Council Member Wong asks about chronic absenteeism and Portrait readiness

I want to turn it over to my friend and colleague, Councilmember Wong.

Who keeps track of a student attendance?

Raise your hand.

My first question to the panel.

You ought to.

Good.

Okay.

It's...

Okay, good.

Here's my question.

First question.

It's very disturbing for me to see that such high rates of chronic absenteeism.

And this concerns me because COVID is over many, many years ago.

And then we're looking at numbers that are...

That are far higher than the figures I've seen during COVID.

And when you say portrait of a student, portrait of a graduate, you know, that's the first thing come to my mind.

You know, do they go, do they show up for school?

What is being done on that?

Because I find that we're not doing enough to get kids to go to school.

Please answer.

Anybody?

Yeah, sure.

I'll jump in just to say all of this matters the most when we have our children in school with us for so many reasons.

Deputy Chancellor Flavia Puello-Perdomo helps lead attendance and addressing chronic absenteeism.

All of our districts have attendance leads, and we have in our schools designated folks that help.

Keep a real practices, attendance teams.

We have now the school avoidance liaisons.

started this year.

We have many structures in our schools to connect closely with families, to help get at

some of the root causes of what's keeping our children out of school, and helping support families to, to the extent possible, remediate any challenges of getting children to school.

In partnership with them.

So do you have a theory on these high, high chronic absenteeism figures?

I think the theory for our chronic absenteeism is multifaceted.

I think it is around...

So just a wide variety of different criteria, such as, you know, we have.

So it will take a while to analyze the reasons.

Well, we have.

We have.

I just don't have our attendance data with us right now.

I'll follow up with this.

Yeah.