Testimony Before New York City Council Hearing on Chronic Absenteeism in New City Public Schools

November 12, 2008

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Testimony of Katherine Eckstein, Policy and Advocacy Specialist, The Children’s Aid Society

Prepared for the New York City Council’s Hearing on Chronic Absenteeism in New York City Public Schools, Education and General Welfare Committees, November 12, 2008

Good morning. Chairman Jackson, Chairman de Blasio and honorable committee members, thank you for holding this hearing on this very important issue and for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Katherine Eckstein and I am the Policy and Advocacy Specialist at The Children’s Aid Society. The Children’s Aid Society, founded in 1853, provides comprehensive services for 150,000 of New York City's children and families each year. Our goal is to ensure the physical and emotional well-being of children and families, and to provide every child with the supports and opportunities needed to become a happy, healthy and successful adult.

I’d like to begin by sharing a story: A 1st grader gets sick. In fact, he gets sick a lot. His mom works two jobs, neither of which offers health insurance. So, this 1st grader doesn’t have health insurance and doesn’t see a doctor. The mom can’t send the child to school because he’s sick, so she has to choose between leaving him with a neighbor she barely knows or missing work. The mom doesn’t know what to do. What happens? The child misses school and he doesn’t receive healthcare to figure out why he keeps getting sick.

Through our extensive experience in child welfare, health, juvenile justice, education, and youth development, we have learned that a holistic approach to working with children and their families yields the best results for them. And we believe that a holistic approach is necessary to address the startling early chronic absence statistics that our City faces.

I want to thank the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and the Center for New York City Affairs for working together to release this data. Unlike many other school districts in the country, New York City has a sophisticated and high quality data system. And while we knew that there were large numbers of children who were consistently missing school, we didn’t know the extent of the problem until the Center for New York City Affairs did its analysis in its report “Strengthening Schools by Strengthening Families: Community Strategies to Reverse Chronic Absenteeism in the Early Grades and Improve Supports for Children and Families.”

What are the implications if we know that :
• attendance is a predictor for future success in school;
• children with a history of poor attendance in the early elementary grades have lower levels of academic achievement throughout their school years;
• multiple factors lead to children missing large amounts of school; and
• 90,000 children in grades K-5 were absent in New York City for 20% or more of the 2007-2008 school year?

If we know all of this, we cannot afford to ignore it and we must have a systemic response to address it. My remarks today will focus on community schools, one comprehensive, strategic solution to address the shocking number of young children who are chronically absent.

Children miss extended periods of school for myriad reasons. There is a tendency to oversimplify the causal factors and blame parents for not getting their children to school. However, we must fight against this. Research has shown that three spheres influence whether or not children attend school regularly: family, community and school. As Hedy Chang and Mariajosé Romero say in their report, “Present, Engaged and Accounted For – The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grade:”

Since conditions can vary substantially across schools, communities, and families, examining the extent to which any or all of these factors are relevant is critical. While parents are responsible for getting their children to school every day, schools and communities need to recognize and address the barriers and challenges that may inhibit them from doing so, especially when they are living in poverty.

The Children’s Aid Society and many other organizations and school districts throughout the country use the community schools strategy to address all of these spheres.

What are Community Schools?
Community schools are both places and partnerships that bring together the school and community to provide an engaging academic experience, enriched opportunities to help students see positive futures, and services designed to remove barriers to learning. Community schools are not formulaic and community schools are not a program. Instead they are a strategic response to the specific needs of the children in a particular school and an organizing framework to coordinate and integrate existing and new resources.

In the late 1980s, The Children's Aid Society became a partner with the DOE to form community schools – currently we partner in 19 schools. Our schools offer mental health, medical and dental services. We enroll children in health insurance. Our schools provide high quality, enriching after-school, holiday and summer programs built upon what happens during the school day. Our schools offer classes for parents that might include learning English or starting a business and our schools hold immigration clinics for the neighborhood. In every one of our schools is a Community Schools Director, who works in close partnership with the principal and whose responsibility it is to integrate and align the non-academic programs and services offered in the school.

And while no two community schools look alike, they all respond to the specific needs of the students in the school with interventions or programs that seek to address their particular challenges – whether that means implementing an asthma prevention and management program or working with a family to fight eviction. Through a partnership with Helen Keller International and the SUNY State College of Optometry, for example, we have done vision screening in our schools. In a group of elementary schools, 35% of children in grades PreK-4 failed vision screenings. When we screened children in grades 5-8, 17% failed the screening and after the follow-up work, 60% (559 children) were provided with glasses, many of them on the same day of the screening.

