In 2020, Rochelle Muhammad, a Merrillville mother who worked the night shift to provide for her teenage son, received some unexpected mail. It was a summons to appear in court after her son was late to school too many times.
"I felt attacked,” she said. “I thought I was a good mother."
She was shocked to see that she could go to jail for something her child wasn't doing correctly, like going to the bus on time.
Muhammad wasn't the only parent battling attendance issues during this time.
Before the pandemic, some school districts, such as Gary Community School Corporation, had attendance rates as low as 25%. During the pandemic, schools had no choice but to switch to kids attending school virtually, and Gary absentee rates spiked to as high as 71%. Since then, Gary and the state’s chronically absent percentage have improved.
In 2024, the Indiana Department of Education released the state's chronic absenteeism rating, and for the second consecutive year, Indiana’s rating improved.
In Indiana, 17.8% of students were chronically absent for the 2023-2024 school year. That’s 1.4 percentage points better than the 2022-2023 school year and 3.3 percentage points better than the post-pandemic rate.
As absenteeism rates gradually improve in Indiana, state lawmakers have continued to pass bills to address the issue.
For example, Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, proposed House Bill 1540 during the 2025 legislative session, requiring the Department of Education to look at coming up with suggestions to improve the system, creating disciplinary actions to cut down the days kids miss school, setting up guidelines for schools to step in earlier, and making an attendance plan.
The bill died in committee, but it meant something to him because he was a principal before becoming a legislator. During Smith's last principal job, at Williams Elementary School in Gary, he tried to encourage students to come to school by making it a fun environment.
“We never lost our focus on academic achievement, but we did things to make children enjoy school. We had pride days, we had incentives,” he said. “For example, if you had perfect attendance for the month, then the following month, you can come to our game room during lunch. We also had things like, if your class had the best attendance, then we were going to have your choice of a pizza party or ice cream party per grade level.”
He also highlighted that his second priority was to help parents become partners in their efforts to improve attendance, and his staff would strategize with parents to see what they could do to help.
“For example, laying out the children’s clothing the night before, if the children were having difficulty getting up in the morning. Let them take their showers and their baths at nighttime. So, when they get up, all they have to do is get out of bed, brush their teeth, comb their hair, wash their faces and leave the house,” Smith said.
“We wanted them to come partners with us to understand that academic time had to be protected. Students shouldn’t be coming into school an hour late, half-hour late or missing half the day.”
Smith observed some improvements when focusing on attendance but still encountered challenges.
Now, in Smith's role as a lawmaker, he along with other representatives and senators can make bills with the hope of improving the issue, but none of this is possible without the efforts from the school districts and teachers.
During the pandemic, two school districts, GCSC and Warren Township, saw spikes in their chronic absenteeism ratings. GCSC rates reached a high of 71% in 2022, and Warren Township rates peaked at 63.6%. These districts are now making it a priority to reduce these rates moving forward.
Chris Membribes, assistant principal at Warren High School, is in his second year there and has developed a multi-tiered support system to tackle the chronic absenteeism that he believes is working.
“Because we’re treating people like people,” Membribes said.
“Before I got here, communication was done via email, via code, pre-scripted letters. While we still send those out, I recognize that there needed to be more. Treat people like people. People who don’t have reliable housing probably don’t have reliable internet. People who are thinking about what their next meal or how they’re going to provide for their family’s next meal are thinking about what message or voicemail did I receive from the school today—recognizing that I think was the first step to changing the chronic absentee issue that we had.”
Membribes was aware that, at one point, the school's ratings were over 35%, and he said, “I just, I can’t imagine that that’s sustainable for me.
“So I made it my mission to address that. … It’s like a personal achievement that I am striving for to bring that number down to about 10% in the next two years.”
Warren’s multi-tiered support system aims to identify the problem and then address it by offering different services for support.
“So, let’s say they’re like, we recently lost our jobs, and you know, I’m working two jobs, and sometimes I’m home to get them to school, sometimes I’m not well. Then we refer that person or that family to our McKinney-Vento specialist to see if they can qualify for any services,” Membribes said. “If they don’t qualify for any of those services, then they’re transferred over to what is known as True Lasting Connections in the city of Downey,” he said.
“So, we take that first approach, and then the second approach is centered on clear and consistent communication, reminding families the importance of school, reminding them through letters and messages, … personal phone calls, and making sure that if that chronic absentee continues, there are specific consequences that we have in place to ensure that their student is on track for graduation and on track to graduate. ... So we offer Saturday school attendance recovery, where students can complete assignments, work on homework, and make sure that they are receiving their full educational benefit despite the fact that they've missed several days of school.
Membribes added: “We’re not quite there yet. I think we’re definitely moving in the right direction. Change is the process, and change takes time.”
Antionette Ferguson-Dixon, the director of student services of GCSC. She has been a student, dean, assistant and interim principal in this same system and has the goal to leave a mark in the system where she was educated and in her hometown.
“We’re on the up-cline this year in Gary,” Ferguson-Dixon said about the recent GCSC attendance rate improvements. She said they have a goal of reaching 95% attendance ratings.
“Gary is holding those mid-80s, which for Gary is an increase," she said. “We like our secondary schools to become higher, specifically our high school. We need higher attendance.”
In her role, she gets a chance to view the state post percentages of each school district every week. Because she was new to the position, she went back to the 2021-2022 school year just to look at the spikes in the ratings.
“Like how chronic absenteeism is increasing and decreasing, what breaks or holidays or what periods of the year our attendance is higher,” she said. “I’m trying to look and find trends within the data that could influence how we, for example, plan activity or how we even target instruction academics.”
Ferguson-Dixon emphasized that adding an attendance department has been the key factor in improvement.
“A part of that, I want to believe, and I do believe, is because we’ve added a department that is focused on attendance as one of its main focuses,” she said.
Sen. Stacey Donato, R-Logansport, had a bill on chronic absenteeism signed into law May 6, and she gave TheStatehouseFile.com some insight into why some schools are doing better than others.
“Some schools are doing a great job; they have the resources to do that,” she said. “[But many] schools just don’t have the resources to do it. So, we’re just trying to get some better practices.”
Donato complimented Warren's program by what she would call “rocking it.” But she spoke about small schools without a lot of students that do not have the resources to make programs to tackle absenteeism.
“I have a school in my district where the entire building is 400 students, K-12, so they’re not going to be able to have staff to combat that,” she said.
Schools are transitioning from punishing parents to now trying to fix the root problem of why the absences are occurring.
Muhammad's attendance at court stemmed from her son consistently being tardy. This led to her having to attend court for trial and complete 30 hours of community service, and her son had to participate in a Big Brother mentorship program for three months.
When Muhammad went to court over her son being chronically absent, all that she had to endure didn't help their situation personally, she said.
"It was other people in the courtroom who were chronically absent; it was whole families who weren't going to school, and the parents were threatened with the same consequences," she explained. "I'm like, I know my son is late, which is not good, but these young children haven't been."
Her son was a junior in high school at the time and was paired with a student in college. He said the mentorship didn't help him attend school on time, but it did help him with other things, like writing his first cover letter and applications to college. By his senior year, his attendance improved.