On a recent autumn morning, attendance counselor Yazmin Arias greets kids at the gates of 135th Street Elementary School in Gardena, as she does every morning. But today is a special day.
As kids wearing nearly kid-sized backpacks file by, Arias hands each of them a red paper ticket. It is “Fun Friday,” and later, the kids who showed up to school on time will exchange these red tickets for a prize.
“A pencil eraser, sharpener – everything's happiness,” says Arias. “They're just happy to get anything.”
“Fun Friday” is part of the elementary school’s strategy to recover attendance, which plummeted during the pandemic here and districtwide. During the 2021-2022 school year, 40% of kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days.
Last school year, as part of the district’s iAttend program, administrators, principals and attendance counselors knocked on the doors of 9,000 families to coax them to campus. The effort is ongoing, and every so often, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho joins.
Days earlier, Carvalho – trailed by reporters – pulled up in a black SUV to the home of 135th Street Elementary School parent Deyse Morales. Her three school-aged kids missed 62 days of school last year.
LAUSD parent Deyse Morales’s three school-aged kids missed a third of school days last year. She says she struggles with transportation. Photo by Robin Estrin.
Carvalho wanted to help Morales. He told reporters, “We descend upon these families, connect with them, and we bring the resources with rapid solutions to address the issues facing these families and their students.”
But it’s attendance counselors like Arias who are working day in and day out – without the fanfare – to slowly turn the district’s attendance story around.
Families at 135th Street Elementary School are facing a lot of challenges, some of which are vestiges of the pandemic.
Schools in LAUSD were closed or operating on a hybrid basis for a year and a half. 135th Street Elementary School Principal Sherree Lewis-DeVaughn says it’s been hard to get kids back in the habit of going to school every day.
“At first, it was difficult. Our attendance was really, really bad,” says Lewis-Devaughn. “Some [students] wanted to stay on virtual learning because they became comfortable with learning from a device in the comfort of their home.”
Another habit that was hard for families to break was letting students stay home from school when they were mildly sick. During the pandemic, kids weren’t allowed on campus with any symptoms at all, and the district only reversed that policy at the start of this school year.
“After COVID, primary parents became very sensitive to anything health-related,” says Arias. “That’s the No. 1 barrier.”
But families at 135th Street Elementary and other low-income schools in the district are also up against barriers to attendance that long predate the pandemic.
Deyse Morales says she struggles daily with transportation. She doesn’t drive – and says her kids don’t feel safe on the city bus.
“It's hard for me to get a ride every morning for them. My budget, my money is low. I don't work. So sometimes I'm like, ‘You guys got to take the bus.’ But they don't want to, and I don't want them to miss school anymore.”
Arias says that for a lot of parents, work schedules get in the way. “I have a lot of parents who work at nighttime, and then in the morning, I'm the wake-up alarm, calling, calling, calling until they wake up.”
She says custody issues are also driving absences, especially on Mondays and Fridays. Parents tell her things like, “Oh, the dad wanted to pick them up a few days earlier. So then [the child] won't come because the father took them out of town.”
Arias has a lot of empathy for the parents. “It's hard for them to think about school when they have their survival needs that come first,” she says.
Despite the challenges, Arias has worked to turn the school’s attendance around. Last August, 19% of the kids at 135th Street were chronically absent. This August, that number dropped to 7%.
Arias attributes the success to two things. The first is incentivizing kids to attend school with prizes. On Fun Friday, Arias laid out a table with hundreds of pencils, folders, and fidget toys, which students picked over with great interest throughout the morning.
Arias carefully arranged attendance prizes for students at 135th Street Elementary School to choose from. Photo by Robin Estrin.
Arias’ other major attendance strategy is making meaningful and persistent connections with parents like Morales, who she’s worked with for several years.
“You have to understand that the problems are not going to go away just because we did one intervention, [or provided] one resource,” she says. “There's so many layers, so you have to listen to their story and kind of hand-hold.”
Just ahead of the tardy bell, Morales drops her youngest daughter off at the school. Morales has been applying for jobs, and Arias has something to help her – an armful of blazers and skirts in Morales’ size.
“This is a professional attire that was donated by our teacher,” she explains.
The suits are heavy, so Arias offers to deliver them to Morales’ home after school, along with a resume template that Morales can use in her job search.
From there, Arias hustles from the tardy line back to her office. She still needs to run her attendance report and call the parents of kids who didn’t show up to school today, to see what’s going on.
She says she loves her job but it also takes a toll on her.
“There's just so many requests. And there's one of me, so I guess the hardest part is understanding not being hard on myself. Sometimes I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I didn't get to this person, I didn't get to this person.’ But then I have to remember, ‘No, we'll take care of it tomorrow.’”
It’s a lot of work but her efforts are paying off. Just one example: Deyse Morales’ daughter has shown up to school at 135th Street Elementary almost every day this year.
Superintendent Carvalho says trends are shifting districtwide. “Average daily attendance is up, chronic absenteeism is down,” he told reporters gathered in Morales’s driveway.
LAUSD data from mid-October shows average daily attendance this school year is 94%. Last school year, Carvalho says it was 89%. As for chronic absenteeism, the district says the rate improved to 36.5% last school year, down from 40% during the 2021-2022 school year.