By Becca Bass – Buffalo ReformED:
No one would contest the importance of students attending school regularly. In fact, countless studies make clear the correlation between academic performance and attendance. However, walking through the doors is certainly not enough. Efforts to improve the attendance rates in the Buffalo Public Schools should not exist separately from efforts to improve other student support services within the schools.
At Wednesday night’s Board of Education meeting, Associate Superintendent Will Keresztes presented on the District’s plan to improve attendance rates, an effort made more pressing by the dire attendance statistics recently released to the public. While the plan’s focus on calls home to parents, clearer consequences for poor attendance, and administrative incentives is a step in the right direction, it is insufficient. These efforts in isolation seem like a lamentable waste of energies and resources, because they fail to address the roots of the attendance problem and potentially serve to further alienate students.
Pushing students to go to school with the force of law and the threat of consequence alone will only promote more disruptive behaviors in the schools themselves. If the kids don’t want to be in school and they aren’t motivated to learn, getting them there isn’t enough.
Evidence from the professional world and schools alike indicate that relationships are key. Students need to feel known, recognized, and supported; this is not impossible to facilitate. For instance, what about restructuring homeroom time as small advisory group check-ins? Both faculty and staff could help lead these teams of students, preventing students from going unnoticed while facilitating feelings of connectedness within the school. Schools with high attendance rates are able to build a supportive culture of success that revolves around defined expectations, goals, and clear pathways to reaching those goals. If we provided teachers and principals at the building level with the autonomy and training necessary to create such a culture, it would go a long way in fostering the much sought after parental and community support.
Schools would also benefit by encouraging more positive relationships with parents, by making themselves more accessible. Many parents want to be involved at the building level, but may not have adequate access to transportation, or a schedule that permits them to drop in the school in the middle of the day. The District must address the needs of the population it serves, and finding creative ways to access and involve parents is key. These suggestions are not meant to minimize the difficulty of improving attendance. If anything, they point to the multifaceted approach that is necessary to address attendance.
The attendance rates are the perfect example of how intertwined the issues in the Buffalo Public Schools are. Attendance is closely tied with the social and emotional needs of students both in and out of school. It is reliant on quality of academic programming, and it is influenced by relationships with teachers and staff. Attendance is also related to issues of parental involvement and family structure, and it is connected to practical concerns such as arrangements with bus service providers.
So how can we better address all the facets of the attendance issue? How can we make the task more manageable?
The complexity of attendance interventions points to the need to de-bloat the system. The tremendous size of the District doesn’t provide many real benefits to the individual schools. The schools don’t extensively utilize partnerships and resource sharing within the District, and, if anything, the size of the district hurts the individual schools by making the system less personalized and responsive to their needs. In the same way that the size of the District can make it difficult to have needs heard and met, the size also makes it more challenging to adequately highlight smaller successes and accomplishments in individual schools. Furthermore, greater budget efficiency would be possible if administrators could respond more carefully to specific and realistic needs of schools. Board representatives could be more able to respond to their constituents, and it would be easier to foster a sense of school district and school building spirit if there were smaller sectors.
In the meeting, Dr. Keresztes spoke strongly about how attendance is a community issue, and that the BPS cannot carry it alone. However, the District as it stands now is commonly perceived as an inaccessible, behemoth system that the community often feels alienated from.
Though it may not be a catchall solution, there is precedent for decentralization efforts in other big city school districts, including New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Denver, and Cleveland. Conversations on decentralization have been going on for decades, as various local community groups through the 1970s and 80s pushed to have a greater voice in the functioning of the Buffalo Schools. Perhaps this could be a step towards real changes that we need to see in Buffalo.