New data shows that nearly half of New York City public schools have had attendance rates during the COVID-19 crisis that fall below what’s considered acceptable by education experts. In dozens of schools, serving thousands of students, the median attendance rate is alarmingly low, at less than 61%. And the majority of the schools with a high number of absences are located in Black and brown communities hit hardest by the pandemic, exacerbating an already stark disparity, in not only health but also education.

The data looks at three months of school attendance between October 2020 and January 2021. It was analyzed by the city’s Independent Budget Office at the request of Gothamist/WNYC, and it shows that some of the most vulnerable students are missing the most school. Educators say school attendance rates below 90% are concerning. At District 75 schools, which serve children with complex disabilities, the median attendance rate was 79%, according to the data. The data also shows a 47% median attendance rate at transfer high schools designed for students who are behind on credits and may be at risk of aging out of the system.

Educators called the latest IBO data distressing but unsurprising. It backs up what many have been saying for months, that one of the biggest challenges they face during the pandemic is getting students to come to class at all. There is ongoing confusion over class schedules and attendance policies. Students struggle with distractions at home, whether it’s finding a quiet space for remote learning in a crowded apartment, managing stress, or holding down jobs to financially support their families. Without the social connections that school provides, some educators said many students simply aren’t motivated to attend.

“I’m not shocked,” said Matt Phifer, vice president of education at Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, where the median school attendance rate was 82%. “Sometimes it’s not just the question of will but the literal access of the devices.”

City education officials acknowledged in a statement that attendance has gone down. The average citywide attendance so far this year is 88.4%, a few notches below the pre-pandemic five-year average of 91.6%, a rate that had been climbing steadily higher before the coronavirus hit.

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“We know this pandemic has hit some populations and neighborhoods of our city harder than others,” said Department of Education spokesperson Nathaniel Styer. “We are expanding community schools and hiring 150 additional social workers and targeting supports to those communities,”

The Department of Education, which is responsible for nearly one million public school students, was still distributing tens of thousands of tablets in December, and wiring homeless shelters for wi-fi in January. It has now distributed a total of 500,000 internet-enabled devices, but those devices can break, and some parents report difficulty navigating the technology.

Amy Tsai, a parent and member of the Citywide Council for District 75, said managing a range of student schedules and digital platforms has been hard for most parents, and even harder for those with multiple children or children with disabilities. “Parents are struggling a lot,” she said.

Tsai lives in Norwood in the Bronx, where COVID-19 rates were high last spring and school attendance has been relatively low, at 84%. Of her five children, four have good attendance. But she said her eldest, a 15-year-old who has autism and is legally blind, has been struggling. Like many students with autism, he has trouble sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time, and his vision problems make remote learning exhausting.

“Monday and Tuesday are his best days,” she said. “On Wednesday and Thursday, sometimes he drops the ball. Fridays are very tough…If he can’t do it, he can’t do it.”

Remote learning is especially difficult for students with serious disabilities. According to advocates, students in District 75 programs have, in some cases, gone months without attending school. Going to school has also been difficult for students at transfer high schools where the median attendance rate at one such school, the Brooklyn Academy High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was just 21%. There are 50 transfer schools that serve older students who are behind academically, often because they’ve been homeless, in foster care, in the criminal justice system, or just arrived from another country.

Some students are forced to make difficult choices. Raihana Bosse, who runs one of Henry Street Settlement’s apartment-style shelters, the Urban Family Center, explained that many families are dealing with the health crisis and financial issues, forcing them to put safety and their livelihoods before school. “Sometimes school falls to the bottom of the list when families are trying to get housing, employment,” she said.

Patrick Hunt, an assistant principal at a high school in the Crown Heights area, where the median attendance was about 85%, said the virus exacerbated obstacles to attendance that existed long before last spring. The difference is that more students have been affected, and more severely. “I don’t think it would be surprising to anyone who works in education,” he said of the increase in student absences.

