After all the students had left for the day, a group of educators and Oregon state leaders Tuesday evening sat in the Waldo Middle School library in Salem.
Eight of them were placed at tables with writing utensils and blank postcards. Another dozen sat on either side of a large, pieced-together table in the center of the room, facing each other, with landline phones at every station.
Shortly after 5 p.m., they each began scribbling messages or lifting their receiver and dialing.
They were reaching out to local families to raise awareness about the importance of not missing school. Poor attendance is a pervasive, national issue that has only worsened since COVID-19. It’s especially bad in Oregon, and educators want to fix it, arguing simply that if kids aren’t at school, they can’t learn.
The Salem event was a one-time activity to see how something like this might go — one of many strategies the state and individual school districts are trying out as part of the state’s Every Day Matters campaign. State officials said a similar phone bank was taking place simultaneously in the Junction City School District north of Eugene.
Volunteers at Waldo this week called families whose kids’ attendance was up this fall compared to last year. Their goal? To thank them and encourage them to keep it up.
Gov. Tina Kotek was one of the many big hitters participating. Oregon Department of Education Director Charlene Williams, Salem-Keizer school board chair Cynthia Richardson and Superintendent Andrea Castañeda were also there.
Gov. Tina Kotek joins more than a dozen volunteers at Waldo Middle School in Salem, Ore., on Oct. 15, 2024, for a phone bank event to raise awareness around regular school attendance.
Natalie Pate / OPB
The library quickly filled with a thrum of voices as they each worked down a list of families to call.
“Are you doing something special to get him ready every day?” Kotek asked one parent.
The volunteers’ remarks overlapped one by one.
“We are looking forward to a wonderful school year…”
“...we appreciate you…”
“... do you have to give him a pep talk?...”
“...It’s just so very important … just being there, learning and in the classroom every day.”
Union leaders, district officials and other administrators had a friendly competition to see who could write the most postcards. Parents from the Latinx advocacy and support group Salem/Keizer Coalition for Equality spoke to families on the phone in Spanish, while a district administrator at the other end of the room wrote postcards in Russian.
“This is like trying to scoop up the ocean,” ODE director Williams told the volunteers. “But if we all continue to make these kinds of moves, we will see results and impact.”
Kids miss school for all kinds of reasons. Illness, weather, lack of transportation, caring for family members, social anxieties and bullying are just a handful. But we aren’t talking about the occasional missed day. The state is tracking chronic absenteeism, the rate of students missing at least 10% of the school year — about 18 days a year or roughly one missed day out of every two weeks of school.
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Absenteeism is a national problem, and it’s gone up significantly since the pandemic. Local and national statistics frequently show students with disabilities, those who have less money, children who speak languages other than English or who identify as Native American have the highest rates of absenteeism.
But Oregon’s overall absenteeism rates are especially bad. About 60% of schools had “high” or “extreme” absence problems before the pandemic, according to a report published earlier this year by Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center, which is part of the Johns Hopkins School of Education. That number has since jumped to 92% of Oregon schools.
The state’s latest data shows that in 2022-2023, about 38% of Oregon students were chronically absent. That number was even higher in Waldo’s district, Salem-Keizer Public Schools, the second-largest district in the state. There, 48% of the district’s roughly 38,000 students regularly missed school that same year. Salem-Keizer has the highest chronic absenteeism rate of Oregon’s 10 largest districts.
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Improving attendance rates is a crucial component of improving outcomes for Oregon’s young people.
Research shows regular attenders are more likely to graduate from high school in four years and score higher on standardized tests, which recent results show Oregon continues to significantly struggle with. Evidence also shows long-term effects for these kids, such as negative economic, educational and political engagement, later in life as a result of missing school chronically in the elementary- and middle-school years.
The state’s efforts in the Every Day Matters campaign are tailored to each district, an example of Oregon’s often-used “local approach.” As a whole, the campaign focuses on systemic support and advocacy to address barriers. Some districts have considered stricter or more punitive measures around truancy, while some have focused on shifting the community’s mindset — more carrot than stick.
“I hope that this kind of activity continues,” Williams said to the volunteers at Waldo Middle School as they hung up their phones and put down their pens at the end of the night. “We [know] you already have a lot on your plate as educators, as volunteers, as leaders, but every move you make to support students getting to school, it absolutely matters.”
Over an hour and a half, the volunteers made 265 calls.
“How did you feel when you missed school, to know when you showed back up that we missed you?” Williams asked. “That’s what we communicate to these families: You matter. We miss you. We see you, and when you’re not here, it makes a difference.”