Okay.

Good afternoon, and thank you everyone for joining the Education and Workforce Development Committee meeting.

My name is Councilmember Shayla Adam Stafford, and I serve as the chair.

Today is Monday, June 1st, 2026.

We advertise this as a meeting of the Education and Workforce Development Committee.

However, we do not currently have a quorum of the members to convene as a public meeting.

As a result, we will proceed as an informational gathering as opposed to a meeting, and the public is welcome to observe.

Thank you.

For today's agenda, we have two briefings.

I want to thank all of our presenters.

We're so appreciative of your time.

Thank you for being here with us today.

Our first agenda item will be a briefing from the Prince George's County Public School System on Chronic Absenteeism.

I will now turn it over to our committee director, Dr.

Pirakin, for an overview and introductions.

It's a French McGather.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, Council members.

My name is Dr.

Burn Perakin, Director of the Education and Workforce Development Committee.

The first item on our agenda is a briefing on chronic absenteeism in our school system.

With us today from the Prince George's County Public Schools are Dr.

Elizabeth Faison, associate superintendent of student services, Dr.

Tisa Holly, Director of Student Services, Mr.

Anthony Whittington, Director of Monitoring and Accountability, and Principal Warren Tweedy from Andrew Jackson Academy, who has seen strong reductions year to year in chronic absenteeism rates.

I will now turn it over to our presenters.

Good afternoon and thanks so much, Council Chair and members.

We're here today to discuss our efforts this year that are centered around realigning our focus on student attendance and to provide graduation rate information as has been requested.

And so throughout the presentation today, various presenters will take turns providing that information.

And so I will now yield to Mr.

Anthony Whittington for the rest of the presentation.

Oh, perfect.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for this opportunity.

First of all, we want to level set and talk about defining chronic absenteeism.

The formal definition of chronic absenteeism applies to any student enrolled for 10 or more days who has been absent, 10% or more of their school days.

And for context, this measure accounts for 15% of the total accountability scores on the school's Maryland School Report card, underscoring the importance of it.

In addition, uh for our school district, we've launched an outward-facing public district performance dashboard.

This tool offers complete transparency into our schools, district's progress, tracks key metrics, and aligns directly with the Maryland Accountability System.

When you check out the platform, you can view current achievements alongside of historical trends of data to see how schools are growing over time.

And I consider this the health of our school district, and also you can view each individual school's data alongside the district's data.

Next slide.

All right.

As we move into uh two-year comparison of our chronic absenteeism rate, here you see uh uh the May's chronic absenteeism with uh downward trend of roughly 0.4 percentage points across all levels.

If we dig a little deeper, we can next slide, we can see this from the grade span perspective.

And as you see, elementary and K-8 are experiencing a significant reduction as compared to year prior.

And so this year, um, by charge of our now new superintendent, Dr.

Joseph.

Um, we were charged to really lean in and understand root causes to look at our data, but also understand what's behind the data.

What is the why as to why students aren't coming to school?

And we started with looking at data trends.

And so this particular slide shows information around our data and the trend that it shows.

So for early dismissal days that you'll see in September and again in November, our chronic absenteeism spike for those days.

You'll also see similarly for a late weather day or late start due to inclement weather, our chronic absenteeism rate rose for those days as well as the day right before Thanksgiving or spring break.

We see that those days as well are days that we see that our students are not attending schools the most.

So you'll see that theme occurring as we continue with the rest of the presentation around our efforts to be more investigative with our chronic absenteism data this year.

Dr.

Tisa.

And like Dr.

Faisan just mentioned about the root causes, we were asked to survey our staff to hear from them as they're in having these encounters with families and the students as to what's serving as the barriers.