The number of students regularly missing school across the country has soared since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A state report released last year found that more than a third of Oregon students are chronically absent, meaning they miss at least 10% of school days. State lawmakers removed truancy fines in 2021, but a new program in Umatilla County reintroduces them. As reported in the East Oregonian, the program uses a mix of family support, intervention from district officials and legal action with the goal of bringing students back to the classroom.
Heidi Sipe is the superintendent of the Umatilla School District. She joins us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The number of students regularly missing school across the country has soared since the COVID-19 pandemic. A state report released last year found that more than a third of Oregon students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days. State lawmakers removed truancy fines in 2021, but a new program in Umatilla County has reintroduced them. As reported in the East Oregonian, the program uses a mix of family supports, interventions from district officials and the possibility of legal action to bring students back to the classroom.
Heidi Sipe is a superintendent of the Umatilla School District. She joins us now. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Heidi Sipe: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What did absenteeism numbers look like in your district before the COVID-19 pandemic?
Sipe: Prior to COVID-19, we were really close to in line with the state average. For the state, prior to COVID, they were at 20.4. And in Umatilla, we were actually at 21.5. So very similar. Post-pandemic, in Umatilla for the ‘22/’23 year, we were up to 38.4, also pretty in line with the state average, because by that point the state was at 38.1. So very similar to the state averages in Umatilla.
Miller: And again, that’s meaning it was close to 40% of students district-wide missed at least 10% of school days?
Sipe: Correct, and unexcused absences. So excused absences for illness and other excusable areas aren’t included in that number.
Miller: You looked at this issue nationally as part of your work with the American Association of School Administrators. What did you learn about why students haven’t been returning to school?
Sipe: Well, I think there’s a little bit of a bigger context there, in that it’s not just that they aren’t attending school, but it’s also that they aren’t currently enrolled in school. And what brought this onto my radar, was actually a situation in Umatilla, very tragic, that a 7-year-old little girl in our community experienced a fentanyl overdose and thankfully, police were able to revive her. But I met with our police chief. I was furious because the school hadn’t been informed of the experience and we wanted to be able to offer counseling and support services for her and her family. But her answer took me by surprise. She said, you weren’t informed because she wasn’t enrolled in your school, had never been enrolled in your school and hasn’t been enrolled in any school district for quite some time. So this was a 7-year-old little girl in the wind.
I started to look at our 10-day drop data, which means if a student hasn’t attended for 10 school days, we’re required to drop them from enrollment. And there’s been some assumptions post-pandemic that students have been enrolled in online charters, or that they’re homeschooled, or they’re being privately schooled. But our internal records didn’t support that. In truth, many of the children 10-day dropped were also in the wind, and no one was watching over their education or perhaps their well being.
This started to be very alarming. So we started a process internally to report every 10-day drop student. If parents didn’t reply, complete with a self-addressed stamped envelope that we sent notice to, with either their homeschool registration notice, information about enrollment in a private or another public school, we started reporting all of those cases to CPS. And CPS closed every one of ‘em and told us they don’t address truancy.
It was at that point that I started reaching out across the nation and we formed the Oregon Hub for Learning 2025. And then I also reached out to our police chief at the time, Darla Huxel, and then the Umatilla County Judge Temple. We all started working together by looking at what was happening across the state and across the nation. And that’s sort of what really led us to this point.
Miller: Well, what reasons have you heard, the most common reasons for why a 7-year-old wouldn’t be enrolled in school at all, as you’re saying, not just not in your school but then going to somewhere else, but not getting any schooling. What are the reasons for that?
Sipe: We don’t know because those are the same people who aren’t enrolling, they’re not attending, they’re not participating in those things. Those are the same people who won’t pick up the phone or answer the door. So there’s a real risk that we have in Oregon and across the nation for children who are truly just not being monitored for their educational success and potentially for their well being. And it’s very concerning.
Miller: I mentioned that Oregon lawmakers ended truancy fines in 2021. What options have you had since then to get kids back to class?
Sipe: So the primary options that we’ve had since that fine has been removed are the same that we would need to have. It’s very clear, data across the nation and in Oregon, fines don’t work for attendance. And the goal of the work that we’re doing in Umatilla County is not ever to fine a family, that’s not the intent of this at all. The intention of the program is to show care and concern for students and their attendance when other safety nets for children and families have failed.
So that’s why the program focuses around what is effective. And that is parent effectiveness support, so making sure that families have everything they need to send their child to school, whether they need social supports for the family such as housing support, perhaps they have mental health or substance abuse concerns. The idea is to wrap around that family and make sure that they’re connected with as many different organizations as possible to help them, so that we can help the whole child and the whole family. And that’s what’s shown to be effective and that is the tool that we’ve had available.
The only piece that’s added is many of our families, when we offer those meetings or we offer support calls, they simply don’t respond or they won’t participate since the fine went away. And it’s really important to note that in Umatilla – this is my 18th year as the superintendent – I can only recall fining two families in that entire 18 years, because we had a Community Accountability Board. So again, we would offer all of these various supports. If families were not willing to participate in any of the wraparound services, then we would refer it to the Community Accountability Board.
