The Choice To Come Together
I applaud the efforts and approach to reducing chronic absenteeism in Paradise County Unified School District. They are looking at factors ranging from diversity in the way children want to be educated or experience education to conditions at home and transportation. They use a “trauma-informed approach” to work with students that seem to provide the individualized support children and their families need.
Chronic absenteeism, which is when a K-12 student misses, “10 percent or more of the school year (equivalent to 18 days out of a 180 day school year) regardless of whether absences are excused or unexcused”, is a symptom of an extremely well-known condition called poverty. It’s a generational epidemic. Poverty is the parent of chronic absence.
Where are all of the Dena Kapsalis’ of the world?
We need more people like her who are willing to support children and families without judgment. People often ask me what it takes to get a child back on track who has been sucked into chronic absenteeism’s abyss. It takes the willingness to do any and everything to raise awareness, triage the cause, and provide the acute care necessary to address a child’s chronic absenteeism. Much like any other chronic symptoms, we have to bypass traditional practices and be creative to save the life of a child.
Since doing whatever it takes to eradicate chronic absence seems to require that we do the same for poverty, it doesn’t surprise me that there has been very little support for the movement to end the crisis. Policymakers point at the issue and they deal with it like it’s a homeless encampment that the police force to move from one block but it pops up on another block and…repeat.
All Talk — No Resources
Just like homelessness, chronic absenteeism stems from poverty and until we are willing to apply our best outside-the-box thinking to address it, our children will be doomed to the same fate as the nearly 2.3 million people locked up in US prisons today. Pointing it out doesn’t make it go away but putting their money where their mouth is a step in the right direction.
This article also reminded me that the chronic absence crisis is not simply isolated to one racial group or geographic location. It’s neither a black or white thing nor an urban or rural thing. It is a socio-economic thing. Sometimes when you are in your bubble doing this work, it is easy to feel like you are alone in the fight, which tends to make us ignore or disregard the courageous efforts of our counterparts in other regions of the state or country because the problem doesn’t always appear to be the same, but it is the same.
Rather than highlighting the differences in communities facing this crisis, I think that it is time to focus on the commonalities. When looking at the most common factors linked to chronic absence, we can clearly see that nearly every one of them relate to the student’s socio-economic conditions. We can combat the crisis together. We can make the choice to eliminate the otherness and in turn see value in the best practices others have discovered.
Nyeisha Dewitt is the Founder and CEO of Oakland Natives Give Back Fund, Inc. Her passion for education and better choices in communities stems from her own background. Nyeisha struggled in school, dropping out before graduation. The birth of her children propelled her to make a new choice about her own education. She went on the achieve her doctorate degree in Organization and Leadership. When her mother passed away, Nyeisha was compelled to return to the very community she had grown up in to give back to the place her mother loved. She founded Oakland Natives Give Back, a non-profit working to improve the lives of Oakland children. She began the mission by working with the city to provide 900 backpacks and school supplies to local children. She self-funded her company’s flagship event for many years because it did not receive support. That event has been delivering supplies to children in need for over 12 years and has now given children over 19,000 backpacks and school supply kits. Through her volunteer work, she began to uncover the greatest crack in the foundation of a child’s success, chronic absenteeism. As a dropout and an educator, Nyeisha tackles the challenges of chronic absenteeism in a way very few people have the experience to understand. She persevered in her efforts to be a reliable and consistent resource that the community has grown to count on. Nyeisha is a cornerstone of Oakland’s culture and a national expert on how communities overcome chronic absenteeism.
