Morning after morning in her junior year, Carmelia McKeehan thought about making the short walk to Farragut High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side, only to retreat to her bedroom, twiddling away hours on YouTube still in her pajamas.
She didn’t realize just how many days she was absent last school year — until a worried school counselor printed out her attendance record to share with her mother.
Carmelia, 18 at the time, recalls staring at the printout and asking the counselor: “I missed this many days of school?”
She had only shown up for about a quarter of the year.
“I was totally shocked,” she says now.
Carmelia’s experience reflects a dramatic rise in absences among high schoolers in the country’s fourth largest district — a spike that comes as schools nationwide grapple with lower attendance after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Across Chicago Public Schools, nearly 25,000 high school students — or a quarter of all high schoolers — missed at least 35 days last year, according to CPS data obtained by WBEZ and Chalkbeat. That’s double the number of students who missed that much school in 2019 — and twice the number of days the state deems troublesome enough to flag a student as chronically absent.
And yet, Chicago Public Schools’ graduation rate has continued to inch up — from 81% in 2019 to 85% in 2024. Part of the reason: School district officials are giving students more chances to make up work and pass their classes even after weeks of absences.
In short, it’s easier now to miss a lot of school and still graduate.
“We as a system have been focused on not punishing students for being absent, but really understanding what are the barriers and trying to work actively to address that and also to support them not to miss learning opportunities,” said CPS Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova.
But experts say all the missed school is taking a toll on learning. Research obtained exclusively by WBEZ and Chalkbeat shows the more days a CPS student misses, the lower their SAT scores — raising questions about how much students know by the time they leave high school.
At schools like Farragut, educators are grappling with how to strike a balance between giving students such as Carmelia flexibility and making sure that doesn’t send the wrong message about the importance of being in school.
Farragut Principal Virag Nanavati has found that cutting school often comes down to a COVID-era attitude shift among students and families — a radical devaluing of showing up.
“So many things became optional,” he said. “Our message to the parents is that school is not optional. You can’t replicate it at home with a packet.”
Carmelia learned that lesson the hard way. And she was not alone.
Nanavati and his staff were determined to steer students who were missing school back on track. This school year, they set out to tackle their absenteeism problem head-on.
Farragut’s new principal: Where are the students?
Nanavati took the helm at Farragut, a school that serves students from mostly Latino and low-income families, in the spring of 2024, around the time Carmelia was staring down her bleak attendance record.
Coming from a job as a CPS assistant principal, he knew schools were experiencing an uptick in absenteeism. But at Farragut, he discovered a full-blown crisis.
On any given day, classrooms were filled with empty desks.
That spring, Nanavati, 42, started greeting students every morning as he clutched his large coffee mug customized with photos of his first child, 2 years old at the time, and his German shepherd.
On sunny days, he would stand in front of Farragut’s tan facade, corralling stragglers to get to class. On rainy days, he would wait in the large atrium, where a mural of the Chicago skyline promised “a bright future.”
Too often, he’d run into students lingering in the halls. Freshman Liliana Rivera was one. She says she’d sometimes go to class, but after about 10 minutes, she’d ask to go to the bathroom. She would spend the rest of the day roaming the sprawling campus that was built for more than 2,300, but enrolled only about 490 that year.
At Farragut and across dozens of CPS schools, absenteeism was an issue long before COVID struck. In 2010, rapper Kanye West held a private concert at Farragut after its students beat six other high schools in a district-run contest to improve their languishing attendance and grades.
During the pandemic, Farragut’s attendance problem deepened: Last school year, 60% of students missed at least 35 days — a share that has tripled since 2019. Over that time period, Farragut was one of 26 high schools — most on the South or West sides of Chicago — where the share of students missing that many days of school jumped by at least 20 percentage points.
Experts and educators such as Nanavati say schools have struggled to bounce back to pre-COVID attendance for complex reasons.
Farragut is in Little Village, or La Villita, a neighborhood of small apartment buildings and a landing spot for recent immigrants. Like other poor communities during the pandemic, it faced more sickness, more death, and more unemployment than other neighborhoods. Some teens had to take on jobs and care for younger brothers and sisters.
The impacts have persisted. And the Trump administration’s current immigration crackdown is creating new challenges as some families have kept their children home out of fear.
But in speaking with students and families, Nanavati found what he thinks are even bigger factors: the idea that attendance is optional and a sense of disconnection from school. One mother, for example, promised her son would start slowly “easing back into it” after skipping lots of days.
Then there’s Carmelia, who missed a lot of school last spring without a firm reason — no job, no sibling she needed to babysit.
She just didn’t feel anything drawing her to Farragut. A soft-spoken teen with curly bangs who turns bubbly when talking about fantasy romance novels and crafts, she wasn’t part of any sports teams, clubs, or activities. She says no one at school pressed her to show up more; neither did her mom.