The Community Accountability Board would work with the family, explain why attendance is such a priority for our community, offer additional support. And the only time a family would be fined is if they either wouldn’t work with the Community Accountability Board group or improve student attendance. And so that’s only happened that I can recall twice in 18 years. That’s what we’re trying to replicate. The fine should happen almost never, and only in cases where parents are willfully refusing both support and to improve attendance for their child. That’s what we’re really looking at, for fining.
It should happen very, very rarely because that’s really not effective. What is effective though is the threat of a fine to get families in the door and to help understand why it’s important. That’s all we’re trying to do with the fine. At least [it] requires families to respond to those letters because right now, a lot of them won’t.
Miller: A lot of our listeners on Facebook had thoughts about truancy and the best ways to address it.
Nicole Kent asked: “What changes can we make to get children to want to go to school? Why are they choosing not to attend? How can we best prepare students who are not making good progress in the typical brick and mortar school? I feel that forcing kids to go is not the solution. The students wanting to attend and looking forward to attending and learning is the key. How do we get there?”
She’s really focusing on, as she said at the beginning, changes to make children want to go to school. How do you think about that?
Sipe: I think that she has absolutely been echoing what we know to be true about attendance. She’s 100% correct. The presentation that all of the schools that are participating in our Learning 2025 Hub, which is our national work that we’re working together in Oregon – there’s about 15 districts participating from around the state – and our theme of this year is inviting students and families to attend and engage. The idea of requiring, the idea of forcing children to attend isn’t the route to take. And that’s not what any of us are attempting to do either.
So instead, we really have to think about what are the ways that we increase school connectedness? How do we support family engagement? How do we educate families with positive messaging campaigns about the importance of school? And how do we educate parents through the use of what are often called “nudge letters,” of, “hey, were you aware that your child has missed this much school?” And this is the potential impact of that because they’ve lost this many hours of instruction. “How can we help?”
Multiple research studies back this – parents have a tendency to underestimate their child’s actual attendance or absence rates by a factor of two. So a child who’s attended or missed 10 days of school over the last month, parents will guess that it was five days. So those nudge letters are important to help parents understand exactly how much school their child has missed, because life is busy and they aren’t necessarily tuning in to just quite how often that is without that type of letter and information.
Miller: We heard from Nancy Willard, who is an anti-bullying advocate and author, who we’ve had on the show before. She pointed out that on a 2022 Oregon Healthy Teen survey, roughly 19% of sixth graders, 25% of eighth graders and 15% of 11th graders reported that they had been bullied at school during the last month. A significant number of these young respondents reported that they did not feel safe at school.
It echoes something we got on Facebook. Theo Jasper said: “Feeling unsafe and unhelped by staff was a big contributing factor to me dropping out in my sophomore year. Oregon schools have so much work to do and their attendance numbers would improve if they were to just try working on these issues.”
How do you address these particular issues in the Umatilla School District? And more broadly, how do you think about the connection between bullying or a sense of student safety and attendance?
Sipe: Again, your listeners were spot on with their comments and everything that’s been researched. There’s a huge difference between bullying and reporting. I’ll focus specifically on Umatilla. So in the Umatilla School District, we focus heavily on making sure students are aware of the various mechanisms for reporting. We have the Safe Oregon Tip Line which many students will use to raise a flag if they have needs. And then we also try to make sure that we have supportive peer connections for students and that they have access to counselors as needed.
The Umatilla School District has a unique program where we will not only pay for traditional school counseling services like you often see in schools, but for any students or families that have needs beyond what our school counselors can address, we actually pay all the out of pocket expenses for those families, so that they have access to quality counseling services. Because sometimes just removing the situation of bullying isn’t enough for that student to really feel safe at school. They need counseling to support them through the trauma that they just experienced. We take that very seriously and we pay for that service for students.
So reporting is one thing; counseling is the other thing. We also have social-emotional learning programs throughout our district. We do various check-in surveys with students so that we’re not just asking for those final Oregon healthy teen summaries, for example, which are effective and helpful. But we need more interim check-ins with students so that we know, if a child’s raising a flag, perhaps they’re not reporting something. But if we can see that they’re pretty consistently telling us that they’re not happy at school, that’s a flag for us to check in on them and make sure that we’re working with families to understand what’s going on and that we can provide those services.
Addressing bullying is absolutely a commitment and priority, and something that needs to happen, and other safety concerns as well. There’s a lot of attention right now about false reports of violence in schools or hoaxes. That causes a lot of anxiety for kids and much of that is happening on social media. So again, we have to make sure that we’re providing supports and social emotional supports, counseling, both in schools and out of schools for students that are experiencing anxiety because of those things – all of that’s very valid.
The piece that all of the schools that are participating in the cohort across the state have agreed to start off with is trying to increase positive relationships. So one of the things that everyone is committed to doing this year is a relationship audit. Throughout each of the schools that are participating, everyone is doing a survey of staff that essentially says, here’s all of our student names for this school, this grade level or however they’re grouping that. Which students do you know by name and face, and that you know something about them? You know that they enjoy playing soccer, you know that their favorite video game is Minecraft, whatever it may be. Something that you have some sort of positive connection with that student. And then also the same thing for the families. Then we’re intentionally looking at who doesn’t get identified as having people who are connected to that student and/or parent. And how can we start working to build those connections? Because all of this work really comes down to relationships first.
Miller: Heidi Sipe, thanks very much.
Sipe: Thank you.
Miller: Heidi Sipe is the superintendent of the Umatilla School District.
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