At first glance, the Back 2 School Bash looked like Atlanta Public School’s version of DragonCon.
Over 12,000 families milled around the Georgia World Congress Center’s convention floor on July 22 to collect free school supplies and haircuts, health screenings for kids, and explore a host of exhibitions. Much of the festivities were aimed at promoting “Day One,” the district’s newly branded name for the first day of school on Aug. 1.
But despite the district’s efforts, only 38,800 of its 49,482 enrolled students—78.4%—showed up on Day One. A month later, the average daily attendance rate had increased to 92.6%. Even so, education advocates are concerned that chronic absenteeism, which spiked with the onset of COVID-19, isn’t going away.
“The problem has gotten significantly worse in the post-pandemic era,” said Lori Miller, executive director of the Truancy Intervention Project Georgia, a nonprofit that aims to reduce chronic absenteeism, which means a student misses 10% or more of school days, or about three and a half weeks.
“I think it’s a huge issue for Atlanta, but also particularly in Fulton County, DeKalb County, and places where children are living far below the poverty line,” Miller said.
A concerning problem
The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented disruption to the U.S. education system, causing student absenteeism to spike. The conventional wisdom was that kids would return to the classroom in numbers similar to pre-2020 levels as restrictions fell away.
But about one-quarter of Georgia students (24.4%) qualified as chronically absent during the 2021-2022 school year, when students returned to the classroom. Nearly every school in Georgia had an “unacceptable” attendance rating under current state standards, where more than 15% of their students are absent for over 15 days.
Atlanta Public Schools’ numbers are even more alarming. In 2019, before the pandemic, the chronic…
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