This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press.
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Bernalillo Public Schools had attendance struggles before. But not like this.
Prior to the pandemic, a third of students in the New Mexico district missed 18 days of school or more in a year, marking them chronically absent. By the 2022-23 school year, that had spiked to over three-quarters. For Native American students, the problem was especially acute: One in 3 missed nearly two full months of class that year.
Bernalillo’s schools serve seven Pueblo communities north of Albuquerque, and just over half of the district’s 2,900 students are Native American. Leaders knew they had to do something, but the response took teamwork.
Schools added events that made campuses feel more welcoming and brought families in the door. Several Pueblo leaders pledged to bring kids to school if they missed their morning bus. Truancy officers, who are from the communities they serve, made sure kids had clean clothes and access to laundry facilities.
And when school staffers called home to inquire about an absent child, they emphasized that they were not calling to get the family in trouble.
“It’s about: We’re here to help, we care about you, we care about your families,” said Lynette Deuel, the district manager who oversees attendance. “It’s also your tone when you’re talking with families. Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it.”
Years after COVID-19 disrupted American schools, nearly every state is still struggling with attendance. But attendance has been worse for Native American and Alaska Native students — a disparity that existed before the pandemic and has since grown, according to data collected by The Associated Press.
Out of 34 states with data available for the 2022-2023 school year, half, including Colorado and New York, had absenteeism rates for Native students that were at least 9 percentage points higher than the state average. In two dozen states, including New Mexico, absenteeism rates increased more sharply for Native students following the pandemic than they did for students statewide.
Many schools serving Native American students have been working to strengthen connections with families, many of which struggle with higher rates of illness and poverty. Schools also must navigate distrust dating back to the U.S. government’s campaign to break up Native American culture, language, and identity by forcing children into abusive boarding schools.
Loretta Trujillo, a veteran educator who worked with Native youth in New Mexico during the pandemic, saw how many Native teens took jobs with long hours to help their families stay housed and fed. Often that got misinterpreted to mean “that they didn’t care” about school. That’s still happening now, she said.
“It’s really important to be sensitive to that history of under-serving that has happened and the instability that Native families are often entangled in,” said Trujillo, who now leads Transform Education New Mexico, a coalition working to implement remedies for the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, which led to a court ruling that the state had shortchanged Native students in their education. “Those are reflections of systems that have not served them. It’s not a reflection of apathy or lack of valuing education.”
Schools invest in family engagement, affirm student identity
New Mexico saw the nation’s biggest jump in chronic absenteeism during the pandemic, as well as the largest increase in absenteeism among Native students in the 34 states with sufficient data.
State education officials say bringing those rates down is a top priority. Over the last two years, state lawmakers set aside $10 million to help 14 school districts with some of the greatest attendance challenges, several of which serve large Native student populations. This year, that includes an extra $50,000 for Bernalillo.
Several districts are using the money to reach out to families more often and hire a staffer who can connect families with resources to address attendance barriers. The state is offering more training on family engagement, too.
“It’s going back to the basics,” said Candice Castillo, the deputy secretary for New Mexico’s education department who oversees attendance. “What a lot of the districts are realizing is that post-COVID, that engagement of the caring adult in the lives of our students, it’s even more crucial.”
The Pueblo communities around Bernalillo were hit hard by COVID, with devastating impacts on elders. Some children lost more than one family member, Deuel said, and are still grieving.
At Algodones Elementary School, excused absences for sick days are still piling up — in some cases, Principal Rosangela Montoya suspects, students may feel queasy with nerves or anxiety about falling behind academically. Last school year, two-thirds of the school’s students were chronically absent, meaning they’d missed 10% or more of the school year.
Staff and tribal liaisons have been analyzing every absence and emphasizing connections with parents. By 10 a.m., telephone calls go out to the homes of absent students. Next steps include in-person meetings with those students’ parents.
“There’s illness, there’s trauma,” Montoya said. “A lot of our grandparents are the ones raising the children so that the parents can be working.”
