School board data highlights increase in chronic absenteeism and out-of-school suspension days

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the School Board of Alachua County’s March 14 workshop, the board heard data on attendance rates, behavior, and core academics; board members were particularly concerned about increases in chronic absenteeism and out-of-school suspension days.

David Shelnutt, Director of Evaluation, Accountability, and Analytics, presented the ABC Trend report, the first under the new Superintendent and the first since April 2024. 

Click here for the full ABC Trend Report presentation

Attendance

Shelnutt presented various charts showing attendance rates by grade groups, schools, and race/ethnicity. Chronically absent students are those who miss 10% of the appropriate days, and one chart showed that over 52% of black students are chronically absent at every level. Only 1% of Asian students are chronically absent, with multi-racial students between 7% and 8%, Hispanic students between 15% and 17%, and white students between 18% and 22%.

Comparing last school year to this year, Shelnutt said the overall average attendance rates are very similar, but the number of chronically absent students has increased by 21% at the elementary level, 36% at the middle school level, and 49% at the high school level.

Behavior

Shelnutt moved on to behavior with charts showing disciplinary offenses by grade group, school, offenses, and race/ethnicity. The most common offense in elementary schools is “unsafe act,” and all levels list “classroom disruption” high on the list. Shelnutt said 86% of all students have no disciplinary events, 6% have one event, 6% have 2-5 events, and 2% have 6 or more events. 

Out-of-school suspension (OSS) days were broken down by grade group, with about half coming from middle school and about a quarter each from elementary and high schools, and by race/ethnicity, with almost 72% of OSS days being served by black students, about 15% by white students, over 7% by Hispanic students, and about 5% by multi-racial students. 

The number of disciplinary offenses is slightly higher this year at the elementary level, compared to last year, with fewer offenses at the middle school and high school levels. The number of OSS days is higher at both the elementary and middle school levels but lower in high school. 

Core academics

Moving on to Core Academics, Shelnutt said the district is using “K12 Lift,” which he called “an amazing tool [that] provides tremendous actionable data that administrators and teachers can use – and combining that with Data Dialogues, I think, is truly a grand slam in providing just an immense opportunity to reallocate resources, to find high needs, and to act immediately.”

Shelnutt said the average improvement from last year through PM2 for all students by grade has been positive except for fourth-grade English Language Arts (ELA), seventh-grade ELA, and fifth-grade math.

Grade-level results for the School Improvement (SI) and “fragile” schools can be found in the presentation at the link above. Notably, the chart for Rawlings Elementary indicates that zero percent of the school’s fourth-graders are expected to score a 3 at the end of the year (indicating adequate progress) in both ELA and math.

Shelnutt said principals can break down the data by student and by classroom and subject.

Superintendent Kamela Patton said Data Dialogues help line up the way the district uses the data it collects. In the Data Dialogues, principals share their data and their best practices with staff from other schools and district staff. Principals then go back to their own schools and do “data chats.” Patton added, “The purpose, really, of Data Dialogue is that you will know your school better than you’ve ever known your school,” and she said “every single principal” told her they knew their schools better after participating in the Data Dialogue. 

Patton said the Data Dialogues also help district staff see patterns and learn about issues at the school level. She mentioned one example in which a new hotline was added for late buses after district staff heard the issue mentioned by several principals. She said her question for every principal is what they’re doing differently, based on the data – not what they’ve been doing all year, but what they’re doing differently “from now to the rest of the year.”

Board discussion – behavior

After the presentation, Member Leanetta McNealy asked what is “specifically going on” with the high number of OSS days for black students. She said, “That graph, to me, is atrocious, when I look at how many students that look like me are not there… This has been occurring a long, long time. I need some explanations.”

Assistant Superintendent for Student Support Services Anntwanique Edwards said one reason the elementary disciplinary events have increased is that they’re reporting referrals more consistently, but she added, “We also have a much larger number of students who have come to school not ready for school, and the socialization concerns at the elementary school level are extreme.”

Edwards said her team has been trying “to build a system around behavior that everyone can follow, that is consistent, and we have the same understanding.” She said her team has randomly pulled referrals and then had everyone analyze them to compare the results and see where training is needed to make referrals more consistent across schools. 

Member Thomas Vu asked for more percentages in the attendance charts instead of just raw numbers, and Chair Sarah Rockwell echoed that on the behavior side because the color coding for the disciplinary offenses was based on raw numbers and not the percentage of students at each school. For example, there are only 81 middle school students with offenses at Hawthorne, but that represents 44% of the students, while Fort Clarke has 233 students with offenses, representing only 29% of the students. Rockwell said, “I feel like this kind of color coding, where it looks like the darker the blue, the worse it is, is kind of misleading when we’re not comparing similarly sized populations.”

