Battling chronic absenteeism

When Patricia Mitchell became principal of P.S. 48 Wordsworth in 2007, she discovered that her small elementary school in Jamaica, Queens, had one of the highest chronic absenteeism rates in the city. Serving a largely black and Hispanic community with lots of young, single parents, P.S. 48 had one-third of its students absent at least one day out of 10 that year. That attendance number was worse than in many low-income schools in the Bronx and Central Brooklyn — and almost unheard of in relatively well-off Queens. 

Mitchell was taking over a school that had cycled through four leaders over the previous seven years. Her staff was demoralized. She looked at the poor attenders and wondered if her students and families were sending her a signal about the school. “I needed to get to know my kids,” she recalls.