School districts in Maine are still trying to get students back into the classroom five days a week

In the wake of the pandemic, school districts in Maine are still trying to get students back into the classroom five days a week.

Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in western Maine has created a model program that looks to get kids back into the classroom.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 18 or more days in a school year. Here it shot up to more than 50% after the pandemic. Now it is just over 30%.

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

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

Button, now a junior in the automotive technology program, said it was difficult to get out of bed in the morning when she was a freshman, causing her to miss a lot of school. But now things are better.

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

Freshmen have become the focus of a model program at Oxford Hills called “Building Assets, Reducing Risks,” or BARR. It is designed to help teachers connect with students in ways they might not be able to do during class, communicate regularly with students’ families, and even go to their homes.

“We do home visits,” said Alicia Sadler, dean of students. “It can sometimes be the most impactful intervention we can provide. We say to them, ‘We’re here because we care.’”

Sadler said anxiety and depression, instability at home, food insecurity and transportation are among the barriers keeping students out of school.

“We have families that I communicate with on a daily basis. And families that I have difficulty communicating with that may warrant a home visit to talk to the family about the level of support we can provide, not just to the student, but to the family as well” , she said.

School officials say that before BARR was implemented, 70% of freshmen had completed six credits in their first year of high school, and data showed that these students were more likely to graduate on time. Since BARR’s inception, the number of students completing six credits in their first year has increased to 90% — proof, administrators say, that they are coming to school.

But other schools are not doing so well. The state reports that 27% of Maine students were chronically absent last year.

According to Dr. Tom Swiderski, an education policy research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, it is a national problem.

“You also see it happening in all places within a county in a state. It’s not urban or rural. It happens in all of them,” Swiderski said.

And Swiderski said every year a student is chronically absent makes it that much harder for them to recover.

“By adding up those absences over time and showing that this number of students are experiencing a hundred or more absences in three years, which we weren’t seeing before the pandemic. Each year that this problem continues, it becomes more difficult to recover because students experience this cumulatively,” he said.

For junior Julie Button, school is now less a place to avoid on bad days and more a bridge to her next life chapter.

“When I get out of school I’d like to work in a garage,” Button said. “I heard you can make a lot of money doing that.”

The BARR model is not new. It has had a limited presence in Maine schools for 15 years. Now, nearly 100 schools in Maine are using the BARR model successfully, and the state has received approval for an extension of federal funding to maintain BARR support mechanisms in those schools for another year.