On Monday morning, some 500,000 students in Los Angeles will brush their teeth, zip up their backpacks and don their snazziest outfit as America’s second largest school district kicks off the fall semester.
For many students, the painful memories of COVID and remote learning are starting to fade into the past, but issues including chronic absenteeism and learning loss remain very present. And, longstanding tensions over charter schools resources and school curriculums continue to simmer.
Here are the top five things to watch for at LAUSD this fall:
1. A big push to boost attendance
When the pandemic hit, millions of students across the nation packed up their lockers and left the classroom. But when in-person learning returned, many students did not.
In LAUSD, an urban district with a high concentration of low-income students, around 46% of students were chronically absent in the 2021 to 2022 school year. In California, that rate was around 30% and at a national level it was about 25%, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.
Last academic year, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho made a concerted effort to bring children back to the classroom and successfully decreased chronic absenteeism by 10 percentage points.
“Chronic absenteeism across the country is at its highest levels ever and the recovery in many places is slow,” said Carvalho, on Friday, Aug. 11. “I think we’re moving the needle here at a faster rate.”
Carvalho credits part of the district’s success to its “iAttend” campaign, where staff knocked on 9,000 doors and visited several crisis family housing shelters to encourage students to return to school last academic year.
This fall he is doubling down on these efforts and has an ambitious goal to boost average daily attendance by 5%.
“That 5% will put us back to where we were prior to the pandemic,” said Carvalho. “It will bring in an excess of $300 million in terms of education funding, which we need.” In…
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