Our results have shown that there is value-add to children if they attend a community school: Of our five elementary schools, four received an A and one received a B on their progress reports from the 2007-2008 school year. Outcomes from 16 years of research on Children’s Aid community schools include:
• Increased academic achievement
• Improvement in student attendance
• Improvement in youths’ social and emotional development and community engagement
• Increased parent involvement
• Improvement in mental and physical health

Sixty-eight percent of our funding for community schools comes from existing public funding sources, many of which schools by themselves could not otherwise access, such as Medicaid.

Early Chronic Absenteeism and the Case for Community Schools
We recommend adopting a community schools strategy as an important piece of New York City’s response to early chronic absenteeism. Our experience has taught us that a child who is depressed, hungry, scared of walking to and from school, has chronic asthma, is homeless, or whose parents are abusive, neglectful or mentally ill – all reasons why a child might miss school – will not be able to take advantage of all that schools have to offer, even if schools have the best leadership, innovative teachers, small class sizes and state-of-the-art resources.

In most schools, attendance is tracked and when a child is absent someone calls the child’s home. Too often this is as far as it goes. More of the same won’t work. Principals and teachers tell us that schools can’t do it alone. Community schools help address the barriers to learning, factors that can contribute to children missing school. Organizing and mobilizing existing and new resources around schools through partnerships can help to address the dire situations that too many of our young people and their families face and that impact how successful a child will be in school.

We know that during tough economic times families who are already vulnerable suffer the most. This is why we must look at cost-effective strategies that we know will yield positive results. And because we know that there isn’t just one factor that contributes to early chronic absenteeism, this problem demands a multi-sector, cross-agency, coordinated response. New York City has an opportunity to marshal its human and financial resources to help the children and families who need it the most. We have an opportunity to promote the integration and coordination of the efforts of city agencies and community organizations.

Because of the budget challenges we are facing, we must ensure that we leverage human and financial resources across sectors and agencies wisely. Perhaps this means redeploying housing workers into schools with particularly high family mobilization rates. Perhaps this means locating child welfare preventive services personnel into a school – like we do at one of our elementary schools. Perhaps this means offering incentives for deeper and stronger partnerships with community-based organizations to locate a health clinic in a school or work on improving school climate. However just putting these services in schools is not enough. We know that these services must be coordinated within schools if they are to be effective.

The Children’s Aid Society supports the Center for New York City Affair’s recommendations in its report and we would like to partner with the Center, the DOE and the City to develop a plan that will significantly reduce the number of children who are chronically absent. Our National Technical Assistance Center for Community Schools has helped districts around the country begin and sustain community schools initiatives and we would like to do the same in New York City.

The Children’s Aid Society belongs to a group made up of urban community schools initiatives – including such cities as Chicago, Baltimore and Portland – that are grappling with this issue as well. New York City has the great opportunity to model a systemic response, based on local needs, to early chronic absenteeism. The rest of the country is looking to see how we respond. Let’s do the right thing. Let’s respond boldly and broadly. Let’s ensure that children are in school and prepared to receive an equitable education. Our children deserve nothing less.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning.

1. Nauer, White and Yerneni, “Strengthening Schools by Strengthening Families: Community Strategies to Reverse Chronic Absenteeism in the Early Grades and Improve Supports for Children and Families,” Center for New York City Affairs, Milano The New School, October 2008.
2. Chang and Romero, “Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades,” National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University, September 2008 and Op cit., “Strengthening Schools by Strengthening Families: Community Strategies to Reverse Chronic Absenteeism in the Early Grades and Improve Supports for Children and Families.
3. Op cit., “Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades.
4. Community Schools for All: A Case Statement and Strategic Plan | 2007‐2014, Coalition for Community Schools, http://communityschools.org.
5. 21st Century Community Learning Centers at Six New York City Middle Schools Year One Findings, prepared by Kira Krenichyn, Heléne Clark, Nicole Schaefer-McDaniel and Lymari Benitez of ActKnowledge, September 2005. See also Summary of Fordham University Research Findings 1992-1999, prepared by ActKnowledge.
6. Op cit., Fordham University Research Findings 1992-1999. See also Op cit., 21st Century Community Learning Centers at Six New York City Middle Schools Year One Findings.
7. Op cit., 21st Century Community Learning Centers at Six New York City Middle Schools Year One Findings. See also op cit., Fordham University Research Findings 1992-1999.
8. Op cit., Fordham University Research Findings 1992-1999.
9. The Children’s Aid Society’s Community School Mental Health Services Analysis of Progress in 4th Year of the New York State Education Department’s VESID – Effective Practices Contract. Evaluation conducted by Heléne Clark and Robert Engle of ActKnowledge, November 2003. See also PS 50 Evaluation of the Health Component in its First Year. Evaluation conducted by Heléne Clark, Melissa Extein, and Robert Engle of ActKnowledge, September 2003.