Vu said he would also like to see OSS days broken down by school, and he challenged Patton’s description of the increase in elementary school OSS days as “a slight increase, you know, considering the changes in discipline policy and how we’re kind of refining it. But… I don’t see it as a slight increase; I see it as a major increase of Out of School Suspension days, year over year.” He pointed out that there were 55% more OSS days in K-5 this year over the same period in the last school year and a 25% increase in middle school OSS days, with fewer students.

Member Tina Certain asked how the board’s new defiance policy is affecting the OSS days, specifically whether “unsafe acts” is being used as a “catch-all”: “I’m not for pushing kids out of school… And I think we deal with students that have discipline issues, and I think we coach them up.” She also said it’s important to have “engaging lessons,” particularly in “our schools that serve large numbers of low-income students.” She added that staff members need more training in “how to interact with families… because… people have choices now.”

Certain said the district should not only focus on “the people who have choices and the means to be able to move and change” but also on families “who can’t just pick up and go,… [who] have to take what we give them. I think we, as an organization, need… to have the mindset that we’re going to do right by the people, even if we think that they got to take what we give them because they may not have the option [to move to a different school]… If we raise the achievement of those students that look like me and Dr. McNealy, it’s gonna lift our whole – not just our organizations, gonna lift communities, and it’ll take less resources to try to remediate if we do good instruction, I think, at the front end… We hear people say the work that they’re doing, but we have got to start making sure our inputs are driving positive student outcomes.”

Patton said, “One of those barriers is our instructional framework, our evaluation system here, and the tool we use is like backwards 25 years.” She said she wants to use Instructional Empowerment; she said it “costs money,” but she is hoping to negotiate a discount because the district hired someone who had worked there for nine years, so “we have an in-house expert.”

Board discussion: Core Academics

Moving on to discussion of the academic part of the presentation, Certain said she thinks it’s a problem that the district doesn’t have Professional Development days and can’t mandate attendance at training sessions. She said that when she worked in the private sector, she didn’t get a paycheck if she didn’t complete all the training, “and so I think we have to kind of change our mindset because in giving all of the liberty and latitude, we’re not seeing positive things for our students, and we can’t just blame families and we can’t just blame poverty.”

Patton said that’s because of the district’s contract with teachers, saying she’d “never seen [one] like it before. It’s okay, we can learn to live within it, but you go around that contract.” She looked at ACEA President Carmen Ward and said, “Don’t freak out” and said her plan to “go around the contract” was just to use planning days differently. She principals and teachers both get planning time, but “each school does whatever they want… If we… utilize these days correctly, you get a different result.” She said the district can provide training materials to be used in principal meetings, keeping each school aligned with district priorities.

Vu said he comes from a family that fled Vietnam and that he can relate to young children who don’t have much academic support at home and don’t know how to regulate their emotions: “That doesn’t mean students can’t learn, and the trend I’ve seen in just the last few years here is that we’re trying to give these kids a pass… We’re trying to say, ‘Your life’s really hard; let’s lower the bar for you.’ And if anything, we need to raise the bar for them; we need to expect more. Because if we lower the bar for them,… they’re not really reaching their potential.”

Vu said he wanted to “do away with the whole idea that we have flexible discipline, that we have different standards for students… We’re just really doing our kids a disservice, and we’re seeing that in the [data].”

Public comment

During public comment on the presentation, Carmen Ward said, “Unsafe acts are violence,… – that’s either fighting or eloping. It’s something that could cause physical harm; it is not defiance… The biggest problem we have is violence, and no amount of engagement keeps kids from fighting on the bus, rolling off the bus, and fighting at the school.” She said the district should look at how it’s supporting students who need more behavioral support, including alternative programs.

Former ACPS data analyst Taylor Gilfillan recommended adding a one-sheet summary of the “big takeaways” from the presentation. He also recommended more of a focus on whether actions are effective, as opposed to simply reporting that the action was done. He said the presentation for that day’s meeting was posted 20 minutes after the meeting started, which “feels disenfranchising to the public who want to… bring their thoughts and comments to the table.”

Referring to recent School Board meetings in which many members of the public spoke against the district’s guidance on how to engage with law enforcement (specifically ICE), Gilfillan asked whether the fear of immigration enforcement is leading to reduced attendance. Rockwell said, “The district does not keep data on students’ immigration statuses, so we can’t directly measure the impacts of federal changes to ICE on student attendance, but we have looked at the indirect measure. So even in the data that was presented today, we don’t see any differences in the attendance trends for our Hispanic community.” She said the district also doesn’t see any attendance difference in ESOL students.