergarten first grade even missing two days a month puts them in the category of absenteeism chronic absenteeism. So, and it is starting to affect kids in the kindergarten, first grade, second grade… so much so that they're not reading by third grade, which is you know, one of the things that we're looking for. So, yes, we do have to worry about absenteeism in the younger grades also.
Jolia Hill: You know Cindy brings up a great point. It's in these multi-tiered systems of support. You know, you've got to think about… look at the needs of your families look at the issues that your students are dealing with and try to develop systems that meet the kids where they are. Every family and every kid is going through something different. One approach that can hit all kids that are having an issue with is attendance. So it's on us as adults, as partners, as educators, as a community to identified different innovative ways to ensure that kids have an opportunity to learn. And I think that's a key phrase: Giving kids an opportunity to learn looks different according to the needs of a family and the issues that our kids are dealing with. So that's what we're hoping to do as an Attendance Resource Team is to pull together different strategies. Because there's no reason to reinvent the wheel if somebody's doing it out there, if it's easy to emulate, it's easy to turn around and do it, and put it in the context of your backyard. So, we hope that we can help our districts do that with the modules that Joe was talking about, and with the multi-tiered systems of support Marvin spoke about.
Ellen Vorenkamp: Awesome. Last word, Marvin.
Marvin Franklin: I just want to say how important it is for us to stay on top of this…make sure our kids are getting in. If we just look at the data for African American males and reading by the third and the fourth grade and the chronic absenteeism challenge. They've written many articles about those boys being suspended from preschool. And like Dr. Cook just mentioned: two days! So, if the black boys, African American males are not getting to those points by the fourth grade and we're suspending them from school, you know, for things that maybe we could find other ways to develop…This is really a prime opportunity. You know, to turn in a little different spin on it. The pandemic has definitely shown us that we've got to find a better way to do what we've been doing. Make sure that we're educating our kids and we're including all of the challenges and understanding, where they're coming from so that we can do a much better job to make a better State of Michigan.
Ellen Vorenkamp: So well said. Let's make lemonade out of this lemon and let's do what's best for kids. Thank you all so very much for joining us today and helping us get to the core of this really important topic. We really appreciate you and all the work that you're doing. And thank you for joining us.
Cynthia Cook: Thank you, Ellen.
