Toward the end of the school day, every student and every teacher at Patrick Henry Elementary School in Martinsville marched into the auditorium. Some students wore purple tutus, or shamrock-green wigs. A teacher walked in wearing a banana costume; another was dressed as a pickle. One student wore a headband with wolf ears, and an apron and sleeves covered in wolf “fur.”
The excitement vibrated off the students as they filed into their seats. Dance music blared from the speakers. Principal Cameron Cooper, wearing a rainbow sequined blazer with her jeans and low-top Nike Dunks, danced on stage with another staffer dressed in a giraffe onesie.
It was mid-October, but this was not a Halloween party. It was technically a meeting.
Each Patrick Henry student and staffer in the K-5 school is assigned to a house. Each one has a name, a key quality, a color, a chant, a hand signal and song, plus an animal mascot. The five houses compete for points, and at the end of each grading period, the house that has earned the most points for good attendance and positive behavior wins a trophy that’s nearly as big as some of the younger students.
It’s part of an effort to get kids excited to come to school each day as, across the state, schools try to re-engage families and encourage attendance post-pandemic.
The house system is only about a year old, but it already appears to be having an impact. Patrick Henry has the lowest chronic absenteeism rate of all four Martinsville schools. It has reduced its chronic absenteeism from 23% in 2021-2022 to just under 10% last school year.
Chronic absenteeism versus truancy
In September, Martinsville schools and the commonwealth’s attorney for the city announced that the city would add the Class 1 misdemeanor as an option for charging parents who contribute to a child’s truancy. The charge could result in a fine of up to $2,500 and jail time. The new option is intended for severe truancy cases that need swift attention, said Andy Hall, the commonwealth’s attorney for Martinsville.
A student is considered truant whenever they have an unexcused absence. That could take place when a student is sick but isn’t able to see a doctor. Or it could take place when a parent leaves for work early in the morning, only to find out later their teenager slept through their alarm and didn’t make it to their high school.
Students who skip school are more likely to drop out eventually. Truancy tends to be more of an issue with older grades, where students have more autonomy. But fostering engagement in the younger grades can keep them and their families engaged with their school community as they get older.
Martinsville’s attendance issues aren’t unusual for school divisions in Virginia. When schools returned to in-person learning in fall 2021, chronic absenteeism — when a student misses 10% or more of school days — shot up. Test scores, in contrast, declined once schools reopened, and haven’t yet caught back up to pre-pandemic levels.
About 11% of students in Martinsville were chronically absent before the pandemic. In the 2021-2022 school year, it jumped to 28%. Last year, Martinsville shrunk its chronic absenteeism to 21%.
Chronic absenteeism can impact a school’s state accreditation, and includes all absences — including those for illness that have a doctor’s signoff.
Educators, meanwhile, are working to reduce the number of truancy cases that end up in court. Doing so starts with the basics: Encouraging school attendance and helping families overcome obstacles standing in their way.
Combating truancy with support instead of punishment
This year, Martinsville schools has added a chronic absenteeism and dropout prevention specialist and a school social worker to its staff. They work with school counselors, Piedmont Community Services, juvenile and domestic court, and the department of social services to meet with families and students and make attendance plans well before a situation reaches that point of having to go to court, Callie Hietala, spokesperson for Martinsville City Public Schools, said in September.
That mindset of providing help over issuing punishment is important, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, a national nonprofit that focuses on strategies to boost school attendance. Court action can work as a last resort to reach families who haven’t responded to other offers of help, if the courts also take a problem-solving approach. But it has to be the very last resort, she said.
“The key is you’ve got to build a relationship, and then you’ve to find out what’s going on” if a child is missing school, she said. “If you start with threats, if you start with court action, you’re not going to build a relationship to families, because [they’re] already on the defensive.”
Building a relationship with families before there’s a problem may help them feel more comfortable to seek and accept help if they need it.
“Parents have a lot on them,” said N. Wayne Tripp, a faculty member of the School Leaders Institute run by Virginia Tech for school administrators. Tripp was superintendent of Salem schools for 17 years and now mentors school administrators through the Virginia Association of School Superintendents Executive Coaching Service.
He said building relationships can be challenging, especially when single parents or grandparents are raising children.
But “the blame game” doesn’t help support children and families, he said — fostering engagement through multiple avenues does. “You can’t talk at people” all the time, he said. “You have to talk with people.”
Martinsville’s move to add the Misdemeanor 1 charge as an option for parents of truant children was modeled after Patrick County, which added it to its toolbelt in the spring.
That county did so in an attempt to prevent challenging repeat cases. Truancy increased during the pandemic years, said Patrick County commonwealth’s attorney Dayna Bobbitt. Under a Class 3 misdemeanor, there was no consequence for not paying the fine, which contributed to Bobbitt’s office seeing the same cases come back to court again and again.
Bobbitt said truancy is already on the decline since adding the Misdemeanor 1 option.
A pair of shoes. A jacket. A ride to school. An alarm clock.
Long before a truancy case ends up in Bobbitt’s office, Kimberly Kendrick tries to resolve attendance issues as early as possible. When a student has an unexcused absence, the student services specialist for Patrick County Public Schools looks for barriers a family may need help with.
