Six of 10 public high school students in the District of Columbia were “chronically absent” in the 2022-23 school year as high levels of mental health complaints, disease fears and safety concerns outlasted the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
In its annual report released Friday with city officials, the D.C. Policy Center found that even as many city teenagers missed at least 10% of the academic year, the high school graduation rate rose from 68% in 2018-19 to 76% in 2022-23. The latter was the first full year of in-person learning after the pandemic.
Truancy rates were highest among low-income students. Before COVID-19, the nonprofit think tank said, about 24% of all K-12 students were chronically absent, which the public schools defined as missing up to 20% of each school day.
In 2022-23, the schools changed that definition to count students who missed up to 40% of each school day. The center found the number of chronically absent K-12 students rose to 44% under that metric.
“Students are taking time off when they don’t feel good [mentally or physically], which did not happen before,” Yesim Sayin, head of the D.C. Policy Center, told The Washington Times. “There’s a greater sense that being in school is not as important as before. If they’re not going to school, it undermines the investments we’re making.”
Elected officials increased the District’s education budget from $1.7 billion in fiscal 2019 to $2.7 billion in fiscal 2024, which ends Sept. 30.
The D.C. Policy Center also conducted a series of focus groups with local students, teachers and parents.
Chelsea Coffin, director of the center’s education policy initiative, said some participating teens expressed persistent concerns about school safety.
“We heard from students about the importance of feeling safe on their way to school and on campus to engage in learning,” Ms. Coffin said.
The report comes as growing numbers of teenagers have become involved in the surge of carjackings, shootings and retail theft sprees in the Washington area over the past year.
Most of the suspects the Metropolitan Police Department arrested in reported carjackings last year were juveniles. That included 13 of 16 people arrested in June and 14 out of 19 collared in July.
According to the office of Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn, public schools referred 288 cases of students with 15 straight unexcused absences to the D.C. Attorney General last year. None resulted in prosecutions.
The report released Friday found that 6% of students received at least one out-of-school suspension in 2022-23.
It also found that fewer D.C. high school students applied for college last year than before COVID and that teenagers failed to make up pandemic-era learning losses in math and reading scores.
At a press conference releasing the new report, Mr. Kihn highlighted positive enrollment numbers in the most recent school year.
Total D.C. Public Schools enrollment from pre-kindergarten through high school grew by 2% year over year to 88,258 students in 2022-23, the first increase since the pandemic began.
Preliminary numbers show enrollment for the current 2023-24 school year increased another 2.2% to 98,663 students.
“Enrollment is an incredibly important sign of the strength of our system,” Mr. Kihn said. “We are so proud that we’ve now seen two years of historic enrollment increases across the entire public school system, including this year.”
Council member Christina Henderson, an at-large independent and former D.C. Public Schools employee, said Thursday that recent enrollment increases have come from an uptick of immigrants in the District.
The city’s public schools do not report the number of immigrant students they serve because administrators do not ask for documentation.
“With the migrant crisis, we’re a very transient city,” Ms. Henderson told The Times.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.