WFSB Puts Lipstick on Hartford's Attendance Pig

With a poor piece of news reporting, local television news station WFSB (We’re Friends of the School Board), in a story posted on their website with the title, “Home visits helped improve student attendance in schools, new report says,” would like you to believe that the state and Hartford Public Schools has this attendance thing under control. However, words matter, and in this case, the lack of words matter.

In August of 2021, with $10 million from the state, the Department of Education, and the non-profit company Attendance Works, put their collective cognitive energies together and figured out that chronically absent students do not do well on the path to college or career. From this mind meld came the LEAP program, the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, where school staff would climb aboard their LINK Scooters and visit the homes of students with poor attendance, visiting them, as Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez stated, “nights and weekends.” In 2021 there were more than 7,000 students in Hartford with poor attendance. Attendance Works is of the belief that if school staff go pounding on the doors of the worst attendance offenders at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, reasons for their being MIA would magically appear, which will lead to solutions, and thus, by extension, decrease absenteeism and increase graduation rates. So, they set out to prove it, even though documents from a December 2021 Hartford Board of Education meeting stated that the LEAP program would just expand on something HPS has had ongoing. In December of 2022, research type folks from Wesleyan, CCSU, and UCONN, completed a study of the LEAP program and after spending a month finalizing the spin, the report was released to the media to further spin for you and me.

WFSB paints the results this way: “The effects were most noticeable in Hartford Public Schools,” “…home visits are making a major difference in helping attendance rates in Hartford…,” and, “At home visits were incredibly impactful in Hartford.” That’s their story and their sticking to it, even though nothing else will. FSB dug deep and correctly relays to us that 15 school districts took part in this study; it’s all downhill from there. The 15 school districts FSB never mention, except for Hartford, strangely, and their 2021 chronic absenteeism rates, as provided by “Connecticut’s official source for education data,” EdSight, are shown below:

WFSB’s use of the term, “school district,” is misleading. The LEAP study did not encompass the entire chronically absent student body within each district. What FSB doesn’t mention, but what is found in the final report, is that the study looked at 8,690 students spread over the 15 school districts. How many students from each district were looked at? Even the final study report does not provide that information. A New York Times story on October 6, 2022, discussing the national chronic absenteeism trend following COVID, curiously focuses on 2 communities, Fulton County, Georgia, and, lucky for us, Torrington, Connecticut. Torrington, they said, conducted outreach in 2021 to 350 chronically absent students as part of the new state initiative (LEAP). Torrington had over 1100 chronically absent students in 2021. Any final data presented by FSB on chronically absent rate decreases (or increases) therefore, only applies to the segment of students studied, not the entire number of chronically absent. FSB stated, “attendance increased among students in the LEAP program by 15-percent.” The final study report does not break down final rates by school district, so, based on the obvious and FSB’s statement, it’s safe to assume that this 15% increase applies to the entre 8,690 study cohort.

The NY Times story states that by the end of 2022, Torrington’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped to 23%, down from the 32% rate from the shown table, and matching EdSight’s 23.7 number for the 2021-2022 year. FSB gives us no such final rate for Hartford, hoping, instead, that we eat the 15% number, swallow their rhetoric on Hartford’s attendance success, and call it good to go. Hartford finished the 2021-2022 year with a 46% chronic absenteeism rate, an increase over the previous year when LEAP was introduced. If Hartford’s LEAP participant group showed a decrease in chronic absenteeism rate, the message certainly didn’t rub off on their peers…or WFSB, despite calling the change, “most noticeable” and “incredibly impactful” for Hartford.

The final study report was slightly more helpful in determining how the Hartford chronically absent sample faired in the study. Concerning Hartford’s cohort, the study stated, “The upward trend was particularly dramatic…where attendance rates increased by nearly 30 percentage points in the 6 months or more after treatment.” A bit vague for a group from Wesleyan, CCSU, and UCONN, wouldn’t you say? The research group was happy with that statement however, and they used the exact wording throughout their final report. Where numerous reasons are given for the cause of chronic absenteeism, there appears to be no doubt that the LEAP “treatment” was the sole reason for Hartford’s attendance increase. The final study report noted that the LEAP program wasn’t that big of hit in New Haven however, stating that it “had no impact on attendance rates in New Haven.” However, said the report, “New Haven did not implement the program as designed.” Of course they didn’t.

After the celebratory backslapping, it’ll be a leap to think that the LEAP program can be scaled to affect all 7,000 chronically absent students; there are not enough LINK scooters. For this exercise, HPS made use of the $1,045,580 received as part of the total $10 million LEAP funding (dollar data not relayed to us by FSB), for salaries and benefits for 15 “Student Engagement Specialists,” the folks making the house calls, as well as for partnering with COMPASS, Catholic Charities, The Village For Families & Children, and AFCAMP, for an additional $175k. One SES, Brittany Libman, told FSB, “When I go to a home visit, I don’t show up empty handed. I come with an attendance tracker, I come with resources, health insurance information. So it’s also I’m bringing them information and not just checking up on them.” Ms. Libman failed to state that she also brings a share of the $10,000 in “SWAG for the families,” as stated in HPS’s budget narrative for the LEAP project. To scale this project, HPS would need a SES battalion and a budget larger than the whole LEAP fund.

To investigate whether the supposed LEAP affect played a role district wide for the 15 original school districts, the table below shows those districts with their chronic absenteeism rates for the 2020-2021 school year, and the 2021-2022 school year, and their year-over-year change.

As the table shows, only 4 school districts involved in the LEAP program showed a decrease in chronic absenteeism, district wide, after 1-year of treating a portion of their total chronically absent student body. So, while the state, HPS, and WFSB paint the program a tremendous success based on a small sample size (for which there is no specific data reported), there is no ripple effect from the program over the larger student body, nor is there any evidence of scaling this program.

Attendance Works, partner of Connecticut’s Department of Education on attendance matters, stated that in employing the LEAP program, chronic absenteeism will decrease, and graduation rates will increase. That may be true of the LEAP involved students, but, again, there is no ripple affect over the entire district. In fact, there is a paradox shown by the tables below. Statewide and in Hartford, the graduation rate shows a mild but positive increase over 5 years, but over the same time span, the chronic absenteeism rate has risen dramatically. Even WFSB couldn’t make this up! The “why” of this paradox is a study for another story.

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