New Zealand school principals are raising the alarm that students are falling off the rosters, as a wave of absenteeism follows COVID-19 disruptions.
Last year, schools in Auckland and parts of the North Island were shut down for weeks or months as the country went into lockdown.
However, since then, principals say that a worrying number of students have not made it back to school, or are not attending regularly.
Vulnerable students are falling through the gaps and disappearing, despite schools visiting homes and contacting families and neighbors to find them.
“I’ve already taken 42 children off the roll totally, because they’d been away more than 20 days — that’s in term one,” said Shirley Maihi, the principal of Finlayson Park School in Manurewa, south Auckland, which has a roster of about 960 students.
“Since then, we’ve still got something like 22 that we are trying to trace,” Maihi said.
As well as the children who had disappeared off rolls completely, a large chunk of children were attending only intermittently — just two or three days a week, she said.
A government inquiry into the issue, released in March, found a “disturbing increase in the proportion of students who are chronically absent” — defined as students who attend less than 70 percent of the school year.
Between 2016 and this year, the proportion of chronically absent pupils doubled to 9 percent.
Overall, the proportion of students attending school regularly fell more than 4 percentage points last year to 59.7 percent, with the decline most pronounced for schools in poorer neighborhoods, and among Maori and Pacific students.
“Sadly, some children are being forced out of school and into work to support their families,” the report said.
“The difficulty is understanding exactly why they are away,” New Zealand Principals’ Federation president Cherie Taylor-Patel said. “They could be away because of COVID ... they could be away because of sickness and winter illnesses, and they could be away because they’re out of the habit of coming to school.”
When schools switched to online learning during COVID-19 shutdowns, poorer students were hugely disadvantaged, she said.
The idea that all students could easily access Zoom, safe or quiet environments, laptops or adult assistance was “absolutely so far from the reality of what they can expect to happen when they go home,” she said. “It is incredibly inequitable.”
For students who disengaged then, schools now face the challenge of bringing them back, she said.
Maihi said many families are facing a tangle of problems: The rising cost of living, inflation and gasoline prices are all putting extra stress on families, and in some cases, school attendance is falling down the priority list.
“Clothing for the winter is a huge issue this year. We’ve never had that before,” she said. “Parents are under duress themselves, under stress from trying to meet the rent, trying to meet the food [costs]... They’re just not seeing that the fight in some cases to get the children to school is worthwhile for them.”
The government inquiry said that “COVID-19 appears to have also worsened existing inequities in school attendance,” and 40 percent of students who developed poor attendance had not done so before COVID-19.
In the latest budget, the government pledged US$40m to tackle problems with school attendance.
“You’ve got a group of families that are dealing with generational and situational poverty issues,” Taylor-Patel said. “If you haven’t got a house and you’re transient, it’s very difficult to make getting into school every day a priority. If you’re worrying about food, and money every day — again, sometimes school gets into the too-hard basket.”
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