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Maine school districts are still trying to get students back in classrooms five days a week

Maine school districts are still trying to get students back in classrooms five days a week

In the wake of the pandemic, Maine school districts continue to work to get students back into classrooms five days a week.

Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in western Maine has introduced a model program that appears to be getting kids back into the classroom.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 18 or more days of the school year. Here, after the pandemic, it increased to over 50%. It has now dropped to just over 30%.

For students like Julie Button, there have been more tangible changes.

“People stopped bullying me so much,” Button said.

Button, currently a participant in the automotive technology program, stated that during her freshman year she had a hard time getting out of bed, which caused her to miss a lot of school. But now it’s better.

“I had a friend who told me that in seventh grade, people talked a lot about me and what I wore. But they stopped because they thought I was confident. Someone told me I was inspired by them,” she said.

Oxford Hills High School in South Paris.

Karol Bukiet

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Public in Maine

Oxford Hills High School in South Paris.

First-year students became the subject of a model program at Oxford Hills called Building Assets, Reducing Risk (BARR). It is designed to help teachers connect with students in ways they wouldn’t be able to in the classroom, establish regular communication with students’ families, and even visit their homes.

“We do home visits,” said Alicia Sadler, dean of students. “Sometimes this can be the most effective intervention we can provide. We tell them: ‘We are here because we care.’

Sadler said barriers that keep ninth-grade students from going to school include anxiety and depression, home instability, food and transportation insecurity.

“We have families that I communicate with every day. And families with whom I have difficulty communicating who may warrant a home visit to discuss with the family the level of support we can provide not only to the student but also to the family,” she said.

School officials say that before BARR was implemented, 70% of freshmen earned six credits in their first year of high school, and data suggests that these students were more likely to graduate on time. Since BARR was founded, the percentage of students earning six credits in their first year has increased to 90%, which administrators say shows they are attending the school.

But other schools aren’t doing so well. The state reports that 27% of Maine students were chronically absent from class last year.

Jayne Bristol's college math and algebra dual classes at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School. He says attendance is good.

Karol Bukiet

/

Public in Maine

Jayne Bristol’s college math and algebra dual classes at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School. He says attendance is good.

This is a nationwide problem, according to Dr. Tom Świderski, an education policy researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“We also see that this phenomenon occurs in all towns in the district in the state. It is neither urban nor rural. It happens to everyone,” Świderski said.

And Świderski said that every year the student’s chronic absence significantly hinders his recovery.

“By adding these absences over time and showing that this number of students have at least 100 absences over a 3-year period, which we did not see before the pandemic. Year after year, the persistence of this problem makes recovery more difficult because students experience it collectively,” he said.

For junior Julie Button, school is no longer a place to avoid on bad days, but rather a bridge to the next chapter in her life.

“When I finish school, I want to work in a garage,” Button said. “I heard you can make a lot of money doing this.”

The BARR model is not new. It has been taking place in Maine schools on a limited scale for 15 years. Currently, nearly 100 schools in Maine are successfully using the BARR model, and the state has received approval to extend federal funding to maintain BARR support mechanisms in these schools for another year.