Accommodating Frequent & Unexpected Student Absences

This school year (and last!) has been challenging for teachers, students, and families in so many ways. One challenge certainly exacerbated over these “covid years” is the frequent and unexpected student absences. Students are being sent home to quarantine unexpectedly and thus missing critical classroom instruction. We especially worry about our diverse learners who typically need more assistance to work on independent activities. So what can we do to prevent our students from losing learned skills during time spent away from school and catch them up on what they missed when they return? 

With a combination of intentional planning for all students and classroom systems to support students’ return to school, we can attend to student needs without interrupting learning. At the end of this post, you will find two resources - a Quarantine Plan for your students and an Absences Organizer for you. We encourage you to adapt these resources to best meet your needs, and we hope that these resources help alleviate some of the stress associated with frequent and unexpected student absences. 

Preparing for the Absences 

At this point, it feels almost inevitable that at least one student in a class will be sent home as a close contact. By intentionally preparing students for such an absence, students will know what to expect when they have to miss school and what they can and should be doing while at home. 

The Plan

The Quarantine Plan document can be provided to students and placed into a Quarantine Folder that stays in the students’ backpack to ensure they always have it. This document includes login information for students to access computer-based programs, a checklist of activities to work on each day they are absent, and contact information so they can reach their teacher as needed. The bottom of the document includes a space for parents/guardians to write a note back to the school if they choose to do so. Remember, students may not have a parent at home and available to assist them, so it is important to carefully consider the types of activities that would be motivating enough for students to do without supervision in addition to an appropriate difficulty level. Click here to view a sample filled-out Quarantine Plan. In the Quarantine Folder, you may also choose to include a few days’ worth of work to then swap out when the student returns to school. 

Teaching the Plan

Just like with everything else, it’s important to explicitly teach students how to follow their Quarantine Plan well in advance of needing to use it. To do this, you might consider having students practice independently accessing computer-based programs without the use of shortcuts often programmed onto school computers. This way, you know that students will be able to navigate their way to these programs at home. It is also very important to emphasize when this plan should be utilized. If students are feeling sick, they should not feel obligated to complete school work. However, many times students are sent home without having symptoms. In these cases, students should understand that continuing to exercise their brain is important. You can have a brief lesson with your students, adjusted to be age appropriate, in which you teach them about the brain as a muscle and the importance of exercising that muscle every day that they can. 

Supporting Diverse Learners

For our diverse learners, it is important to individualize this plan to best meet their needs. You might choose to leverage your knowledge of the student to identify different activities the student can independently and successfully complete at home. This might include a review of mastered IEP goals for maintenance or intentionally selecting activities at their independent level to support task completion. Many computer-based programs are leveled according to a placement test, so these are likely to be accessible for students to complete independently - but make sure the placement test has been completed before students are absent when possible.

Identify a reinforcement-based system to encourage students to work on their independent assignments while at home. Consider working alongside parents to develop a plan for motivating students to continue working from home. If you use a home/school communication system like Remind, you can check in with your student and their family at pre-determined points to see how they are doing. This might be a great opportunity to develop a classroom website, like a Google Classroom or SeeSaw, where you can quickly update classroom assignments and keep students as on-track as possible from home.

Responding to the Absences

Reteaching

Eventually, students will return from their time at home and be ready to rejoin the classroom. These students will likely be unable to jump right into current classroom content. Finding a time to catch these students up will be a challenge. Consider utilizing the time built into your classroom schedule for small group instruction as an opportunity to reteach missed content for students who were absent. Because this time is already built into your day, you can continue to move forward with your regularly scheduled plans and activities while still providing support to students who have just returned back to school.

If you are unable to lead a small group through their missed content, you might consider utilizing another teacher if your classroom follows a co-teaching model. A special education teacher could work with struggling students through scaffolded, additional practice while you provide initial instruction to students who were absent. During this time, other students might be working on independent practice activities or collaborative work in groups. Depending on the content and age of your students, you might also be able to have a few students lead their peers through what they missed. Utilizing peers in this way will require some instructional time spent on how to be a helpful tutor, but will allow you to continue to work with other students or circulate throughout the room while a group of students is caught up. 

Staying Organized

Some students may be sent home in the middle of the day once they have been identified as a close contact in need of quarantining. These students may not have been marked absent for the day’s attendance, but they never made it to your class period to receive your instruction. You may find it helpful to have a system in place for your grade level where the front office has access to homework assignments or other relevant documents. If students get sent home in the middle of the day, the front office staff can provide them with what they need before they leave. Your grade level team can also work together to identify other potential systems to address unique concerns regarding student absences.

Finally, a practical challenge of having groups of students intermittently absent is keeping track of what students have missed when they are unexpectedly absent. This Absences Organizer was made to help you stay on top of student absences. First, enter your roster into the organizer. Then, when a student is absent, identify the most important activity or activities the student missed on that day. Using a color code, identify the reteaching method that would be best suited for the missed activity. Once the student returns, you can organize your instruction quickly based on the reteaching plans you’ve already identified. Like the Quarantine Plan, adjust this tool to make it helpful for you and your needs - but hopefully this gets your wheels turning!  

Being a teacher is hard work. Being a teacher during a pandemic is even harder! Through intentional preparation, system-wide adaptations, and classroom accommodations you can be as best prepared for frequent and unexpected student absences as possible.