Thousands of Cleveland students aren’t showing up for daily online classes — skipping class, dropped off the rolls, or never enrolled at all, data analyzed by The 74 show.
That means a district with 36,900 students last school year now has about 28,200 attending classes on a typical day, a drop of more than 8,000, the district’s data show.
The 28,200 may be generous.
A few schools marked 100 percent of students present every day this fall – schools that in a normal academic year would have an attendance rate of around 80 percent.
“It’s distressing,” said Kurt Karakul, who heads a partnership between service organizations to help students in one of Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, adding that low attendance and participation in classes make this school year almost a lost year. “I think, unfortunately, there are kids that have sort of just disappeared.”