State Legislature rejects new truancy plan

Published 9:55 pm Friday, April 15, 2011

SEATTLE — A plan to reduce state school aid to districts with low attendance has died a quick death in the Legislature after experts, education groups and Gov. Chris Gregoire said the idea would just create new challenges for the state’s poorest districts.

Budgeting according to how many kids are in school every day is an approach that has been tried in a handful of other states, but mostly as an incentive for improving attendance. The plan presented earlier this week in the state Senate budget would have subtracted money from schools with poor attendance.

A national group that tracks the relationship between seat time and academic achievement said the proposal may result in better attendance in small schools, but Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, notes that it could backfire on the schools with the highest number of poor kids.

“I like the fact that schools are motivated to pay attention to attendance,” Chang said. What she doesn’t like is giving school districts that serve large numbers of low income kids fewer resources to meet high education challenges.

The state budget under discussion in the Washington Senate estimated the state could save $95 million by adopting a new attendance policy that requires districts to report average daily attendance, with monthly state education payments distributed according to those numbers.

Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said Friday the idea was being pulled from the budget.

“There was so much opposition to it and no support,” said McAuliffe, D-Bothell. She said the idea has been floated unsuccessfully in the Legislature at least three times over the past 20 years, but she’s not giving up entirely.

But while the truancy budget cut has been scraped, budget writers still needed to fill in the $95 million left over. On Friday afternoon, they revealed a plan to push state payments for school bus maintenance forward a few years, instead of yearly payments to school districts. Gregoire had proposed a similar idea in her December budget proposal.

McAuliffe plans to spend some time before the next legislative session looking at other states that use similar systems and find out what’s working to improve attendance.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn says the $95 million savings would come out of the budgets of the schools that need the money most.

“Whether a kid is truant or is sick, you still have to have a teacher for that student, you have to have books,” Dorn said.

An alternative idea from Rep. Jim Probst, D-Vancouver, to reward school districts for improving graduation rates may now gain some more momentum.

“Left unchecked the state budget will almost certainly cause our dropout rate to go up after years of holding fairly steady. That’s unacceptable to me,” Probst said. “I think it’s a state fiscal imperative, a moral imperative and an economic imperative to get our graduation rates up.”

House Bill 1599 would set aside $4.8 million as an incentive fund for districts that improve their graduation rates. The measure was passed by the House and made it all the way to the floor of the Senate but hasn’t come up for a vote. The idea could resurface during the budget debate.

Seattle Public Schools estimates the Senate attendance proposal could have cost it between $2.1 and $5.1 million a year — as much as 1 percent of the annual budget of the state’s largest district.

District spokeswoman Teresa Wippel said Seattle schools do whatever they can to reach out to chronically absent children and their families, including home visits.

“As budgets get tighter, it’s sometimes those kinds of programs that are harder to fund,” she added. Taking money away from the district because of poor attendance isn’t likely to make those decisions any easier, Wippel said.

Seven states use average daily attendance as a way to direct state dollars: California, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, New York and Texas, according to a 2010 study of state attendance policies by the Colorado Children’s Campaign. Those states count students in class every day and do not treat excused and unexcused absences differently.

Another 16 states also count kids every day, but include absent kids as part of the count, and only take money away when students drop out.

California has used its daily counts as part of an incentive program to encourage better attendance. Palm Springs, for example, got more than a thousand kids to come to school more often in order to bring in state bonus dollars, Chang said.

Washington school districts have made some progress over the past decade improving attendance. Dorn says the poor economy gets some of the credit for that improvement.

“Districts are trying to hang onto to every (student) possible,” he said.

The state already distributes the bulk of its school dollars according to a monthly count of school attendance, he explained. The rest of the money is distributed according to a formula that says a certain number of teachers is needed for every thousand students.