Carmelia would tell her she had a migraine and hole up with her phone in her bedroom, filled with drawings of flowers and butterflies and Korean TV show posters. After COVID’s virtual learning stretch, she found staring at a screen more comfortable than being around other kids at school.
“It felt draining to me just sitting there in my room with nothing to do,” she says now. “But at the same time, it was more draining going to school.”
She remembers lying in bed, feeling like she was going nowhere. But she didn’t know how to get out of the rut.
More and more chances for students to pass
As the 2023-24 school year neared its end, Nanavati watched the staff spring into a frantic race to avert failing dozens of students.
Not long ago, students with more than 18 absences — most Farragut students last year — would automatically fail the school year, now 176 days. But because of a policy change the Board of Education had made quietly in 2018, this is no longer the case.
Students also got a boost because during the pandemic, the school adopted a grading approach in which the lowest score students could earn on an assignment was not zero but 50%, even if they didn’t turn it in. Proponents argue zeroes make it too hard to recover after just one or two missed assignments, discouraging students from working to bounce back.
Farragut students who skipped a lot of school could hand in missed assignments until the end of the semester and still edge their grades up to get at least the 60% needed to pass.
Liliana, the freshman who had spent most of 9th grade wandering in and out of classes, says she hustled in the last weeks of that school year. She marveled at the outcome: “I am not sure how I ended up passing.”
Megan Hougard, CPS chief of college and career success, said giving students multiple chances to make up work helps them pass classes and keeps them on track to graduate — a milestone that’s key for young people to be successful. But she said it also means they can try to recoup learning they missed.
In recent years, some schools, including Farragut, have also made it easier for students to make up entire classes they have failed. They are offering weekslong online credit recovery classes during the school day rather than at night or during the summer, as they once did. CPS also launched a virtual schooling program called Tassel Truancy for seniors who work full-time or have a child.
“We really have doubled down on, ‘How do you ensure students do not fail that class?’” said Hougard.
At Farragut, Nanavati wanted his staff to do everything they could to keep students like Carmelia engaged. Still, he worried some of the extra leeway was encouraging students to skip school.
Graduation rates increase while attendance sinks
One day last summer, after Carmelia had missed so much of her junior year, her mom asked about her grades.
“My mom is like, ‘How bad did you do?’” Carmelia said. “I was like, ‘They were bad, very bad.’”
Then she went to her bedroom and pulled the covers over her head.
In the back of her mind, she knew she might miss a golden opportunity. With much fanfare, the nonprofit Hope Chicago had announced in 2022 that it would cover college tuition, room and board, and even books for every graduate of Farragut and four other CPS schools.
But Carmelia barely passed some of her classes and failed others. She wondered if she would make it to graduation.
Still, with CPS giving students many chances to get back on track, Carmelia had a shot.
Those extra chances also might help explain why CPS’ graduation rate continued to rise amid the stark increase in absenteeism.
At Farragut, for example, the school graduated 69% of students in 2024 — just one percentage point lower than in 2019, when attendance was much better.
And it’s not just Farragut.
Of 124 schools with complete data, half had at least a 5 percentage point increase in severe absenteeism — defined as students absent 35 days or more — between 2019 and 2024 while still seeing increases in their graduation rates.
For years in CPS, regular attendance in high school had been considered one of the strongest predictors of graduation.
Research by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research in 2007, considered groundbreaking at the time, found that CPS students who missed even one week of school freshman year had a significantly lower chance of graduating compared to those who didn’t.
But during the pandemic, absenteeism became less of a hurdle to graduation in districts across the country, said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. He said one explanation is that students might be getting assignments and turning them in online.
“The other possibility is it’s just gotten easier to pass,” he said.
What worries Balfanz: The correlation between attendance and test scores has remained firm. As a result, students who skip a lot of school but are still graduating could be leaving with less knowledge and skills.
CPS data echoes that national trend on attendance and test scores. CPS students who missed more than a month of school had the lowest SAT scores, on average, compared to all students in Illinois in 2023 who took the test, according to an analysis shared exclusively with WBEZ and Chalkbeat by the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative at the University of Illinois.
The average Illinois student who missed more than a month of school scored in the bottom quarter of test-takers on each subject, based on the College Board’s rankings.
Last fall, in announcing the state report card, Illinois education Superintendent Tony Sanders said the disconnect between “amazing gains in the graduation rate with simultaneously declining proficiency rates in high school” statewide is concerning. He didn’t have a clear answer as to why.
But CPS officials insist there’s little evidence students are learning less. They cite other UChicago Consortium research showing that grades are a better predictor of college success than SAT scores, even as they acknowledge grading policy changes at many schools make comparing grades pre- and post-pandemic impossible.
