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Where are they?
City educators are scrambling to find what some officials fear are 150,000 or more kids who have not yet set foot in school — and others who don’t show up on a given day.
“Reach out to every absent student every day,” the Department of Education instructed principals last week in a memo obtained by The Post.
Schools were told to follow up daily with each missing kid until they nail down the reason why he or she has not shown up — whether for one day or not at all.
“Outreach to families may include phone calls, text messages, postcards, and where possible, home visits,” the memo says.
In another urgent missive, principals told staffers that all schools with more than 20 percent of students absent will get weekly visits from DOE higher-ups — a dreaded occurrence. “We cannot continue in this direction,” one administrator warned.
“No one wants a visit from central when we’re understaffed and missing most of our paras (classroom aides who serve kids with special needs],” a teacher said, referring to a personnel crunch since the vaccine mandate took effect Oct. 4.
“I think they’re getting a lot of pressure to make things look normal when we aren’t being given the tools and staffing we need to be normal for the students.”
The directives went out a day after the City Council’s education committee held an oversight hearing to get answers on COVID-19 testing in schools, quarantines and student attendance.
Brooklyn Councilman Mark Treyger, the education committee chairman, said he had heard from contacts that some 150,000 students “have not come into a building” since classes started Sept. 13.
“Does that sound right?” Treyger asked LaShawn Robinson, the DOE’s deputy chancellor for School Climate and Wellness.
Robinson called that figure “unofficially, far from accurate,” but she did not give a better number. “We’re focused on every student, every day.” she said. Treyger, who has urged the DOE to offer families a remote instruction option, also hit a brick wall when asking First Deputy Chancellor Donald Conyers how many students are attending city schools.
“I don’t have that number to give you,” replied Conyers, the DOE’s second-in-command to Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter, who did not testify.
In the same hearing, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said he believes as many as 180,000 city kids may not have come to school at all, and called for greater efforts to reach them.
Blasting the DOE’s lack of transparency, he charged, “They have an attendance figure for every day. They know how many kids didn’t show up. They are hiding this.”
Anxiety over COVID-19 is at least partly to blame for students skipping school, a Brooklyn teacher told The Post. “Parents keep kids home a lot on unofficial quarantine like when cousins are exposed at other schools. They don’t care about the DOE’s quarantine rules.”
After the hearing, the DOE again refused to disclose the raw number of students currently enrolled in its 1,600 schools.
The city reported a total 955,490 children in Pre-K through high school in the fall of 2020. That was down from 1,002,201 the year before, a loss of 46,711 students, according to the Independent Budget Office.
But enrollment may have slipped further during the turbulent 2020-21 school year, when two-thirds of students were instructed remotely and in-person attendance was low.
Officials should give the facts they know instead of “vague and offhand dismissals of public concern,” said David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor.
“The DOE’s refusal to provide accurate enrollment and attendance figures is not only frustrating, but adds to public distrust.”
DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer promised the agency will cough up some answers soon.
“We’ll be providing preliminary enrollment data after rolls close at the end of the month,” he said Friday. “We’ve never done that before, but we are committing to getting it done.”
Officials said DOE rosters at the start of every school year include students who have moved or enrolled in different schools — which must be confirmed before they are discharged.
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