Student Absenteeism Dips; Student Brass Swings

Seven students showed up to school Thursday and brought clarinets and flutes to their lips — to help New Haven celebrate the fact that more kids are showing up in school.

The celebration took place in the auditorium at John C. Daniels School. Students and dropout prevention workers filled the room as officials took the stage to announce that chronic absenteeism plummeted from 47.6 percent to 32.9 percent from November 2022 to November 2023.

That’s a big deal because New Haven has made a priority of tackling chronic absenteeism (defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days) since the Covid-19 pandemic. So has the state. State Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker joined local officials at the event to note that New Haven’s drop topped that of all other major cities in Connecticut.

The seven members of the John C. Daniels Band weren’t on stage. They gathered in the back of the hall and performed from back there during an intermission of the hour-long event as students filed out back to classes before official speeches resumed.

But their performance was more than background music. It added a note — perhaps a central note about how to make school worth coming to — to the official discussion of how the numbers dropped and what it might take to keep them falling.

The speeches focused on the hard work being done to tackle the problems that keep kids out of school: following real-time data in order to reach out to families as soon as absences pile up. Connecting struggling kids and families to counseling or other help. Feeding hungry kids dinner. Visiting homes to suss out the causes of absences.

The band focused on another challenge of luring kids to school: challenging them to reach higher in their work.

The band tackled Errol Garner’s classic composition ​“Misty.” Band Director Bryan Carrera arranged the piece in E flat and challenged the students to put together an arrangement of the piece less than 24 hours before the event.

Carrera began leading the band this year. He decided to bring it up a notch. The previous pieces were too easy, he said. Not enough students were picking up brass instruments, just woodwinds; he lured more to saxes and flutes to broaden the sound. The Coop High grad plays tuba and trombone on his off-hours in a group called the East Rock Brass Band; his energy and passion for music are evident.

And it rubs off.

“I love being in band. I like to come to school because of band,” flutist Jayla Lumpkin said before commencing ​“Misty.”

“I’m excited when it’s band days. It motivates me to come to school. ” said fellow seventh-grade flutist Carla Huber. She admitted she would come to school anyway. But still — as Carrera said, the first-period band practice can set a tone for keeping kids energized in school all day.

“Giving them something to look forward to,” he argued, ​“helps with attendance.”

Daniels School has posted some of the district’s top attendance improvements this year. Principal Yesenia Perez credited part of that to the problem-solving work with parents and mentors and data-crunchers. And she credited part of it to the positive challenges the Spanish-English dual-language school is offering kids through Chinese-language enrichment classes, after-school programs … and the recharged band under Carrera’s direction. ​“It makes the students motivated to come to school,” she said.

Mayor Justin Elicker and Superintendent of Schools Madeline Negrón struck a balance in their remarks to the crowd: We should take a moment to ​“pat ourselves on the back” when we make progress, as the schools did in November. Then we should focus on continuing to do better. Negrón said that attendance figures slipped back somewhat in December; and while New Haven topped other cities in the percentage of its absenteeism drop, it retained a higher absentee rate than Bridgeport’s and Waterbury’s. New Haven’s goal is to drop the chronic absenteeism rate to no higher than 27.5 percent by the school year’s end.

Similarly, the Daniels band had reason to take a bow (if they’d been on stage) for being able to perform an arrangement of ​“Misty” after one day of practice. It’s a challenging piece to master. They’ll have a reason to return to school Friday to hone it.