By Betty M\u00e1rquez Rosales | EdSource<\/p>\n
When kids start attending school, the youngest tend to get sick their first year. Some may have a tough time adjusting to a new school routine. Some parents may believe missing the day\u2019s lesson isn\u2019t that big of a deal, so their student stays home.<\/p>\n
But when young students miss school, the days absent can quickly add up and impact student learning. About 24% of California\u2019s youngest students were chronically absent in 2024-25, higher than the 19% chronic absenteeism rate for all students.<\/p>\n
In October, the state will release data on chronic absenteeism from the 2025-26 school year, the first school year transitional kindergarten, or TK, was widely available for all families. Education experts and administrators will be zeroing in on attendance rates among the very youngest.<\/p>\n
Down from a Covid peak<\/p>\n
Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more days in one school year. The overall rate has improved since the percentage of students in that category hit a peak of 30% of all students in the 2021-22 school year in California.<\/p>\n
But the rate has remained high among TK and kindergarten students. That matters, early education researchers say, because the effects of not attending school regularly in the earliest years can show up in lower academic achievement years later.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they are missing school, they are missing out on the building blocks, and it will impact them for the rest of their lives,\u201d said Jessica Hull, executive director of communication and community engagement at Roseville City School District near Sacramento.<\/p>\n
In many ways, it makes sense that the youngest students have spotty attendance. They tend to get sick more often, so higher rates of absenteeism are largely expected, say school administrators. This can be especially true for students who did not attend preschool or other early learning programs prior to TK.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen your child starts school, that\u2019s usually a year of sickness,\u201d said Kara Stern, director of education at SchoolStatus, an education technology company that works with 123 California school districts on chronic absenteeism.<\/p>\n
Illnesses such as colds \u2014 sometimes even monthly, according to SchoolStatus data \u2014 are often part of the TK and kindergarten experience because \u201cit\u2019s a first exposure to all these other kids,\u201d said Stern.<\/p>\n
Long-lasting effects of missing school<\/p>\n
Some families are unaware of the foundational learning that happens every day in TK and kindergarten classrooms, said Hull.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s a requirement to attend each day,\u201d she said. And since the Covid pandemic, parents have had difficulty discerning when a child might be sick enough to keep home from school, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to send a 4-year-old to school if they have a runny nose,\u201d said Hull.<\/p>\n
Recent research shows that students who are chronically absent in TK and kindergarten are about twice as likely to transfer to other school districts, and that kindergartners\u2019 ability to read and do basic math can be predictive of academic achievement by third grade and beyond. Part of that may be that students and families build routines in TK and kindergarten \u2014 establishing a wake-up time, getting to school on time, socializing with classmates \u2014 which helps with attendance as students grow older.<\/p>\n
\u2018Absences sneak up on families\u2019<\/p>\n
A student who is chronically absent, and attends a typical 180-day school year, has missed about 3.5 weeks of school.<\/p>\n
In 2021-22 when schools began reopening after Covid-related closures, nearly 2 million of the state\u2019s TK-12 students were chronically absent. California districts launched a yearslong campaign to get students back into the classroom.<\/p>\n
One of them was Roseville City, a 12,000-student district in Placer County. The district mailed letters to families explaining the importance of attendance, created graphics detailing how quickly absences can add up, and called families whose children were often absent.<\/p>\n
In communications with parents, the district said it\u2019s fine to keep a sick child home, but they can send them to school \u201cif they are a little under the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n
The messaging worked. In three years, the district\u2019s overall chronic absence rate dropped from nearly 26% in 2021-22 to 10.5% in 2024-25 despite an increase in total enrollment, according to state data.<\/p>\n
But the district\u2019s TK and kindergarten students were still missing class at alarming rates \u2014 at its peak in 2022-23 their chronic absence rate was 11 percentage points higher than the rest of the district, state data shows.<\/p>\n
Last year, Roseville City focused its attendance communications on TK and kindergarten. The letters to those families described what their children were learning each day in class and how those lessons were the building blocks to reading, math, writing and science.<\/p>\n
On the district\u2019s website, staff has also listed the building blocks children learn in early grades: hand-eye coordination in TK turns to learning sight words in kindergarten, writing sentences in first grade and writing short paragraphs in second grade. This is all part of educating parents on the value of their youngest children being in class, Hull said.<\/p>\n
District staff have learned that \u201cabsences sneak up on families,\u201d Hull said. Families are not keeping track of the number of days, so the schools need to point out the amount of time a student is missing. \u201cThat\u2019s on our part to reach out and explain,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
This school year, Roseville City\u2019s communication to families about absenteeism is more tailored to the individual student.<\/p>\n
Hull said that a letter might say \u201cit\u2019s been two months of the school year, and you\u2019ve already missed five days. You\u2019re on track to be chronically absent. What can we do?\u201d The most important part of that message, she said, is showing families the district is ready to help.<\/p>\n
That early intervention is critical, said Stern of SchoolStatus, which works with Roseville City. Once students become chronically absent, her team has found that reengaging them becomes much more difficult, especially as they grow older.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur data suggests that reaching out in the window of three to five absences is a lot more effective in returning them to school and not needing further intervention than waiting until it\u2019s more set in stone,\u201d said Stern.<\/p>\n
SchoolStatus\u2019 internal data for the 2025-26 school year seems promising. In 97 of the California districts they work with, the TK chronic absenteeism rate dropped to under 22% from nearly 29% in 2023-24. Among kindergartners, it dropped to about 20% from nearly 25% during the same two-year timeframe.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a lot of extra work, but our entire system is so determined and focused on this because they do see that end result,\u201d said Hull of Roseville City. \u201cThey see the kids who return to school are doing better both academically and socially.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Betty M\u00e1rquez Rosales | EdSource When kids start attending school, the youngest tend to get sick their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[187436,7024,15,143,145,144,4265,4574],"class_list":["post-477525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-absences","tag-edsource","tag-education","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-school","tag-student"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}