The IBO’s analysis showed that the 400 schools in the bottom quartile of attendance had a median attendance rate of 72%. More than 62% of those schools were located in neighborhoods hit hard by COVID, as measured by case rates and deaths. Conversely, for the 400 schools in the top quartile of attendance, with a median attendance rate of 96%, only 30% were located in the neighborhoods most affected by COVID. In the map below, you can see the schools with the lowest attendance rates are located in neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID, as marked in yellow:

The correlation between COVID and attendance may not be causal. While it’s possible that higher rates of COVID cases and deaths led to lower attendance as life for students’ families were disrupted by the disease, it’s possible that other factors could explain the relationship. For instance, many schools with low attendance are located in poorer, more crowded neighborhoods with more health challenges. Those underlying factors could impact both school attendance and COVID rates.

“Why do students not show up to school?” Hunt said. “They’re sick, their family member is sick, they’re stressed out, they’re exhausted, maybe they are having trouble finding a reason to come to school. Those factors have been dialed up…And then you have removed what is frankly the most important part of school — the social aspect.”

Some students are simply overwhelmed trying to work multiple jobs and keep up with school. Attorney Ashley Grant from the nonprofit Advocates for Children said that is the case for many older students who attend transfer high schools. She said her organization is calling on the Department of Education to allow kids who are aging out of the school system an extra year to finish their diploma or other types of certificates, something it allowed for certain categories of older students last June.

Styer said the education department has upgraded how it tracks absences and is deploying anti-truancy mentors and specially-designated “attendance teachers” to support individual students who have been missing a lot of school.

The new schools chancellor, Meisha Porter, said she believes it comes down to educators’ relationships with students. “We need to make sure every student in every school, in every classroom has at least one adult in the building that they feel connected to and that that adult is regularly connecting with them,” she said.

The new numbers may only hint at the reality because what constitutes attendance remains a loose construct in the era of hybrid learning. This fall, the city’s Department of Education said students must be present for in-person school, log-in for remote classes, and complete assignments that are due. But that policy counts a student as present for the day if they show up for one class, participate in a single chat, or hand in one assignment.

Nearly 70% of students are learning virtually full time, according to the DOE.

Experts said attendance appears to be down nationally as well. Julia Kaufman, a policy researcher at Rand, surveyed more than 2,000 teachers and administrators across the country. She said the teachers estimated around 86% of students are showing up daily, down from 90 to 95% in recent years. If those trends hold true nationally, she said, it means millions of students are missing school on a regular basis.

“There are kids missing days and days,” she said. “What are they doing? Where are they?...There might be little kids with less parental supervision, [older siblings] taking care of kids for their parents, or experiencing trauma at home. It’s like this missing group of children that we just don't know how they're doing.”

In Brownsville, Brooklyn, where 298 people died of COVID-19, the average attendance rate is 62%. “Black parents are afraid,” said Camara Jackson, who runs a local program called Elite Learners. “We’re not over this pandemic. There’s people catching and dying from COVID at this moment. We’re still fighting this. Vaccines have not been made available for the populations that are reentering school buildings.”

Brownsville is 73% Black and 23% Latino. 76% of the population earns less than $51,000 a year, according to a 2018 four-year census survey. The neighborhood stands in contrast to areas such as Bayside and Oakland Gardens in Queens near the Long Island border, where median school attendance rates hover around 96%. The neighborhoods are mostly white and Asian, and more affluent. Jackson said on top of the effects of the pandemic, Brownsville’s wifi infrastructure is so weak that students can’t download certain lessons.

“The towers and the bandwidth in our community were not even prepared for all of this virtual living,” she said.

As education leaders grapple with where to begin addressing the needs of students who have fallen behind due to the pandemic, attendance rates provide an obvious clue. Jackson said the trauma from COVID is ongoing and her community will need to be flooded with resources to recover.

“I know it's coming where our kids are going to be able to go back in the building and as parents, we're going to feel good. But as of right now, we're still in a state of fear. We're still in a state of emergency,” she said. “We're still looking for help. This really hit. It affected children. It affected everyone.”