The Rancho Santa Fe School District will be taking steps to address its ongoing issues with chronic absenteeism, after being notified by the state that it qualifies for the new Targeted and Improvement (TSI) program under the education department’s California School Dashboard.
The California School Dashboard tracks every district’s performance in categories such as academic achievement, English learner progress, suspension rates and chronic absenteeism. It is meant to hold districts able for educational equity and to help them work toward continuous improvements. The dashboard can point to disparities in academic outcomes across student groups that include race/ethnicity, homeless and foster youth, English language learners, students with disabilities and socio-economically advantaged students.
While Rancho Santa Fe performs well in many of the dashboard’s areas, chronic absenteeism is something they have struggled with for the past few years.
In California, a child is considered chronically absent when they have missed 18 days of school which is about 10% of a school year. In the R. Roger Rowe elementary school, 18.7 % of students were chronically absent in 2024, up from 15.6% in 2023. For the middle school, that number is 17.2%, up from 14.3% the previous year. Those rates are double from the district’s pre-pandemic numbers in 2019.
“They are basically missing a month of school, that’s a lot,” board President Jee Manghani remarked.
Last month, the board voted to send a letter to Rowe parents hoping to stress the importance of kids being in school but it may have come too late, maybe a few years too late.
As Superintendent Kim Pinkerton explained at the board’s May 13 meeting, the district has qualified for Targeted and Improvement (TSI) due to their chronic absenteeism rates in the student groups of Hispanic students, students with disabilities and English learners.
The state outlined a number of actions districts in TSI must take before the next school year, including forming a site council focused on chronic absenteeism, drafting a School Plan for Student Achievement, and implementing an independent study program.
Some of the ideas the site council could explore to combat chronic absenteeism include intervention teams, family and community engagement, and creating a positive school climate: “We should have an environment where people want to come here,” said Pinkerton, giving as an example the middle school’s schedule move toward creating time in the day for student connection with peers and teachers. Another idea could be creating incentives or recognition for good attendance— in the past, the board used to recognize students who had achieved perfect attendance.
Even before the TSI designation, one of the district’s top goals in its Local Control ability Plan (LCAP) is to reduce chronic absenteeism for all students by 10% using tactics like a new school attendance review team.
At the May 13 meeting, board member Annette Ross said the state’s required actions seemed “totally obnoxious”: “It just seems absurd that this is what we would have to do.”
Ross believes that there are other issues they could be working on as a district and that she doesn’t see chronic absenteeism as a real problem—especially if the reasons for Rancho Santa Fe kids missing school is taking an international vacation or family time. Ross had reluctantly agreed to sign her name to the board’s parent letter as she didn’t really agree with the message it sent.
“I always was a little bit concerned that we were stepping into territory that we shouldn’t be stepping into: Families with their children and how often they come to school and if they’re late and what their reasons are,” Ross said.
While reasons for chronic absenteeism in Rancho Santa Fe may appear to be vacations or family time, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, there are several factors that can contribute to a child missing a lot of school that the TSI program is meant to address. Barriers preventing a child from being in school could include health challenges, family responsibilities, a lack of transportation or an unwelcoming school environment, including more serious cases of bullying or violence.
As Rancho Santa Fe is a basic aid district (receiving the majority of funding from property taxes), they do not receive state funding based on average daily attendance like many other schools in the state.
In her comments, Pinkerton said the district does not want to be in TSI in any category and acknowledged that it does create extra work for staff. However, she said attendance is an important issue and that missing instructional time does have an impact on academic performance.
“The teachers cannot do the job that they’re hired to do when there’s an empty seat,” Pinkerton said. “Students need to be present. The experiences that they’re getting in class, even with independent study for us to recoup those absences, they’re not going to receive the same type of instruction and rich engagement by their teacher. Whether you have a student that’s absent or a staff member that’s absent, learning is impacted.”
The board is expected to review an updated LCAP, which includes actions to address chronic absenteeism, at its June 10 meeting. The board will then approve the LCAP and the 2025-26 budget the following week on June 17.
