ST. PAUL — Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle are pushing for improved attendance reporting in schools to address frequent absences among Minnesota students.
A bill by Rep. Heather Keeler, DFL-Moorhead, and Rep. Ben Bakeberg, R-Jordan, would require schools to quickly report when students miss several consecutive days, change the age when a child is responsible for his or her own attendance and correlate attendance with standardized test scores.
Keeler called the bill “an attendance minibus” at a House education policy committee hearing on Tuesday, March 25. She said in an interview that she expects the effort to reform attendance will take 10 years.
The bill would also require school districts to mark students present if they are with a counselor or coach, but not in class. Keeler called that the most important change, because students who might be in crisis will be able to spend time with a counselor without being counted absent.
“That's not negligence,” Keeler said. “That's them utilizing services that are within the school.”
If a student misses 15 consecutive days of school without any contact, they will be unenrolled. The bill would require schools to immediately contact county officials to try to find the missing students and ensure their safety.
Keeler said there has never been a timeframe for schools to report long student absences to counties.
“What we're trying to do is streamline the schools’ reporting to counties so it's quicker, so that we don't have months go by that a kid has not been in school before somebody starts to look for them,” Keeler said.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, absenteeism rates have been increasing across the country.
Thirty percent of Minnesota students were chronically absent in 2022, missing 10% or more school days, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Only 13% of Minnesota students were chronically absent in 2013.
The national average of chronic absenteeism was 28% in 2022, according to the report.
Students who are chronically absent are less likely to read at their grade level and are four times more likely to drop out before graduation, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Keeler said reporting absenteeism is a bipartisan issue, but there are partisan differences on how to prevent students from missing school preemptively.
“I think the two parties are different on how we believe we make children feel like they're seen safe and secure within a school,” Keeler said.
The bill would also require schools to report a student’s attendance along with their standardized test scores. Bakeberg, a middle school principal, said at the committee meeting that the information would help parents and teachers better understand why a student is struggling in school.
Currently, students are considered responsible for their own attendance at age 12. Before age 12, parents are held responsible for their child’s attendance, and school officials meet with parents to determine reasons for a student’s absences and to find solutions.
The bill would raise the age of responsibility from 12 to 16, when students can consent to their own mental health treatment without a parent signing off.
Keeler said she was confident the House would pass the bill, and she attributed the bill’s bipartisan support to her partnership with Bakeberg.
“I think the way that we've done it has actually built like a really trusted lane for people to trust that Bakeberg and I are doing this in a good way,” Keeler said.
Report for Minnesota is a project of the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication to support local news in all areas of the state.