For elementary students, parent transportation or work schedules are a common obstacle. Rural Patrick County stretches across nearly 500 square miles, so if a student misses the bus in the morning, administrators hustle to figure out a way to get them to school via an extra stop for another bus or pickup by a staff member. Martinsville’s schools do this too, when necessary, but the city spans only about 11 square miles.
For high schoolers, student resistance may be an issue. “They may want to work. They don’t realize the importance of high school,” she said. Some high school students still have anxiety post-COVID.
And sometimes, she said, a student just needs something, like a pair of shoes or a jacket. All Patrick County schools have programs that allow students to take food home as often as daily, and they try to keep hygiene items stocked too. “We try to make sure they have everything they need to be successful.”
Kendrick even keeps alarm clocks on hand for older students. “Can you get yourself up?” she asks them. She even tells students her favorite tip: to put the alarm clock across the room so they can’t hit the snooze button easily in the morning.
When a school schedules an attendance conference with students and their parents, Kendrick tries to follow up with a phone call to explain who will be attending the meeting, so families aren’t surprised when they arrive to find a large group of people. The intent is not to punish parents, she said. Instead, it’s to allow a family to talk about what’s going on at home, and to figure out how the school community might be able to help them.
Patrick County’s truancy team includes social services professionals and the court system, similar to Martinsville’s team.
Kendrick said word has gotten around that the division is serious about absenteeism. “I do think the parents are talking,” she said. No one likes the idea of going to court.
But it’s hard to pick out which facet of the division’s work to improve attendance is having the greatest impact. “I think it’s everything. I think it’s time, consistency, just everything pulling together,” Kendrick said, and boosting awareness of the issue.
She said recognitions for good attendance had fallen by the wayside during COVID closures.
This year, Kendrick is implementing a monthly recognition of the grade level that has the highest attendance. She also wants to start offering brag tags for students who have good attendance. The tags, sort of like a dog tag, would be earned for reaching attendance achievements, and could be worn on their backpack or keychain. At the end of the school year, they could be traded in for rewards.
In Martinsville, the students in the winning house each quarter get brag tags, a new reward this year.
‘Oh. I actually love it!’
Some students may not even realize that fun programs at their school are part of a push to encourage attendance.
Students at Patrick Henry Elementary start each school day with five points as soon as they arrive. Good behavior allows them to keep those points and contribute them to the pot for their house. Perfect attendance for the entire grading period can earn a student 25 points for their house, as can having zero discipline issues.
Students’ house assignment allows them to deepen connections with others across classrooms and grade levels, and fosters relationships with adults across the entire school, not just their own teacher. “We want them to understand how their individual impact can then have ripple effects,” said Cooper, the school principal. Their attendance and behavior is not just impacting their own experience, she said: it’s impacting their entire house.
Students eat lunch each day with their house and might earn points if a teacher spots them cleaning up the cafeteria without being told, for example. Each house meets monthly to celebrate their trait, such as respect or responsibility.
Loba, the house of trust, ran away with the house trophy at the joint meeting on Oct. 17. Fourth and fifth grade students who have earned positions as house leaders joined Cooper on the stage, smacking their knees to create a drumroll as she announced the winner. But each house was recognized with equal fervor. Students sang along with each house’s song, familiar hip-hop melodies with the lyrics replaced.
Loba’s house song urged students to “Step inside and feel our vibe/Where the light shines bright, no need to hide/Loba House of Trustworthy/Where the truth stands tall/Join us in doing our howling call!”
At the end, everyone howled like a wolf, the house’s animal.
Kenyon Jones, a fifth grader in Loba, wasn’t sure what he thought about being assigned to a house last year. He knew houses were a reference to Harry Potter, but he hadn’t seen the movies or read the books.
“But when I actually started to get into it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh. I actually love it!’”
Now Kenyon is a house leader, dressed in shades of violet on house meeting days, helping younger students get comfortable with their new houses and keeping them motivated. And he’s even making new friends. “His name is Dewey. I love him,” Kenyon said of a new friend who just started kindergarten.
When Dewey got sorted into Loba, he wasn’t sure what to do or where to go, Kenyon said. “So I had to guide him to where we were supposed to meet.” He said, “We’ve been friends ever since” and they make a point to say hello whenever they see one another around the school.
“It’s just fun. I don’t have a better word for it. It’s exhausting sometimes, but it’s fun,” Cooper said, explaining that tallying points on a regular basis takes a lot of teamwork among school staff. Cooper swiped her hand over the sequins on her blazer sleeve, changing the metallic tone from rainbow to gold — the color of her house, Alba — and back. “This is so much fun for me, to dress up.”
Patrick Henry also offers a wide variety of teacher-led morning clubs, basketball, board games, gardening, running, and the newest addition, drumline. Students who want to participate in one of those twice-weekly clubs must arrive at school.
Cooper wants her students to want to come to school, and a fun house meeting or a morning club could be the thing that gets them excited to get out the door in the morning. “My thing is I want kids to be seen, heard and loved every single day,” she said.
Martinsville’s other elementary school, Albert Harris, is setting up its house system this year.
