Attendance in the Coupeville School District has plunged since the pandemic, and student test scores have slipped with it, prompting district leaders to launch a bold plan to reverse the trend.

“Like districts across Washington state and the nation, we’ve experienced significant attendance challenges since the COVID-19 pandemic,” Coupeville Superintendent Shannon Leatherwood wrote in an email to the News-Times.

She, along with members of the Coupeville School Board, expressed concerns about the low attendance rates at a recent school board meeting. Seeing a need for change, as part of the “Washington State School Improvement Framework,” a comprehensive state accountability system, the district set an “ambitious but achievable goal,” Leatherwood detailed in an email. That goal is to raise district-wide attendance rates by 10% and simultaneously improve scores through evidence-based improvement strategies.

The most current data, from 2023 through 2024, shows that the Coupeville District’s attendance rate falls slightly below the state average. While 69.1% of students attended 90% or more of school days in Coupeville, the state average yields a 3.6% higher attendance rate.

Coupeville Elementary saw 68.5% students attended 90% or more of school days, while 67.4% of middle school students and 65.9% of high school students attended those same numbers of days, Leatherwood said. Comparatively, she offered, the 2020 to 2021 pre-pandemic attendance rates were significantly higher. The elementary school saw an 87.6% rate of attendance, the middle school had 92.3% and the high school had a rate of 93.1%.

“This represents a 20-25 percentage point decline across all schools — a trend mirrored nationally,” she wrote in an email.

Leatherwood noted that her concerns are rooted in research that shows that missing just 10% of school days causes a significant detriment to student achievement, with its effects worsening over time.

This is consistent with the school district’s scores; while it is above the state average for English language arts standardized test scores, it is still not at the level it should be compared to school districts of similar size and demographics, Leatherwood said in a meeting. Similarly, the middle and high school ranks below the state average in some areas of its math scores, she added. While this reflects a nationwide drop in scores, the Coupeville School District’s decrease is significant, she said.

“For our size district and our demographics, this is concerning,” she said. “We’re not considered one of the high poverty schools so we should be consistently above the state average in both ELA and math.”

Board members expressed their continued dissatisfaction with the district’s scores on both standardized tests and the scoring system for the Washington State School Improvement Framework.

The district intends to implement new strategies for success, Leatherwood outlined.

The first of these strategies involves early intervention through multi-tiered systems of support. This is an approach that utilizes family outreach after three absences, identifies patterns early and provides extra support. Another strategy is “barrier removal,” which means working directly with families to understand and address obstacles, such as transportation challenges, health issues and family circumstances. At the same time, school staff will make learning more accessible, meaningful, engaging and relevant by teaching content that all students can benefit from.

“When students find learning engaging and connected to their lives, attendance improves naturally,” Leatherwood told the News-Times.

The district will focus on targeting intervention quickly by regularly reviewing attendance trends. It will also collaborate with community stakeholders to support families holistically and help families understand the research-backed link between attendance and academic success; both of which are “deeply connected,” Leatherwood said.

The multi-tiered approach is already being successfully utilized in the elementary school, and the district is starting with interventions at the middle and high school as well, Leatherwood said.

By using an integrated approach, the superintendent recognizes that the district can’t improve student’s Washington State School Improvement Framework scores without simultaneously addressing attendance and providing engaging, accessible instruction to maintain it.

Getting emotional after Leatherwood’s presentation of the matter, Board President Morgan White said while she knows it won’t be easy, she is hopeful for the goals that Leatherwood designed for the district’s future. Nancy Conard, the vice president, agreed, noting that in her four years of serving on the board, she has not seen this kind of effort nor assessment.

“We’re gonna get there,” Conard said.

With strong educators, engaged families and a community that supports public education, Leatherwood agreed the plan has the foundations for success. Through these strategies, she said, she is confident the district can recover to its “pre-pandemic attendance levels” and improve its “academic outcomes for all students.”