Using busing to combat kindergarten truancy
“A lot of the work done that’s been done in absenteeism focuses on looking at characteristics of the child or the family,” such as poverty or student disengagement from school said U.C. Santa Barbara education researcher Michael Gottfried.
But Gottfried found that decisions made by the school system around transportation can also help solve the problem.
His nationwide study of 14,370 kindergarteners in the 2010-2011 school year asked whether kindergarteners taking the school bus have fewer absences than children who get to school by walking, car, or any other way.
He found that 12 percent of the children who took the school bus were chronically absent, two percent lower than kindergarteners who didn’t take the bus.
That percentage is small, but because he studied chronic absences – children absent ten or more days out of the school year – the cumulative effect could be large. By increasing the number of kindergartners taking the bus schools nationwide, schools could cut the number of lost instructional days by 1.04 million, he said.
According to California officials, 210,000 students missed 10 percent or more of the school year in 2016 because of unexcused absences. And researchers have found that chronic truancy in kindergarten leads to lower test scores in third grade.
Gottfried joined an effort by the state attorney general’s office to shed light on the effects of chronic truancy on students and schools. Most school districts have taken steps in the last few years to cut chronic truancy and Gottfried wanted to give schools a concrete step that’s been shown by research to have an impact.
“Kindergarteners have the highest absenteeism rates,” because the transition into kindergarten is tough, Gottfried said.
There’s a deeper takeaway from the results, he said, beyond adding bus routes that could test already tight budgets. He calls it the “school bus effect.”
“Yes, the bus is important but [we should also ask] what is the bus symbolizing, what is the bus doing for kids and families and how can we still do that in the Using busing to combat kindergarten truancy | 89.3 KPCC:
