Kendrick Nichols has a tough job.
As one of five attendance coaches for Santa Fe Public Schools, he is responsible for regularly checking in with school staff, conducting home visits, and contacting students and their families to ensure they are attending school regularly.
How many students? Nichols and his colleagues are each responsible for a caseload of about 2,000 students across the district. Nichols’ area of responsibility includes Ramirez Thomas and Sweeney elementary schools, Nina Otero and Gonzales community schools and Ortiz Middle School.
There is no typical day at the office for Nichols.
“It really is day by day,” he said.
The equation seems simple: regular school attendance means more time for learning.
And yet, children across the United States have not been attending school regularly since the coronavirus pandemic, according to data collected by The Associated Press and Stanford University economist Thomas Dee.
New Mexico stands out in the data for its particularly poor performance. The state saw the largest increase in chronic absentee rates in the country between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 school years, with the percentage of chronically absent students increasing by more than 20 points during that period.
In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 40% of New Mexico students were considered chronically absent — or missed more than a tenth of their classes.
And while the state’s chronic absenteeism rate is gradually improving somewhat — it fell by about 1.5% between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years — New Mexico still has the third-highest rate in the country, with only Alaska and the District of Columbia doing better.
The question for lawmakers, state education officials, families and school attendance counselors like Nichols is: What can be done about it?
There is no easy solution, but Dee recommends hyperlocal and relatively low-cost approaches to solving the problem, backed by sufficient financial support from the state – a solution that some politicians in New Mexico agree with.
“We and our children have all been through a lot and that has brought us to where we are now,” Dee said in an interview.
The difference a pandemic makes
In his more than 30 years in education, Rep. Brian Baca, a Los Lunas Republican and deputy superintendent of Los Lunas schools, has witnessed the excitement first hand. He has seen students streaming into their classrooms ready to learn.
Baca asks himself: “Where do we lose this enthusiasm?”
During the pandemic, this number has largely fallen.
Some evidence suggests that the nationwide problem of chronic school absenteeism – which experts say began before the pandemic – is related to “norm erosion,” the idea that values have changed and regular school attendance is no longer prioritized, Dee said.
“When families had distance learning, especially for longer periods of time, they saw the value of attending school as less valuable,” he said.
At the same time, the pandemic has worsened already precarious financial situations for many families and led to illness, mental health problems and deaths – all of which can contribute to poor school attendance rates, said Arsenio Romero, New Mexico’s state education secretary.
“Every family has a unique situation as to why there is such a problem,” he said. “We have found that the pandemic actually still brings a lot of trauma.”
And there’s another problem brewing, Dee said: Schools across the country are currently facing two major financial challenges.
As school enrollment declines across the country, including in Santa Fe, most districts have less state funding available. And federal pandemic aid – which provided millions of dollars to school districts – expires in September.
“The advice to schools to do a lot of expensive things seems hopelessly misplaced at the moment,” Dee said.
Chronic absence in Santa Fe
Santa Fe Public Schools attendance coaches are facing difficult adversities.
Nichols, along with fellow attendance coaches Evelyn Leger and Vicente Avila-Miramontes, said the city’s high cost of living, lack of child care and increased anxiety as a result of the pandemic are contributing to the district’s high chronic absenteeism rate, which is about 50%, according to the latest figures from the state Department of Education.
Nichols says parents often lack the support needed — whether it’s childcare for younger siblings or juggling multiple jobs — to get their children to school.
“They just don’t have the support at home to help them,” he said. “When that stress gets to them, their solution is, ‘We’ll just keep them at home.'”
In an ideal world, Santa Fe Public Schools would have more than 30 attendance counselors — one for each of the district’s 28 campuses and several additional ones at the high schools — to help families find the services they need, says Crystal Ybarra, the district’s chief equity and inclusion officer.
Instead, there are only five in the district – and funding these positions required some financial acrobatics in the last budget round.
The district expanded its attendance team with the help of federal pandemic relief funds. Starting this school year — as the aid expires — it had to raise $2.8 million in program costs, a sum that included its attendance initiatives.
All this means that there is no easy solution to Santa Fe’s chronic absenteeism problem.
“It’s really a community effort. We need parents as partners. We need businesses to support our efforts,” Ybarra said.
“Someone will take care of it”
While there is no quick fix for chronic absenteeism, Dee says there are some best practices to consider.
The first step to solving the problem is to better understand it. Dee recommends analyzing the needs of each school individually to ensure that aggregated data does not obscure barriers to attendance that are unique to a particular school or neighborhood — such as transportation or scheduling issues.
“My advice to school principals and district leaders would be: Don’t get too caught up in the national discussion about these factors. Understand your local factors,” Dee said.
Baca argued that this approach would be beneficial for the children of New Mexico.
“The needs of a child in Silver City are different than the needs of a child in Santa Fe. The needs of a child in San Jon, NM, are different than the needs of children in Albuquerque public schools,” Baca said.
He continued: “We cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach to this training.”
But national policy changes can also help. Dee said that professional development opportunities have proven effective in re-engaging students, and that the creation of full-service community schools — which can help address the problems of chronic absenteeism by providing families with housing assistance, health care and other services — is worth discussing.
In recent years, New Mexico has poured millions of dollars into both initiatives. During the 2024 legislative session alone, lawmakers approved $40 million for vocational training programs and another $8 million for community colleges.
Vocational training is a sensible way to reduce the number of chronic school absenteeism, says Rep. Joy Garratt, a Democrat from Albuquerque and longtime educator.
“You have to start with an exciting, meaningful and practice-oriented education that makes children want to go to school,” she said.
At the same time, Garratt continued, the community school approach will encourage schools to be staffed with counsellors, social workers and other professionals to identify the causes of chronic absenteeism and to support families.
Dee stressed that given the student and financial losses in U.S. districts, policymakers should not forget the less technological alternatives.
Several research studies have confirmed that informing families of their children’s absences via real-time text message or postcard is a valuable tool in getting them to attend school, and this has proven to be helpful, Dee said.
Santa Fe Public Schools is doing this by automatically sending letters home after four absences. In addition to providing grants to school districts to implement new attendance initiatives, the Department of Public Education is also planning a public information campaign to ensure families know how important attendance is to future success.
“There seems to be a misconception among parents that their child is not really absent from school that much or that the number of hours missed does not matter,” Dee said.
“So basic information that corrects those assumptions – letting them know that their child is missing a lot of school and that it matters – is really effective,” he added.
What also makes a difference – the experiences of the educators as well as Dee’s research – is the personal touch.
That’s why Nichols makes so many home visits.
He visits neighborhoods across the city and visits families. And usually, Nichols says, home visits help – at least because they show that someone cares about the student.
“When you’re dealing with students who have chronic absenteeism problems, parents often feel like the school has let them down,” he said.
Nichols added: “It gives them the reassurance that someone actually cares about them.”
