Michigan’s students with disabilities and those from low income households are missing more school days than their peers, exacerbating the challenges they already face in catching up after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Michigan Department of Education, for the 2023-24 school year, 29.5% of all students were chronically absent, but the rate was even higher for students with disabilities (37.6%) and low income students (40.1%).
A federal investigation revealed that many Michigan students with disabilities did not receive legally required services during the pandemic.
Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, believes this is due to staff shortages for specialized services.
"We know that special education teachers are hard to come by even in good times. And so we did hear about a lot of staffing challenges across the board, across different types of specializations." Lake explained.
She said this shortfall is continuing to impact these children, many of whom have not yet received compensatory services.
Lake described these findings as part of a broader national problem.
“There's still a lot of unmet needs,” Lake said. “We see that reflected in the data. We also hear it when we talk to parents and students who oftentimes are still really struggling; haven't gotten the help they need.
She said there's still a need for a broader approach that takes into account systemic issues such as transportation, housing, and health care.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Education said there are areas of recent improvement.
"Student attendance in Michigan has improved in the last couple of years — both for the overall student population and for children with disabilities — due to the efforts of our local schools, students, and parents. There are still too many students who are chronically absent, so we need to continue to all work together to remove barriers to attendance so children can learn....Local school districts have engaged in many efforts to improve attendance rates as they emerged from the pandemic and the associated challenges, including, but not limited to, calls to parents, conferences with families, mental health interventions, and even door-to-door outreach to visit students’ homes to help reacclimate children to coming to school more frequently."
