GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – According to a recent report, more Wisconsin students were chronically absent during the last school year.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction says, by definition, a student is chronically absent if the student was enrolled for at least 90 days and attended less than 90% of the days during which they were enrolled.
The absenteeism rate is the rate of students who were chronically absent out of the total number of students who were enrolled for at least 90 days.
In the 2020-2021 school year, the statewide absenteeism rate was 16.1%. That’s compared to 12.9% in both the 2019-2020 and 2018-2019 school years.
In the Green Bay Area Public School District, the absenteeism rate ticked up last school year too.
“I guess I’m not completely surprised by that. We knew that our students were starting to exhibit a lot of fatigue when it came to going online and joining whether it’s a Google Classroom or a Zoom meet. I think all of us were getting a little tired of it toward the end of the pandemic,” Green Bay Area Public Schools director of secondary schools Judy Wiegand said.
In the 2020-2021 school year, the Green Bay schools absenteeism rate was 37.5%.
It was 19.5% in the 2019-2020 school year, and 19.7% in the 2018-2019 school year.
Graduation rates dropped slightly as well.
Statewide, the graduation rate was 89.5% for the 2020-2021 school year, 90.4% for the 2019-2020 school year and 90% for the 2018-2019 school year.
In the Green Bay schools, the graduation rate was 87.1% the 2020-2021 school year, 88.9% for the 2019-2020 school year and 85.9% for the 2018-2019 school year.
“So we knew when we were in the pandemic that our graduation rates were certainly going to take a bit of a hit. So when the last report card came out, not to say that we were pleasantly surprised, but it was down a little bit. But still down. So we knew that coming out of the pandemic that we were going to have to put some additional supports in to help students when it comes to recovering credits.”
Wiegand says the district lowered its graduation requirements for the 2020-2021 school year from 22 credits to the state minimum, which is 15.
“We asked the board for special permission to go with the state graduation requirements to help more students graduate which was helpful for us because we could see that we didn’t have that big of a dip. Then going into the next year of the pandemic, we said what can we do when it comes to more of a tiered response. So actually we went from just the 15 until this year, for 21-22 they’ll have to have 17.5 credits, and then next year 20 credits. So the year after that we’ll be back up to our full 22 credits.”
Wiegand says district administrators have seen improvements in student engagement this school year.
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