When Rebecca McClain moved to Memphis last summer, she knew about absenteeism – she had been through the COVID-19 pandemic as a teacher in North Carolina.

What she didn’t know about was something her district-assigned teaching coach at Southwind High School told her to expect: Many of her students wouldn’t show up at school until after Labor Day.

“You aren’t going to have a full class until September,” McClain said, relaying her mentor’s words. “Your roll may look partially empty, but you won’t see everybody until September.”

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It’s a persistent problem that dates back to the Shelby County school holiday for the Mid-South Fair, then held at the old Fairgrounds. Even when the holiday was still in effect, the fair was still in Memphis and Memphis City Schools existed, the district mounted various public-information campaigns to at least get students registered before Labor Day if not in classrooms.

The ghost of the fair holiday is a new wrinkle for teachers of a different generation. But it’s certainly not the only explanation for a post-pandemic jump in chronic absenteeism in Tennessee’s largest public-school system.

Nearly 10,000 more students were “chronically absent” from Memphis-Shelby County Schools in the 2022-23 school year compared to the last school year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 18.4% of the MSCS students who missed at least 18 days of the 180-day school year in the 2018-19 school year compares to 28.9% who were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year.

MSCS, the state’s largest school system, counted 112,125 students in 2018-19 and 105,596 in 2022-23.

The rise is not unique to Memphis.

It’s reflected in the percentages at the six suburban public-school systems in Shelby County and in DeSoto County Schools.

It’s also part of a national trend new MSCS Superintendent Marie Feagins saw in the large urban school systems she worked for before starting her position in Memphis earlier this month.

“I came from Detroit. I was in Cleveland. And even prior to the pandemic, we were starting to see an upward tick, and we really didn’t have a true understanding of what the needs were,” Feagins said at her first press briefing as superintendent April 9.

“I think certainly the pandemic exacerbated that,” she said. “There’s just a general mental-health need, if you will.”

“You aren’t going to have a full class until September. Your roll may look partially empty, but you won’t see everybody until September.”

Rebecca McClain

Some teachers have changed their strategy as they search for deeper causes, one student at a time.

“I basically mirror everything I do in the classroom in an online format. I use learning-management systems like Canvas,” said McClain, who is leaving Southwind to teach middle school next year in Lakeland. “Everything that I do in classes I have a corresponding assignment or video or something explaining what happened there. I tell students, ‘If you are out, that’s where you can find your work.’”

A school counselor at a Memphis charter high school who didn’t want to be identified due to privacy concerns and the potential threat of employment loss cited transportation problems and language barriers as explanatory factors.

“I think that transportation is a huge issue for this city. We serve students from diverse backgrounds and different socioeconomic statuses,” the counselor said. “Parents are trying to get children to multiple schools. We also serve a high population of Hispanic students. I think there is sort of a language-cultural barrier when it comes to understanding the importance of being at school on time and consistently.”

Another part of the cultural barrier is family trips out of the U.S.

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“I know students who in the middle of the school year leave to go see family out of the country,” they said.

Feagins also cited language as a noticeable hurdle in Memphis.

”I think that we’re looking at thinking about our multilingual and bilingual students and families as well and how we better serve them,” she said. “Those needs tend to exist a little differently also. And we’re a little slower overall to be able to meet those. … We are just understaffed in that area.”

The counselor at the charter high school said understaffing in other areas also can translate to a school not having the capacity to follow up on absences.

“It’s a lot of work, and most schools don’t have a dedicated person for that job. It’s just a duty that falls on another faculty member who already has a plate full of duties,” they said. “We will put students on a contract that they and their parents have to sign that they understand, ‘You’ve got this many unexcused absences. And if get more, you will be truant, and it could become a DCS (Department of Children’s Services) referral.’”

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The cycle of violence is also a factor, McClain said. She told of a Facebook threat of school violence prompting parents to check their children out of Southwind en masse, leaving her with three children to teach for the remaining school day.

“We had a kid pass away from violence, and as a result, siblings or cousins would threaten retaliatory violence. As a result, kids were out of school,” she said. “There are so many things taking place out of that learning environment.”

Feagins also pointed to “a competing factor of students needing to work for various reasons.”

“So we’re competing with the workforce,” Feagins said of an economy where inflation is still a factor but where there is low unemployment and a labor shortage.

The lure of a steady paycheck and its effect on college enrollment is something University of Memphis president Bill Hardgrave discussed on the WKNO-TV program “Behind The Headlines.”

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“I mean, the jobs are plentiful. You can go out to a distribution center making $28 an hour, unloading and loading trucks or doing something along those lines,” he said. “For many, that’s a very tempting thing at a time when college is expensive and there’s a lot of talk about student loans and all those things. A lot of students have just decided, ‘I’m not going to go that route.’”

More than a third of the U of M’s students are part-time, and most of those part-timers are working while they attend school.

McClain talked of a different workload for older students that can take them away from school.

“A lot of the students who are older — middle school, high school — they are taking care of younger siblings and making sure younger siblings get their schoolwork done,” she said.

Her experience in North Carolina showcased similar problems: Many of the older siblings were also working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“They had to supplement their parents’ income,” she said. “I had students working way past their legal hours in the evening to supplement their parent’s income, and during the day, they were the babysitters for their young siblings during COVID.”

Some students don’t see school as a sanctuary from the problems they encounter outside the building, the charter high-school counselor said.

“They just see that there is a lack of opportunity for them or maybe they are not as well educated on the opportunities for them after high school,” they said. “They kind of pick up on what is happening socially, and it just might feel a little bit like fighting an uphill battle.”

McClain sees issues of trust and confidence that move from parents to children.

“I think a lot of the parents just don’t have faith in the school system, so they don’t really instill that much value for their kids,” she said. “I think a lot of it has to do with buying back the trust from the community. That’s where it starts. I think if you got the parents on your side, you would eventually have the kids on your side.”

Abigail Warren contributed to this story.