New figures show efforts to reduce absenteeism in Arlington public schools may be bearing fruit.
When Arlington School Board members approved the system’s fiscal 2025 budget in the spring, they set a goal of ultimately reducing chronic absenteeism from the then-current level of 13.5% to less than 8%. In recently updated data, there was a bit of progress on that front.
Arlington Public Schools’ chronic-absentee rate declined to 13.2% during the 2023-24 school year, according to the data. While well under the state rate of 16.1%, Arlington posted a smaller decline than at the state level, which dropped from 19.3% a year before.
School officials, who reported the data at a September School Board meeting and followed up this past Thursday (Oct. 17), say they want to keep the rate trending lower.
“Our schools are working hard,” said Gerald Mann, chief academic officer for APS.
School staff have gotten creative in addressing the issue and ensuring students are wide awake and ready to learn.
“We’ve even given families alarm clocks so that their students aren’t taking their cellphones to bed and playing on their phones all night,” said Charisse Berree, a social worker at Kenmore Middle School, in a new school-system video, aimed at parents, to promote regular attendance.
The evidence is clear that attendance is directly correlated to student achievement, Mann said, adding that “we need everyone to come to school.”
Arlington’s absenteeism rate has fluctuated over the past quarter-century, with peaks and valleys.
More forceful efforts instituted during the era of Superintendent Patrick Murphy (2009-18) helped to cut the chronic-absentee rate to 7.3% in the 2018-19 school year, but rates began increasing during the Covid era, when classes were held online.
To help address the matter, Arlington school leaders in 2023 began reaching out more aggressively to parents when students were unexpectedly out of class.
State leaders also have put a major emphasis on reducing chronic absenteeism, defined as a student out in class more than 10% of the time. The rate is one major determinant of whether individual schools reach full state accreditation.
Chronic absenteeism caused Wakefield High School to fail to receive fully-accredited status from the Virginia Department of Education for the current school year. It was one of two county schools that fell into the accredited-with-conditions category, the other being Carlin Springs Elementary (owing to standardized-test deficiencies in science).
“We’re going to support them very closely,” Superintendent Francisco Durán said of the two schools.
In addition to the absentee rate improving, Arlington school officials also reported that the 97.7% on-time-graduation rate for the Class of 2024 was up from 95% the year before and the highest rate since 2008.
The school system is “working very hard to move students forward” and school personnel are “doing everything they can with the resources we have,” Durán said.
School Enrollment Update: Arlington Public Schools’ official enrollment rate for 2024-25 is higher than a year before but lower than projections.
Superintendent Durán last week reported that a pre-kindergarten-to-12th-grade count of 27,900 had been submitted to the Virginia Department of Education.
That’s up from the 27,452 count of 2023-24. But it is below projections made in the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024, which had anticipated enrollment at 28,099 and 28,161, respectively, for the start of the school year.
In his Oct. 17 report to School Board members, the superintendent pegged the difference between the projections and final result as minimal enough not to call into question the methodology.
Official counts from Virginia’s roughly 130 school districts are based on the number of students enrolled as of Sept. 30 each year. The figures help to determine state funding for individual school districts.
During pre-Covid times, school-system projections were for sustained, significant growth in Arlington’s student population well into the future. More recent calculations envision less growth, with the total number of students in pre-kindergarten to 12th grade hovering between 28,000 and 28,900 for the coming decade.
School Board Tweaks Audit Plan: Arlington school leaders recently tweaked the 2024-25 work plan for the system’s internal auditor, to put more emphasis on human-resources and information-services practices.
One goal, School Board Chair Mary Kadera said, was to put policies in place for getting vital operational processes written down and available to all who need them.
“We are a little looser in some areas in our documentation,” she said. “In some cases, individuals were carrying around institutional knowledge or practices or protocols in their heads, but not carefully documented for that durable knowledge transfer.”
The school system has seen leadership changes and a high turnover rate in its human-resources operations. Alice Blount-Fenney, the school system’s internal-audit director, told School Board members that HR was a “high-risk area” both generally and specific to Arlington.
Kadera said it was a priority area.
“We would like to have these tighter operating procedures and to have those be transparent,” she said.
The tweaks came after the initial 2024-25 audit plan had been adopted by School Board members several weeks previously. The vote to amend the package came without dissent.
