High numbers of teacher absences can hurt not only student achievement – but also student attendance, according to a New York researcher who has studied the topic.
School districts could reduce high numbers of teacher absences by paying teachers for days they don’t use, and creating a “culture of student achievement” that rewards teachers for not missing school, said Cornell University professor Ronald Ehrenberg, who has studied the topic.
While Denver Public Schools officials are grappling with a 26 percent increase in teacher absences compared with last year, for a rate of 8.4 percent, three other area districts have teacher-absence rates that are nearly as high.
In suburban Jefferson County, teachers have been absent 7 percent of the time.
In the more-affluent Cherry Creek School District, that number is 5.6 percent; in Adams County 12, it’s 6 percent this year, according to figures provided by school districts.
While little national data exist on teacher absences, local numbers are comparable to rates in districts across the country, experts say.
“That actually seems low, if it includes conference days and professional days,” said Ehrenberg, responding to Denver’s 8.4 percent rate. The Denver-area districts count such days as absences.
School districts pay more for absences than other employers, though, because they must hire substitutes.
In Denver, for example, DPS spent $2.8 million last school year on substitute teachers and extra “off-duty” pay for teachers covering others’ absences.
Comes with the territory
In the suburbs, district leaders say that paying substitutes and accounting for teacher absences is part of running the schools.
“I don’t have an overall concern about these numbers,” said Karen Leuschel, executive director of human resources for Jefferson County Public Schools. “We’re really in a profession exposed to every germ and bug that comes across.”
In Cherry Creek, human resources staffer Jeanne Gilbert said absences have been static, though sometimes there is a spike during religious holidays.
Ehrenberg found that when school districts bought back sick days from teachers, the absence rate went down.
He also found standardized test scores would be more likely to increase slightly if school districts could get teachers to miss five fewer days a year.
“We found that students aren’t as motivated to attend school” when their teacher was gone, he said.
In his study of 419 school districts in New York, he found that absence rates hovered around 5 percent, excluding professional development days.
Besides affecting test scores, experts and teachers say that absences are disruptive to student achievement.
“You can’t have a coherent program when you have this much absenteeism,” said Barnett Berry, the president of the Center for Teaching Quality, based in Chapel Hill, N.C. “Schools have always been poorly organized to handle this.”
That was Jeannette Baust’s experience.
The veteran substitute teacher in Denver said she often comes to a school to fill one position – and is asked to fill several others because there are so many absences in the building.
She attributes high numbers of absences in the city to burnout and fatigue.
“The continuity of instruction is clearly broken,” she said.
Melissa Underwood, an English teacher at Denver’s North High, said recently that 25 people were out of the classroom for two days for professional development.
The school is undergoing a major reform effort to boost student achievement.
“It’s been time very well spent. It’s had an actual impact on classroom instruction,” she said. “But you can’t always be guaranteed that there would be meaningful things happening when you’re gone.”
DPS aims to do study
DPS Superintendent Michael Bennet hopes to eventually study whether there is a link between student achievement and Denver schools with high absence rates.
“There’s no question that the interruption of not having your classroom teacher in the building has an effect,” Bennet said. “We’d like to have as few absences as possible.”
It’s difficult to compare teacher absence rates against other industries because school districts often count professional development days as absences.
According to a survey done by the Mountain States Employers Council Inc., employees in the Denver/Boulder area were absent from work 1.4 percent of the time.
That does not include professional development.
Green Valley Elementary special education teacher Cathy Cronn has technically taken 20 days off this school year.
But that includes eight days where she had to be away from her class to evaluate students who may be candidates for special education services; three days of staff development and two days of work with the teachers union.
“It looks like I’ve been gone an astronomical amount, but when you look at it, a lot of it is because of the work I’m doing,” Cronn said.
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
