This school year, we can help all Pittsburgh-region kids get to school and avoid chronic absence

Last year, more than 5,500 students were chronically absent in the Pittsburgh Public School system. That statistic was shared with Kidsburgh by the folks at A+ Schools, who are working with local and national partners to help ensure that every student gets to school this year. 

Their message is a simple, but powerful one: Education is essential for students’ success, and also for social progress and improving the economy. When a student misses several days each month, they begin to fall behind in their classes. Meanwhile, their teachers have to juggle the challenge of helping them catch up while teaching new material to them and to the rest of the class. 

“The best way that this community can help kids succeed in schools is making sure they’re there every day, and making sure they know how important it is to be there every day,” says A+ Schools executive director James Fogarty. 

To do that, we need to help families and schools solve the problems that can prevent kids from getting there.

Pittsburgh, fortunately, has a large philanthropic and nonprofit community. So we have resources that families need. The key, says Fogarty, is helping families connect with those resources, whether that’s early childcare so that older siblings can focus on their own education or help with food insecurity or something else. 

September is National Attendance Awareness Month. With that in mind, Fogarty and his team shared these resources from Attendance Works with us. This information can be used to find the causes of a child’s absenteeism and choose interventions that will help. (Scroll down here to find a list of community organizations that the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative works with to help families with the various roadblocks they may be facing.) 

Along with connecting to outside organizations, there is much we can do as individuals to help one another. Just one example: If you have a neighbor whose child attends school with your own, you can knock on their door and say,”If you ever get stuck, I’m here and would be happy to help your child walk to school, or my older child will help walk your child to school,” Fogarty says.  

“That kind of community is so important right now,” he says, “and so we have to build trust, and we have to try and solve the problems.”  

Now more than ever, “it’s incumbent upon us as a well-funded philanthropic community and well-funded nonprofit community here in Pittsburgh to do our absolute best to be an exemplar for the nation of what it means to be successful with families and kids living in poverty, by making sure that their needs are met in a time when things are just about to get harder,” Fogarty says. “We have to seize this opportunity to lead right now. And there’s no excuse for Pittsburgh not to lead in terms of educational success for kids.” 

A student is seven times more likely to want to drop out of school if they have been chronically absent, Fogarty says. But chronic absenteeism is a “problem that’s right in front of us that we can solve today, and it would make a huge difference in the outcomes for kids.” 

Photo at top of story by kazuend via Unsplash.