In 2023, Bianca Vázquez Toness and the Associated Press published a series of articles that took readers on a deep dive into the issue of chronic school absenteeism in the wake of the pandemic. Toness spoke to NPF’s Future of the American Child fellows about how she covered American schools’ “missing children.”
“… An astonishing 230,000 kids were missing from schools in just 21 states,” said Toness, who worked on the analysis alongside Stanford University’s Big Local News team and Thomas Dee, a Stanford economist, who spoke to NPF fellows in May 2023.
California, New York, Louisiana, North Carolina and Washington State had the most missing kids, she said.
“While my data colleagues were badgering these states to release the data and they were analyzing the data, I went looking for these students and families,” she said. “As an education reporter, I’m used to finding students and families. I have some go-to moves, like showing up at the school, talking to parents outside of school, talking to kids outside of school, going to where they hang out. But that wasn’t an option here because they weren’t in school.”
Toness said she talked to teachers and principals, attendance specialists, religious leaders, tenant organizations, low-income housing developments and parent advocates – whom she said are an incredibly helpful resource.
“[Parent advocates] often have their ears to the ground and know whose child is not going to school, whose child is not reading at grade level, et cetera…. I’ve discovered a number of low-income housing developments around the country who have their own afterschool programs or other community services. The people who work there have been incredible resources over the last year.”
The first story Toness produced focused on two main students: A young woman (Kailani) from Cambridge, Massachusetts who was in ninth grade when schools were shuttered and never returned and a young boy (Ezekiel) in Los Angeles who was still enrolled in school but hadn’t attended class in five months.
“The boy had been shuffled around to a bunch of different schools before the pandemic. Then, he didn’t attend much school during remote learning because they didn’t have good internet. When he returned to in-person school, he was dramatically behind. He was in fourth grade, but he read at a first-grade level and he was acting out and he had impulsive behavior,” she said.
The school Ezekiel was transferred to didn’t follow the program ordered by the court, and his mom didn’t feel safe sending him to school, Toness said.
“Meeting Ezekiel and a bunch of other students like him who I found who were just out of school for six months, but still technically enrolled in school, made me realize that there were a lot of other kids who were missing, but we didn’t think of them as missing.”
Wherever the reporting leads, Toness says journalists should always ask if people know anything about possible follow-up stories related to the topic. For example, If she’s developing a story about chronic absenteeism, Toness still asks about other policies that make it hard for kids to go to school such as paperwork, proof of residency and lack of access to communication.
When asked about how to stay “impartial” as a journalist when covering a topic like school absenteeism, Toness said she doesn’t consider herself impartial. “I do this because I’m interested in the welfare of kids. I don’t think enough people are advocating for them or protecting them, so I don’t have any problem advocating for whatever’s best for kids.”
Read the full transcript here.
This fellowship is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for programming and content.
