Thousands of Macon students regularly absent from school. How district tries to stop it.

Reality Check is a Telegraph series digging deeper into key issues and focusing on accountability. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email mynews@macon.com.

The sight of empty desks is not a new issue for the Bibb County School District.

Yet school officials remain determined to reduce the number of absences and get students back in classrooms amid districtwide attendance concerns. For the 2023-2024 academic year, 28.6% of roughly 21,500 public school students in Macon were chronically absent, said Jamie Cassady, the district’s assistant superintendent of student affairs. Chronically absent is defined as missing 10% or more days of the school year, regardless of the reason.

It’s a slight decrease compared to the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years, where the district saw 30% of chronically absent students both times, Cassady added.

For the upcoming school year, Cassady said the district will focus on addressing the long-standing issue through its current implementation of attendance procedures.

Bibb County Truancy Task Force

The Bibb County School District’s attendance protocol adheres to the Georgia Compulsory Attendance Law, requiring parents to enroll their children ages 6 through 16 in school programs and defining truancy as five or more unexcused absences.

The district’s attendance procedure begins with teachers contacting parents when a student has one to three absences, Cassady said. School counselors get involved after the third consecutive absence.

Social workers begin to make home visits if a student is absent for more than seven days. Students who miss more than 10 days are referred to the district’s truancy task force — the second-to-last checkpoint for compliance.

The district’s truancy task force is a partnership between the office of the solicitor-general, the Macon-Bibb Health Department, the Department of Juvenile Justice and other local entities to mitigate truancy and hold parents accountable for the attendance of their children.

“The task force’s first purpose is to identify and eliminate any household barriers that may be causing a student to repeatedly miss school,” Cassady said.

Interventions through the county’s school board can include assisting with IEPs for children with special needs, aiding in transportation services, providing resources for the homeless and more, Assistant Solicitor-General Kristen Murphy said in an email.

All Bibb County schools use a collaborative approach of attendance teams and social work departments that give chronically absent students and their families resources, Superintendent Dan Sims said at a school board meeting in mid-May.

The task force, which meets twice a month, also identifies if a parent and a student has violated the state’s attendance law, Cassady added.

Other ways to reduce truancy in Macon

Absenteeism in the Bibb County School District reflects an ongoing national trend of students straying away from classrooms and falling behind academically, Cassady said. Education experts attribute the lingering toll of the pandemic on student achievement.

But the school system’s attendance problem dates back years before the pandemic happened, according to The Telegraph archives. Over 50% of Macon-Bibb students had more than five unexcused absences during the 2014-2015 academic year. That statistic declined to 41.2% in 2015-16 — around the time the truancy task force was created.

Cassady said the district is considering more proactive methods to break the trend.

“Tackling truancy starts with making sure that we create a positive school culture—one that’s engaging and where the kids want to come to school,” Cassady said. “We’re also working on building relationships with the students and their families.”

Schools also send home attendance reports with students that reflect how many days they have missed, what lesson plans they have missed and where they stand academically, he said.

“I think one of the biggest issues with parents is that they don’t understand the impact that missing a day has on students academically,” Cassady said. “Missing a day, or two days, a month may not sound like much to parents, but when they add up over the course of the year, you turn around and the kid is missing a year of education.”

Holding parents accountable

Georgia law requires that children 15 years old or younger attend 180 days of school unless there’s a valid reason to miss. Failure to comply can result in a fine, community service, or jail time for parents.

Test Prep recently conducted a comprehensive study of 3,000 parents and found that 54% of Georgians support the idea of fines as a deterrent against student absenteeism, with an average suggested fine of $22 per day. The remaining 44% of participants who opposed fines had concerns about the potential unfairness to parents from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds.

Cassady and Murphy described the Bibb County Solicitor-General’s Office as the school district’s “last resort” for addressing chronic absences, as they try hard to avoid judicial involvement.

The Bibb County Solicitor-General’s Office received 59 referred cases from the Bibb County Board of Education for parent prosecution between January 2021 and June 2024, Murphy said. Less than one-third of the office’s cases go all the way through the trial process and end in a conviction or guilty plea, she added.

For those cases, the sentence is almost always the minimum fine of $25 per count and the maximum probation term of 30 days per count, she added. The fines can be converted to community service hours for parents who cannot afford to pay.

“For some parents, the possibility of paying fines and being placed on probation provides the needed motivation to move past whatever hurdles have kept them from having their child(ren) regularly attend school,” she said in an email. “The promise of a dismissal of the charges is often used as a sort-of ‘carrot’ to dangle as an incentive to get into compliance.”