The Reconnection Services Team at Portland Public Schools is responsible for tracking down students who don’t show up to class. That job got even more complicated during the pandemic. Julia Silverman, Deputy editor for Portland Monthly Magazine, recently profiled the team’s work, and joins us to talk about it.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When kids who are supposed to be attending Portland Public Schools don’t show up to class, the Reconnections Services Team kicks into gear. It is their job to find those students, figure out what’s happening with them and help them get back to school. It was never an easy job, but the pandemic made it much harder. And when Portland Public Schools reopened in September, hundreds of kids just never came back. Julia Silverman wrote about these kids and the adults who were trying to find them in a recent article for Portland Monthly. She’s the Deputy Editor for the magazine and she joins us now. Julia, welcome back.
Julia Silverman: Thank you so much for having me, Dave.
Miller: What was your starting point for this reporting? I mean, what motivated you?
Silverman: I have felt for a while that the choice that Oregon made to keep schools closed, school buildings closed rather for such a prolonged period of time had consequences that perhaps weren’t being reckoned with. There were reasons to close schools and there were examples of places that opened schools much more quickly than we did and I wanted to look in particular at a particularly vulnerable population that was greatly impacted and that I didn’t think anybody was really focused on beyond, of course, the people at the Reconnection Services Team whom I profiled.
Miller: So I want to step back though, just a couple of years, because I think it’s an important context. Before the pandemic, what was the work of this team like? I mean including what did it take for a student to be flagged for services with the Reconnection Services Team?
Silverman: That’s a really terrific question. And it is important to say that the pandemic didn’t create this problem and closing schools didn’t create this problem. It existed beforehand and it’s also important to say it’s not unique to Portland. I could have profiled any school district in Oregon or really any school district anywhere. Prior to the pandemic and now again, Oregon had what’s called a ‘10 day drop rule’ in place, which meant that if after 10 days a kid failed to show up in school, red flags went up, right? And the mechanisms kick into gear, whether it’s the attendance coordinator or school counselor or a teacher, somebody starts calling and flagging and saying, hey, your kid’s not showing up. What’s going on? Reconnection Services is really designed to be kind of the last stop, right? The ones who get called in after all other options have failed. During the pandemic, Oregon chose to suspend the ‘10 day drop rule’ and I understand why they did it, they wanted to give grace to families that were really struggling with all the uncertainties of online learning, but as a result, all those safeguards were kind of removed and kids and families were on their own.
Miller: So wait, what exactly did it mean that the 10 day rule was gone? Did it mean that nobody was checking up to see if kids were actually taking part in school?
Silverman: Ultimately, yes. Of course teachers know when kids are absent, but if you remember, being present for school during online learning didn’t have to mean much more than opening up your computer. So yeah, the usual safeguards that would have been there to try to track kids just weren’t there anymore. And that’s why I think, and I think a lot of the people that I spoke with feel as well that there’s probably many more kids who are in this boat. Think of all the kids who were juniors, right, in 2020 when school got out. Many of them, we don’t know what happened to them and now they have aged out of the public school system.
Miller: So does anyone right now in Portland Public Schools or as you noted, and it’s an important note, we can assume this is the case in other districts as well, all other districts. Do administrators, do they have a clear sense for the number of students who have disappeared?
Silverman: Well, yes. When school opened again, school buildings opened again in September, the district did know roughly how many kids were supposed to be there and shouldn’t, and weren’t there. And certainly some of those kids went to other districts, some of them are from very mobile populations. Some of them may have transferred to private schools, but there were about, there were several 100 kids, at least, at the beginning of the school year or, or more who, who weren’t there, who should have been there. And then that number has gone up as the school year goes along because, of course, we know that school doesn’t work for every kid. Some kids feel pushed out. Some kids give up, and don’t forget too, Dave, that the labor market right now is really strong, right? If you’re a kid who’s already been struggling at school and it doesn’t feel like the right environment for you and you know that you can get some job that pays $15 an hour, that can be pretty persuasive for many people. The question is, what does that mean long term for your life and your choices and the paths that you won’t be taking?
Miller: Let’s hear about what you learned about the lives of some specific students. One of the students you talked to is Zaira Price. Could you tell us her story?
Silverman: Sure. Zaira is somebody who, truthfully might have been flagged by Reconnection Services even before the pandemic and she’ll tell you that herself. She had had a difficult time in school. Her mom died when she was in middle school. She has four siblings and they kind of bounced from house to house. Sometimes they were with her father, sometimes they were with an aunt, sometimes they were with her stepsister’s mother. She wound up at McDaniel High School, which was then called Madison and she was okay for a little while, she was on the Cheer Squad. She had a car accident and that kind of changed the trajectory of her life a little bit, and when school moved online, things became pretty overwhelming and she did look for jobs. She worked in several places. She told me about, for a while, she provided care to an Alzheimer’s patient. She got really minimal training for that and that’s a pretty difficult job. She moved on to working in a gift shop at the Portland Airport and she finally landed at the Cinnabon at the Lloyd center and just, she was trying to make enough money to move out and get an apartment on her own and school wasn’t her priority, particularly during the pandemic.
