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Tuesday’s school board briefing meeting touched upon another layer of how COVID is affecting Lee County students through attendance.

School District of Lee County Chief Strategic Engagement Officer Lauren Stillwell said as of the week ending in Sept. 16, the new positivity rate for Lee County was 14.2 percent. The highest percentage was during the second week of school.

“It has been declining. The number of people testing is decreasing as well,” Stillwell said.

A graph was shown of the confirmed positive cases for the district, with staff far fewer than the total number of students.

Teaching & Learning Coordinator Tammy Scott shared information about attendance rates during the Tuesday briefing meeting, as well as the impacts. She explained last year before school started the district created a code as a way to monitor which students could not come to school because of being quarantined or isolated.

A student was not marked as absent if they had this specific code.

“We wanted to make sure we knew who those students were,” she said, so they could count the number of days in isolation or quarantine and know which days they should be returning.

Last year the district’s highest number of students quarantined in one day that received that code was 2,675. This year the highest in one day is 7,758, a drastic difference, Scott said.

“This data is pulled daily and provided to executives and chiefs and you also receive that in your weekly update,” she told the board.

The whole purpose of the code, Scott said was to keep kids connected.

Prior to the pandemic, the percentage of students that were chronically absent, missing 10 percent, or more, from school, was 16.4 percent at March 14 when the district closed due to the pandemic. For 2020-2021 that percentage rose to 21.45 percent. Through Sept. 17 the percentage of students chronically absent is 29.16 percent.

The district’s current target is 15 percent.

“Families that would typically have a three-day unexcused absence for an illness is turning into 10 to 15 days and that is happening with our most at risk students,” Scott said of students who are homeless, students learning in poverty and migrant students. “Our families have a lack of access to personal transportation and health care and that impacts every aspect of our schools.”

There are five intervention steps for attendance, which include school social workers in action; Connect with Lee daytime and after hours; daily School Messenger; COVID Command Center daily Zoom and flexible scheduling.

Scott said with schools needing information right away in the morning, they opened a Zoom link to administrators with morning hours in the center to answer principal and assistant principal questions.

As far as social workers, one of the areas they touched upon was Project Engage during the summer. The district identified 6,789 students who missed 20 percent or more of school.

“They targeted our homeless students and transition year, fifth to sixth and eighth to ninth,” Scott said. She said they reached out to the families and engaged with them in working to identify barriers, connecting resources, notifying them when school starts and when there are open houses.

“On a daily basis we are supporting families and filling out the CRI forms and connecting the right resources. It’s a different level this time. I can’t explain that enough to you. There are deeper barriers than what we would ever imagine,” she said. “When speaking with our social workers and talking to them on a weekly basis in regards to what their challenges are, many of our older students are not seeing past the present. It’s a very difficult time understanding their life could be totally different than life now and it could be amazing. They are struggling to value the high school diploma.”

Several additional social workers have been hired for the district.

Superintendent Dr. Ken Savage also shared a tiered mitigation recommendation that would be based on data thresholds, which would be validated by an expert panel.

The recommendation includes high risk, all mitigation measures, when the coded attendance hit 3,000 students and above; between 3,000 and 1,000 students in the coded attendance would issue a moderate risk where there are select mitigation measures and below 1,000 is low risk where diminished mitigation measures would take place.

Savage said they will make these decisions not only based on their district absentee data, but local health provider data as well.

“We want to make sure a panel of experts will validate those thresholds. To ensure these thresholds are sound and expert driven. It can be difficult to be able to say this is the one to say it did the trick, or this one is more pronounced”” he said.

The standardswill be reviewed at a quarterly basis, Savage said .