Keeping kids in school during pandemic has been tough in Washington – at least 29,000 can’t be found
In October, when Daniella got a call from the Kent School District, she had been away from school for so long that she didn’t even know where to start to get back in.
A couple years ago, she felt out of place at a new high school and stopped going. She tried an alternative high school completion program run by the district called iGrad.
Then COVID-19 hit. Her dad, who paints and fixes up houses, was cobbling together small jobs and gone a lot. When around, he urged her to go to school, but she lost motivation and left iGrad in October 2020. She looked after the house. Months passed. “If schools were open, I feel like I could go back and actually talk to someone,” said the now-18-year-old. But they had long since gone remote.
Around the state and country, school districts have grappled with big enrollment drops and high numbers of disengaged students during the pandemic – to the extent that some, as far as educators know, have gone missing. They are not going to school anywhere at all.
“Disengagement isn’t a new problem, but this is a different kind of magnitude,” said Krissy Johnson, assistant director of attendance and engagement for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).
One measure – the percentage of students attending Washington public schools in a given spring who don’t return in the fall and aren’t on record as home schooling, in private school, in another state or receiving a diploma or GED – shows an increasingly troubling pattern. Excluding prekindergarten students, about 23,300 kids disappeared from sight in 2019, as best as educators can tell. (They noted reporting from early years is less reliable.) The year after COVID hit, the number of missing kids shot up to roughly 27,800, the following year more than 29,000.
Not known is whether any of the students have come back.
