Michigan K-12 crisis: State slow to respond as kids miss school, scores fall

In Mount Pleasant, it’s not unusual for first-grade teacher Danielle Bruursema to have a quarter of her 24 students absent on the same day, an alarmingly higher rate than just a few years ago.

In Ypsilanti last year, plummeting attendance in now-retired Debbie Swanson’s fifth grade class made it difficult to build course lessons. Maybe 50% of students bothered to show up for scheduled half days.

And in Holt, third-grade teacher Michael Adams draws a straight line between rising absenteeism and declining standardized test scores. Days when attendance was too low to teach new material put his class one and a half weeks behind for the M-STEP tests.

“Sometimes you have to slow down the whole class,” lamented Adams.

He’s not alone: Across Michigan, children are missing more school and farin