About 95% of Algodones’ students are Native American, and the school strives to affirm their identity. It doesn’t open on four days set aside for Native American ceremonial gatherings, and students are excused for absences on other cultural days as designated by the nearby pueblos.
The district sends out a survey so families can offer input on the school calendar — a strategy state education officials say is a model for engaging with Native families.
For Jennifer Tenorio, it makes a difference that the school offers classes in the family’s native language of Keres. Tenorio said her two oldest children, now in their 20s, were discouraged from speaking Keres in Head Start, a federal early education program, and they struggled academically.
“In Algodones, I saw a big difference to where the teachers were really there for the students,” Tenorio said. Her 8-year-old son, Cameron, feels inspired at school and likes math. “He tells me every day what he learns.”
Bernalillo’s attendance has improved. The school district’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped 18 percentage points to 60% last school year. For Native students, the rate fell 16 points to 66%. There’s more work to do, but district leaders are highlighting that progress at school events and thanking families for their hard work.
“Not always focusing on the negative” matters, said Deuel, the district administrator, who saw families cheer their elementary school’s attendance improvements at a recent harvest festival.
On-site health, trauma care helps bring students back
Still, in some states, absenteeism among Native students has continued to worsen, even while improving slightly for other students.
That’s the case in Arizona, where chronic absenteeism for Native students rose from 22% the year before the pandemic began to 45% in 2022-2023.
Nearly all students in the state’s San Carlos Unified School District, where 76% of students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, are Native. And more than half of families have incomes below the federal poverty level. Many students come from homes that deal with alcoholism and drug abuse, Superintendent Deborah Dennison said.
The district recently introduced care centers that partner with hospitals, dentists, and food banks to help students at multiple schools. The work is guided by cultural success coaches — school employees who help families address the kind of challenges that keep students from coming to school.
Last school year, the chronic absenteeism rate in the district fell from 76% to 59% — an improvement Dennison attributes partly to efforts to address their communities’ needs. Changing the perception of school and what it can offer, Dennison said, boosts both attendance and morale, especially for older students.
“All these connections with the community and the tribe are what’s making a difference for us and making the school a system that fits them rather than something that has been forced upon them, like it has been for over a century of education in Indian Country,” said Dennison, a member of the Navajo Nation.
That’s been true for 10-year-old Tommy Betom, who missed 40 days of school last year, but is on track for better attendance this year.
A teacher and a truancy officer reached out to Tommy’s family to work on his attendance — he often came home from school saying the teacher was picking on him and other kids were making fun of his clothes — while his grandmother, Ethel Marie Betom, urged him to choose his friends carefully and stressed how important school was to his future.
Betom, an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache tribe who is one of Tommy’s caregivers, also tells him how he has advantages as a child that she lacked: “You have running water in the house, bathrooms, and a running car.”
Meanwhile, Lillian Curtis has been impressed by the student activities on family night at Rice Intermediate School. Her 10-year-old granddaughter, Brylee Lupe, missed 10 days of school by mid-October last year, but had missed just two days by the same time this year. Brylee seems “much more excited” for school, her grandmother noticed.
“The kids always want to go — they are anxious to go to school now,” said Curtis, an enrolled member of the San Carlos tribe who cares for her grandchildren. It also helped to emphasize to Brylee that school is a ticket to self-sufficiency. “You’ve got to do it on your own. You got to make something of yourself.”
In New Mexico, KatieAnn Juanico, the assistant secretary for Indian education, has seen how tribes have stepped in to help with attendance efforts, too. Some have used state grants to take kids on field trips as attendance incentives. Some tribal leaders are making home visits to check on students who miss school.
“We have high respect for our traditional tribal leaders,” said Juanico, who is an enrolled tribal member of the Pueblo of Acoma. So it would be a big motivator “if one showed up at my home wondering where I was, coming from a perspective of: ‘We want to make sure you’re safe and healthy because you’re supposed to be in school.’”
Alia Wong of The Associated Press and Felix Clary of ICT contributed to this report.
Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.