Millions of students have gone missing in the past year.
It’s not kidnapping or alien abductions. It’s just truancy. They’re not logging into the daily Zoom classes. And they’re not showing up at the schoolhouse. Administrators aren’t able to track down their whereabouts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many fear they’ll never be able to find these students again.
As many as 3 million children have been missing from school since March 2020. Most were already at-risk, meaning that they live in underserved communities or struggle with academic disabilities. The lockdowns pushed these at-risk children over the edge, says Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit organization that released a study detailing how the educational system has failed its vulnerable student population throughout the pandemic.
This failure isn’t exclusive to just one state. All over the country, public schools have simply given up on students who don’t show up for virtual classes. In Washington, D.C., a recent back-to-school family survey found that 60% of students lacked the technological devices necessary to participate in remote learning successfully. In Los Angeles, nearly 20% of at-risk students didn’t access the district’s educational materials for three months straight. And in Michigan, more than 13,000 students failed to reenroll this past fall and remain fully unaccounted for, according to state Superintendent Michael Rice. Yet, each of these districts remains closed to in-person instruction.
Unfortunately, many of these students will never return to the classroom, even when schools do reopen. Those who do will face serious academic setbacks that might lead them to drop out again. Statistically, they’re already dropouts. Study after study proves that students who stop showing up to school for extended periods of time end up leaving school again, even after being brought back. They almost never graduate.
Instead of setting children up for success, the public school system has set millions of students up for failure. And the worst part is that the administrators and teachers who are a part of this system know exactly what’s happening, but refuse to do the one thing they could do to get students back on track: reopen their classrooms.
