Chicago Public Schools on Wednesday touted only a slight decrease in student attendance rates on the first day of school, compared with the last time the new year began with in-person learning.
But the district provided no attendance numbers, only the percentage of students who showed up on the first day.
In a news release and presentation to the Board of Education, CPS portrayed the 91.2% attendance rate — down from 94.2% in the 2019-20 year, the last time there was full in-person learning — as a success.
“With the switch to full in-person learning and the start of the school year before Labor Day, the district launched an unprecedented outreach effort and contacted tens of thousands of students,” interim CPS CEO José Torres said in a release. “The district is so grateful to the many CPS employees, school-based staff, volunteers and community partners who helped engage students and ensure they had critical information leading up to the first day.”
What the announcement does not say is how many total students showed up or this academic year’s enrollment size, however. But the district said that data will come after the 20th day of attendance, which is Monday.
The full first-day attendance rates for the past several years were 91.2% this year; 84.2% last year, when all students were learning remotely; 94.2% in 2019; 94.5% in 2018; 94.7% in 2017; and 93.9% in 2016. The district also noted in 2013, the last time CPS began classes before Labor Day, the attendance rate was 93.5%.
Wednesday’s announcement comes as CPS students settle into their fourth week of classes, with remote learning now limited to those in quarantine and the few hundred medically fragile students enrolled in the CPS Virtual Academy. It’s the first time the majority of students have been in school full time since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 prompted Gov. J.B. Pritzker to order schools to close statewide.
In an effort to reengage students, many of whom hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom in a year and a half, CPS said Wednesday that its staffers reached out to about 85,000 students through canvassing, phone banking and marketing campaigns, and that they made contact with about 80% of that group ahead of the start of school. CPS also said thousands of students with the “greatest challenges to getting to school” were offered “intensive support.”
The district contended more outreach is needed “to further engage and support students” and said schools will continue trying to reach families and offer support in the next few weeks.
“We worked hard to reach a wide audience so that everyone had what they needed for the new school year,” Sara Kempner, director of enterprise data strategy for CPS, told the board Wednesday, calling efforts “unprecedented.”
The 3 percentage point drop in first-day attendance from 2019 to this year “was not the dramatic decrease you’d expect,” she said.
Weeks into the new school year, the district has yet to reach a COVID-19 safety agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union, which has clamored for more remote learning options and said a full reopening is too soon given the highly contagious delta variant surge across the U.S. A bus driver shortage on the first week of school also left thousands of students with inconvenient or nonexistent routes to school.
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