Attendance rate climbs at RFSD schools

Roaring Fork School District Superintendent Anna Cole speaks during Wednesday night’s board of education meeting. The district saw a jump in attendance rate last year but is shy of its stated attendance goal. Roaring Fork School District saw a return to pre-pandemic plateaus for student attendance last school year but is still short of its stated goal.

At Wednesday night’s board of education meeting, RFSD Superintendent Anna Cole and Assistant Superintendent and Chief Academic Officer Stacey Park gave a presentation that showed a student attendance rate of 92% last year. “Attendance really matters and time in class really matters for student achievement,” Park said. “If the students are not there, then they are not able to participate in learning.



” Park also noted that attendance is important for student safety; knowing the whereabouts of a student helps the family and the school in the case of an emergency. The district displayed data that showed an average daily attendance of 92%, up 1.1% from the previous school year.

Attendance rate is defined as total days attended divided by total possible attendance days for each student. Per the presentation, the 90.9% rate from 2022-23 is 0.

5% up from 2021-22, the lowest mark in at least the past seven school years. The 2020-21 school year is the highest mark in the last seven years, at 93.3% before COVID-19 arrived.

The previous three years, starting with 2017-18, showed attendance rates of 92.6%, 92% and 92.2%.

The district experienced increases in attendance every month last school year except for September and January — on the latter, Park attributed the drop to a delayed start day because of adverse weather. December saw the single-highest increase, jumping to 93.78% from 90%.

“A big celebration is that you can see the year-over-year by month improve a lot,” Park said. “That’s, again, due to the really strong and concentrated work by our front office specialists, our school leaders, our teachers who checked in on students, our family liaisons who provided support and just wrapping around and everyone just understanding that importance there.” The district’s attendance rate was 0.

5% above the state average last year after being 0.1% up from the state the previous year. However, the district had a higher truancy rate — four unexcused absences in one month or at least 10 in a school year — than the state by 0.

7%, after having a lower truancy rate than the state average the prior year. RFSD showed a chronically absent rate of 26.8%, nearly a full percentage point below the Colorado average.

It decreased its rate of chronically absent students — defined as the percentage of students enrolled who were absent 10% or more of the days enrolled during the school year — by 7.1%. “(Chronic absenteeism) is still high,” Park said.

“We’re now lower than the state, which is good, but that’s still a push for us. That means, 90% attendance means that that student has missed 17 days of school, which is three-and-a-half school weeks. That’s an entire math unit or reading unit, literacy unit.

” Compared to neighboring districts, Garfield Re-2 had a 94.2% attendance rate last year to surpass RFSD, but Eagle County Re-50 had a 91.1% rate and Aspen School District had an 89.

9% rate, according to Colorado Department of Education data. Roaring Fork set a lofty goal of 96% attendance, which Park called “ambitious,” noting that “we’re continuing to push so we can get closer to that.” Only nine districts in the state reached a 96% attendance rate last school year, and the highest enrollment of any of those schools was Dolores RE-4A with 644 students.

One district with more than 1,000 students exceeded 95%: Byers 32J, with 9,576 students, had a 95.1% attendance rate. RFSD had a PreK-12 student count of 6,170 students last year.

A 96% attendance rate for a student means missing six days of school. “I don’t want anyone to take that and say, ‘Great, I have six days to play with,’ because I know kids get sick and things like that,” Park said. “We’ll continue to communicate expectations and values of regular school attendance,” she added.

“We’ll celebrate positive student attendance, do some education.”.