Miller: What other students’ stories stand out to you and I know you talked to a number of students?
Silverman: Yeah, I did and it’s interesting to hear how different people were. I talked to Nikki Ortiz whose story really moved me, I think she’s pretty representative of a lot of kids. She, her parents got divorced during the pandemic. She moved to Portland from Camas, Washington. She too has younger siblings and it was difficult for her to find a quiet space in her home to work. There was always somebody either needing attention or noise being made. She used to be a pretty good student, her grades went down and she just got discouraged. When you’re facing a mountain of Fs, it can be really hard to motivate. So she’s actually back in school now and she’s a Reconnection Services success story. And there are those people, there are a lot of them and, but I think she’s really representative of what a lot of kids went through, where just the at home environment, while it did work for some kids and I spoke to some of them, it was really difficult for others.
Miller: It’s important to reiterate as you just said, that there’s a huge variety in the stories. I imagine each one is unique in important ways, but are there also similarities you found, say demographically in terms of the students who were most affected by the pandemic itself and by the closure of school buildings themselves in ways that that really are, are tied to the pandemic?
Silverman: Yes, I think it’s very clear that the bulk of the Reconnection Services caseload is disproportionately kids of color, kids who are from families that have a, that might not have as many resources, and kids who don’t speak english. Many of them are high schoolers. There is a small but growing percentage of middle schoolers who are in their caseload but those are definitely, that’s definitely a commonality and I think we saw that across the board. I could have written a story about younger kids who are behind in reading and math, which is also pretty universal and again has fallen, has fallen more heavily on the shoulders of those who are kids of color or kids who are from a more, a less privileged background.
Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now with Julia Silverman, she’s the Deputy Editor for Portland Monthly. Her recent article for the magazine is called, “Inside the Search for Hundreds of Portland’s Missing Students”. So let’s turn to the search part. What is the daily work of a member of the Reconnection Services team? Like what are they actually doing?
Silverman: I was really lucky to get to shadow one of the Reconnection Services folks and then to talk to them all as a group. They spend as much time on their phones as your teenager does and that is because it’s like, it’s almost like their weapon of choice. Kids will sometimes reply to texts, so they send a lot of those. They’re sort of constantly trying to chase down parents, they’re coordinating with guidance counselors. They do also do a lot of, as many in person meetings as particularly the pandemic would allow. They’ll go to the schools where they work, they split up territory around Portland. When they do reach students, they have this giant litany of questions to ask them. They need to know, are you pregnant? Do you have, do you have a history with the juvenile justice system? Who are you really? And they go through a long, long list of questions and then they’re trying to pull together the support that these kids need from wherever they can. Now, Portland, like every other district in the state, has federal money for Covid schools relief that’s directly intended to address learning loss. And some of it is being spent on this population. Some of it’s also going unspent and I would point your listeners to a really terrific story that the Oregon Capitol Chronicle did back in December, where they just sort of detail how Oregon schools are facing really few limits on how to use this millions, these millions of dollars in unexpected or rather Covid relief money. Some of it is being spent on capital projects like replacing playgrounds or turf fields.
Miller: Well, you actually note that despite this seemingly urgent need, these students who have become disconnected from school life, from class, and despite this big infusion of federal money that would seem to be really intended for this, this circumstance to help these, these students, you found that the funding for the team that we’re talking about that tries to get students back into school has been uncertain at PPS recently, including now. How do you explain that?
Silverman: Well, that’s right, and I want to give some credit to PPS. I think they do have a lot of programs to target this population of kids, right? They have night schools, they have summer school, they have teen pregnancy supports, they have alternative programming and the people who work there are dedicated and compassionate and thoughtful. I think the reason that there was consideration of cutting this program was because the numbers were down and the numbers were down because the 10 day drop rule had been suspended. And so it sort of looked on the surface as though, oh, hey, there’s a, there’s a smaller population of kids who need these services, but in reality the data just wasn’t there.
Miller: Now you did find some reasons for hope. What kinds of services does the district provide to students to re-engage them and to try to keep them in school?
Silverman: I spent a day at Alliance, the Alliance High School campus at Meek Elementary School and I was really just moved by the teachers there and the support staff there and the efforts they’re making. They’re doing a lot of hands-on classes for kids. They have a fantastic shop program, they have a really great automotive repair program, and they have much smaller class sizes, which is great because kids who are struggling with these issues really do need that personalized one on one support. So, and that’s just one of the number of alternative programs across the district that students can attend once you find them. But again, the issue is finding them, and I think some of them are maybe beyond being found at this point, it might be too late for some of them.
Miller: Julia Silverman, thanks very much for joining us.
Silverman: Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
Miller: Julia Silverman is the Deputy Editor for Portland’s Monthly Magazine.
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