Coronavirus Disease 2019 and High School Attendance: Modeling Latent Trajectories and the Influence of School Policies and Practices.

OBJECTIVE

School attendance is important for adolescent and adult health, but drastically decreased during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We aimed to identify distinct attendance trajectories across a 5-year period spanning the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and examine the influence of school policies and practices related to school discipline and college readiness programming on these trajectories.

METHODS

We analyzed administrative data from the 2016-2017 to 2020-2021 school years for 2805 rising high school students (seventh or eighth grade at baseline) at 5 Southern California schools participating in a randomized trial of the AVID college readiness program. We identified attendance trajectories using group-based trajectory modeling, then estimated the influence of suspension and AVID participation by including these as time-varying covariates.

RESULTS

We identified 3 attendance trajectory groups: stable high attendance (77.2%); acutely declining attendance (17.7%); chronically declining attendance (5.1%). Suspension was associated with decreasing attendance across all groups (stable high: β=-8.96; P<.0001; acutely declining: β=-12.00; P<.0001; chronically declining: β=-7.61; P=.025). AVID participation was associated with a small decrease in attendance in the stable high attendance group (β=-0.97; P=.025) and a larger increase in the acutely declining attendance group (β=3.60; P=.015).

CONCLUSIONS

These findings increase our understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents' school attendance. The health and educational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are not uniformly severe, and both tailored individual and universal school-level interventions are likely needed to support all youth to thrive.