In the wake of the pandemic, school districts in Maine are still trying to get students back in the classroom five days a week.
Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in western Maine has instituted a model program that appears to be getting kids back in class.
Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 18 or more days in a school year. Here, it shot up to more than 50 percent after the pandemic. It’s now down to just over 30 percent.
And for students like Julie Button, there have been more tangible changes.
“People have stopped bullying me as much,” Button said.
Button, now a junior in the automotive technology program, said it was hard to get out of bed in the morning when she was a freshman, so she missed a lot of school. But things are better now.
“I had a friend who told me that in 7th grade people would talk about me a lot and what I wore. But they stopped because they thought I was confident. I had someone tell me they were inspired by me,” she said.
Freshmen have become the focus of a model program at Oxford Hills called “Building Assets, Reducing Risks” or BARR. It’s designed to help teachers connect with students in ways they might not have been able to in class, make regular communications with students’ families, and even go to their homes.
“We do home visits,” said Alicia Sadler, dean of students. “It can sometimes be the most impactful intervention we can provide. We tell them, ‘We’re here because we care.’”
Sadler said among the barriers that keep 9th graders out of school are anxiety and depression, instability at home, food insecurity and transportation.
“We have families that I communicate with on a daily basis. And families that I have a challenge communicating with, that might warrant a home visit to talk with the family about what level of support we can provide, not just to the student but to the family,” she said.
School officials say before BARR was implemented 70 percent of freshmen earned six credits their first year of high school, and data suggested those students were more likely to graduate on time. Since BARR was started students earning six credits their freshman year has climbed to 90 percent — evidence, administrators say, they are coming to school.
But other schools are not faring so well. The state reports that 27 percent of Maine students were chronically absent last year.
It’s a nationwide issue, according to Dr. Tom Swiderski, research associate for education policy at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
“You also see it occurring across all localities within a district in a state. It’s not urban or rural. It’s happening in all of them,” Swiderski said.
And Swiderski said each year that a student is chronically absent makes it that much harder for them to recover.
“By adding up those absences over time and showing that this number of students are experiencing 100 absences or more over 3 years, which we didn’t see before the pandemic. Each year that this problem keeps going makes it harder to recover because students are experiencing this cumulatively,” he said.
For junior Julie Button, school is less a place to be avoided on bad days now and more of a bridge to her next life chapter.
“When I get out of school I would like to work in a garage,” Button said. “I heard you can make big bucks doing that.”
The BARR model isn’t new. It has been in Maine schools on a limited scale for 15 years. Now, nearly 100 schools in Maine are using the BARR model with success, and the state has won approval for an extension of federal funding to keep BARR support mechanisms in those schools for another year.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
