Chronic Absenteeism remains extremely high in districts across Wisconsin

Milwaukee still the worst while Elkhorn shows how to keep kids in school

Years after the pandemic, chronic student absenteeism rates remain distressingly high across much of Wisconsin in both large urban districts like Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Beloit and smaller places like Bayfield, Washburn, Crandon and Butternut, according to new figures for the school year 2022-23 released by the Department of Public Instruction.

Districts like Elkhorn that kept students in class during the pandemic, meanwhile, are proving they made the right call — and continuing to help kids flourish by making sure they show up.

The chronic absenteeism rate during the 2022-23 school year for Wisconsin as a whole was 20%.

Elkhorn had a chromic absenteeism rate of only 3% during the 2022-23 school year — one of the 15 lowest rates in the entire state.

Milwaukee’s rate, Wisconsin’s highest, was 50% that same year — down from 58% during the 2021-22 school year but considerably higher than rates of 34% and 37% in the years immediately prior.

MPS — which is asking voters to approve a referendum on April 2 that would eventually enable the district to collect another $252 in revenue per year — has not responded to questions in recent weeks about either its high absenteeism problem or the fact that 21 of its schools are, at best, only half full of students.

The Badger Institute again submitted questions to MPS asking why the absenteeism numbers are so high, whether the pandemic had anything to do with it and what the district is doing to address the problem but did not get a response by our deadline.

Milwaukee appears to be paying the price for locking kids out of schools for extended periods of time during the pandemic. The district closed its schools and then moved online in the spring of 2020, remained online for much of the 2020-21 school year, and returned to in-person learning for the most part in April 2021. Some schools returned to virtual learning at times after that because three cases could close an entire school.

The Elkhorn Area School District took the opposite approach.

Other than the period of time in which the state forced them to shut down, Elkhorn was fully closed for only two days, according to District Administrator Jason Tadlock.

“We may have been the only high school in the country that did not cancel prom,” he said.

The district already had a virtual charter school when the pandemic hit and was able to quickly transfer hundreds of additional kids online in the early days of COVID. But there are well over 3,000 students in the district and most never got in the habit of not going to school every day. The district, according to Tadlock, “didn’t stray far from that traditional model.”

Today, Elkhorn has four social workers in the district, two of whom are technically employed by the county and one of whom is focused exclusively on attendance. Administrators are known to make house calls for kids who are absent, many of whom experience anxiety. Attendance is one of the “life skills” the district emphasizes.

DPI defines chronic absenteeism as the number of students who missed more than 10% of possible attendance days divided by the total number of students enrolled for at least 90 days. It’s unclear why so many MPS students are missing — or skipping — school, partly because attendance reporting to DPI does not differentiate between “excused” and “unexcused” absences.

Rep. Bob Donovan, whose district includes part of Milwaukee, cited the chronic absenteeism numbers — which he referred to as truancy — as one of the reasons he called for a state audit of the MPS district this week. 

He noted in a letter to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee that the district-wide 58% chronic absenteeism figure for 2021-22 was “staggering” and that “fifteen schools recorded chromic absenteeism rates greater than 90%.”

This is a “huge issue,” he said in an interview with the Badger Institute. “We have a number of schools (in the MPS district) with a truancy rate somewhere around 90%. That is just unbelievable. First, they are not getting an education but they are also out doing other things.

“We need to explore exactly what is going on with truancy rates. When you have thousands and thousands of kids truant, we have a problem here.”

Many of the districts with the highest chronic absenteeism rates in Wisconsin are large urban and/or poor districts. The Bayfield School District, which encompasses the sprawling and largely impoverished reservation of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, had the second highest chronic absenteeism rate in the state, 45%. The Beloit, Racine, Madison and Green Bay districts all had rates over 30%.

Matt Ladner, senior advisor for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, calls the high absenteeism rates in Milwaukee and elsewhere “catastrophic.”

Many of the Wisconsin school districts with the lowest chronic absenteeism rates are small — places like Raymond, Argyle, Cornell and Minocqua, all of which have under 1,000 students and chronic absenteeism rates under 2%. But there are also relatively large districts, places like Holman and the Elkhorn Area School District, that have found ways to keep kids in class.

Mike Nichols is the President of the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.