They say it’s also reassuring that the portion of CPS grads going to college has ticked up in recent years after dipping during the pandemic, and more stay past the first year.
‘You have to go to school every day’
Nanavati is a naturally affable guy, but he wondered if students needed a little sternness. Over the summer of 2024, Nanavati spent a lot of time thinking and talking to his team about what could be done in the coming year to change the dynamics in the school.
Together, they came up with a plan.
Farragut teachers voted overwhelmingly to go back to a zero to 100 grading scale. That way students and parents could more clearly see missing assignments.
Nanavati also made it more difficult for students to wander the hallways when they should be in class, in part by cordoning off unused sections of the hulking school.
Another change: Nanavati moved the cell phone lockers to the main office and forced kids to sign their phones out if they wanted to leave early. Before that, students could grab them on their way out.
Some complained the new policy was insensitive to students who had to leave early for work. But when Nanavati created a special form for those students, no one filled it out.
This proved a point to Nanavati: “We keep making exceptions for all these situations when they’re not actually happening. And so I think we’ve just relaxed so many expectations for students assuming this, and assuming that.”
Nanavati felt he couldn’t reduce absenteeism without the help of parents. He made a summer orientation session for parents mandatory and met with some one-on-one.
One of those parents was Lorena Patino. In September, she came with her daughter, a senior. The girl had failed some classes the previous school year, but Patino wasn’t sure why. To her dismay, Nanavati explained she had missed about half the year. To graduate, Patino’s daughter needed to turn her attendance around, he said.
“You have to go to school every day,” Patino later told her daughter. “This is not a game.”
Nanavati also created incentives to come to school. The library now has a student lounge with pingpong tables and video games. Students can spend their lunch period there, but only if they had perfect attendance the previous week.
And he told seniors that if they raised their attendance to 90%, the school would pay for their graduation luncheon and prom.
Carmelia works on coming to school, with help from a friend
The changes at Farragut seem to be working. Among them, Carmelia now has people on her case to come to school.
One recent morning, Carmelia, her dark hair dyed pink and tied in a short ponytail, was making her way to school when she got a call from Ayrianna Reavley, her “bestie.” Ayrianna asked if Carmelia had made it to her English credit recovery class.
“I was too tired to go,” Carmelia admitted.
“We only have two months left before we graduate,” Ayrianna gently scolded her. “You gotta lock it in!”
Carmelia and Ayrianna are inseparable. They’d hit it off in an U.S. history class and decided to join forces to step up their academic game.
Since the fall, Carmelia has also worked closely with Bethany Cooper-Nelson, a student supports manager from the nonprofit Communities in Schools.
Cooper-Nelson chats with Carmelia about their shared love of the graphic romance novel series “Heartstopper.” She also hands out snacks and helps Carmelia stay organized and turn in assignments.
But more than that, Cooper-Nelson sees Carmelia daily, holding her accountable and making sure she knows she matters. Every student at Farragut this year is paired with a staff member who checks in at least twice a week.
On a district level, CPS has started a new call center to help with outreach to families and is looking for ways to make students feel more engaged and give them more say in school decisions.
“When students feel deeply engaged in learning, it is rigorous, it is joyful, it is equitable, it’s really meaningful for them,” said Chkoumbova, the CPS chief education officer.
Experts say that the sense of connectedness to school is key.
Indeed, Carmelia’s attendance is up dramatically.
Attendance for Lorena Patino’s daughter is also way up, jumping ever since her parents got on board after that September orientation meeting with Nanavati.
The two girls are helping to drive up Farragut’s attendance rate overall. Like Carmelia’s, the school’s rate is now up to 80%, after staying just below 60% for much of last year, according to school officials.
Significantly more students are on track to graduate this school year, and college acceptances are up, too. Nanavati was recently invited to a Board of Education meeting where members celebrated the dramatic improvements.
Now, the district faces the task of replicating this across its high schools. CPS is trailing behind a goal it set last fall to cut chronic absenteeism by 15% over four years.
At Farragut, Carmelia says coming to school and seeing what Cooper-Nelson calls “a crazy drastic change” in her grades improved her mood and energy level. “It makes me feel I can accomplish something,” she said.
These days, she and Ayrianna have started talking about walking across the graduation stage together and what they want to do after high school. Ayrianna is headed to National Louis University in Chicago to study business and marketing. Carmelia’s plans are fuzzier. She still has credits to make up. But she’s more determined to figure it out.
One year after missing most of 11th grade and feeling like her life was going nowhere, college now seems like a real possibility.
“I want to find a purpose in life, and I want to find something that I’m good at,” Carmelia said. “Now, I actually want to try and see what I can do.”