Hartford Courant Opinion: Chronic absenteeism in CT schools has lasting effects on children

Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune

In the Nutmeg State, chronic absenteeism in the 2021-22 school year was 23.7 percent or more than 115,000 students — more than double the 10.4 percent before the pandemic

Like states across the country, Connecticut received federal dollars — $1.7 billion of the $190 billion doled out — to help reverse learning loss stemming from COVID.

Some 50 million K-12 students were shifted from the classroom to the home room — quite literally — using online learning.  The result: chronic absenteeism.

In the Nutmeg State, chronic absenteeism in the 2021-22 school year was 23.7 percent or more than 115,000 students — more than double the 10.4 percent before the pandemic. This past school year wasn’t much better: 20 percent chronic absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism will have lasting effects — from poor academic performance to lower graduation rates to reduced earnings potential to decreased workplace productivity.

Despite this diminished participation and lower levels of engagement, over 70 percent of lower-income GenZers say that online learning is their preferred method of learning.

Clearly there is a disconnect between system-delivered online education and GenZ student expectations.

Our experience at Girls With Impact is very different. Not only did young women 14-24 years of age from underrepresented communities continue to register for our online business and innovation training programs in increasing numbers during the pandemic, but they stuck with it, engaged, learned a lot, produced stellar results, and raved about their experience.

Classes, tuition-free for most, were instructor-led and delivered live, online. Those instructors, using Zoom and our proprietary curriculum, guided students from ideation to discovery to broad business learning to product pitch.

Despite limited prior exposure to business learning, to the essentials of entrepreneurship, and to the foundational “power skills” that are critical to success, even those from underserved communities engage and thrive.

The key is to find a way to capture students’ imagination at the outset of a course, help them build on their innate, underdeveloped capabilities, and give them an opportunity to find their passion within the context of the course itself.

One student, Lucy Kassel, compared her experience with her school’s online learning with that of Girls With Impact. “In school, online learning was a terrible experience. I’ve never loved Zoom classes because I felt like my teachers didn’t know me and I couldn’t get to know my classmates.”

Lucy adds that after giving the GWI course a try, “I realized that it was incredibly different from the experience at school: I felt a connection with my teacher and my peers. My teacher gave me a lot of personal attention, and amazing feedback on not just my final project, but every assignment I submitted. Taking the GWI course inspired me to create two small business of my own, that I still run to this day. One is a small cupcake business and the other is a craft business.”

In addition to an engaging online curriculum and expert and involved instructors, we capture real-time data and insights on our students to evolve our programming and ensure that we are serving the needs of this community, preparing them effectively to excel in college, career and entrepreneurship, and deliver real value to the institutions and organizations that recruit them.

What are some of the things we learned about effective online programming over the years?

• Give the students a framework for ideation to spur innovation skills they didn’t know they had.  When asked about her enthusiasm to start GWI, Bridgeport student Maya Rose said, “Because this is my idea, not someone else’s.”

• Encourage and support their work with regular positive reinforcement to build confidence, both during and after classes.

• Employ instructors that look like them and come from similar backgrounds, those with whom they can relate as role models for their future. “The fact that my GWI instructor was Black was tremendously motivating,” said Shian Earlington, 21, from Hartford.

• Provide robust opportunities for them to engage with each other in class and between classes to find ways to strengthen their work. This both increases persistence and overall engagement, while building one of the top skills employers are seeking in new hires: collaboration.
  These “best practices” can be applied to online offerings from our K-12 and post-secondary educational systems to give our students the opportunity to succeed; in particular, for the most underserved in our country. Let’s learn from programs like these and apply approaches that will ensure that students stay in school, learn more, and deliver more value to the U.S. economy.

Jennifer Openshaw is CEO of Connecticut-based Girls With Impact (girlswithimpact.org), a 501c3 that has  prepared over 16,000 young women for the workplace. To view the article, click here.