MARSHALL — The number of students missing class at Marshall High School has grown in the years after the COVID pandemic, MHS staff said this week. MHS’s attendance rates are better than the state average, said Principal Brian Jones.

“But it’s still nowhere near where it used to be,” he said.

Jones and Emily Snyder, BARR (Building Assets Reducing Risks) coordinator at MHS, talked about student absenteeism during a presentation at Monday’s Marshall School Board meeting. It was one of the issues the BARR program wanted to focus on this year, they said.

“After COVID, we’ve seen such a huge increase of students missing school. If we look at the 2017-18 school year, we only had 88 students who were defined as chronically absent,” Jones said. The federal government defines being “chronically absent” as missing 10% or more of school time in a year, he said. “As of March 1 this year, we had 193 students who had missed 10% or more.”

Jones said that figure worked out to about 22% of MHS students.

“We thought that was really bad,” he said. However, the state average for chronic absenteeism was running around 30%, he said. “The national average is slightly higher than that.”

In order to help reduce student absences, MHS staff and administrators needed to try and find the root causes, Jones said.

“The last two weeks, we’ve been really digging into that,” said Marshall Superintendent Jeremy Williams.

Jones said MHS has looked at student demographic data like ethnicity, and whether more male or female students were missing school. So far, he said, there wasn’t a specific group of students most impacted by absences. They would also need to break the absence data down by grade, to figure out if the BARR program was helping make a difference for school attendance.

Besides student attendance, Jones and Snyder also talked about how MHS teachers were working with BARR, and the future of the program.

Working with students, and tracking academic performance data, adds “quite a bit” to BARR teacher’s duties, Snyder said.

“Teachers are in charge of tracking data for the students that are assigned to them each week. That means looking at their grades every week, looking at their attendance, checking their missing assignments, checking in with them to make sure they’ve caught up … making plans with those students on how they’re going to get caught up, all sorts of things like that,” she said.

Although it’s a lot of work, teachers are also able to connect with each other, and get to know more ninth-grade students each year, she said.

“It has made such a huge difference,” she said.

School board member Sara Brink said the BARR team helps students make the transition from middle to high school, which isn’t easy.

“It’s a great program. I’ve seen it personally work,” she said.

In addition to working with student improvement, Jones and Snyder said the BARR team at the high school are looking ahead at the future of the program as its grant cycle comes to an end.

“We really are in a transition period as we transition from the grant to the district really moving to a self-funding model,” Jones said. Staff want to keep the program going, he and Snyder said.