School attendance has bounced back in Connecticut. Leaders hail LEAP program

It began in 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: an effort, backed by federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act, to get Connecticut students back in school amid a spike in chronic absenteeism. The strategy: send volunteers directly into homes to build relationships with families, connect them with resources and, they hoped, improve attendance.

Five years later, state leaders and national experts on school attendance have declared the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, or LEAP, a resounding success. In the 2021-2022 school year, chronic absenteeism in Connecticut reached 23.7%, nearly double what it was pre-COVID. This past school year, it dropped to 16.4% — a decrease of roughly 35,000 students. That’s still higher than before the pandemic but well below the 2021 peak.

Gov. Ned Lamont, whose administration has overseen LEAP from its creation to the present day, said he’s pleased with the results.

“This is a program that I think is working,” Lamont told a large crowd of educators, LEAP home visitors and state officials at a gathering on Wednesday to celebrate LEAP’s five-year anniversary.

LEAP operates as a partnership between the state of Connecticut, its Regional Education Service Centers and local community organizations. Pairs of trained home visitors visit families with children at risk of chronic absenteeism. Over several months, the home visitors build relationships with the families, identifying why the kids aren’t going to school and offering resources.

LEAP home visitor Cecelia Garay said the causes of missing school vary.

“Some of the barriers will be transportation. Illness. They lost permanent housing and they don’t want to say it. … The language barrier. We have families that, they work — a single mom working two jobs,” Garay said.

Whatever the problem is, the home visitors work on finding solutions with the family.

“This is about a change in mindset. It’s moving from blame to engagement and prevention,” said Attendance Works CEO Hedy Chang, who has worked with Connecticut on LEAP since the program’s inception.

According to Ajit Gopalakrishnan of the Connecticut State Department of Education, students served through LEAP improve their rate of attendance by double digits on average and receive fewer disciplinary actions. A 2023 brief from Attendance Works reported a number of other qualitative benefits for families, including a better awareness of resources and a deeper sense of belonging and accountability.

In 2021, the program served 15 high-need districts; today, it serves 25, with plans to expand further in the near future. A $7 million line item for LEAP in the state budget has replaced the now-expired ARPA funding.

Chang attributed LEAP’s success to how Connecticut collects attendance data: Years before the pandemic, Connecticut began insisting schools report attendance data monthly, rather than yearly. The state also developed a clear definition of what “attendance” actually is, including for virtual learning.

Chang said having those structures in place when COVID hit was instrumental in making LEAP work.

“It allows you to have a much earlier warning sign that things are going awry,” Chang said.

The fact that many other states don’t collect the amount of data Connecticut does — and that “chronic absence” may not even mean exactly the same thing from one state to another — makes it hard to compare the Nutmeg State’s performance to the nation as a whole (in Connecticut, chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% of school days in a school year). Nevertheless, Chang said, Connecticut compares well to many of its peers.

She offered a few theories about why chronic absenteeism remains above pre-pandemic levels. First: Attitudes toward being school haven’t yet gone back to what they were before COVID.

“There have been challenges coming back from the pandemic of kids and families fully appreciating that being in school in person matters,” Chang said.

She said the challenges low-income households have faced after COVID, such as rising food prices and housing insecurity, have also made school attendance worse. Many federal health, housing and nutrition programs have also received substantial cuts since the passage of 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

And then there’s ICE.

“There is research … that shows that when you have ICE raids at or near schools, it — particularly for those days, it affects (attendance),” Chang said. And that doesn’t just go for undocumented students; Chang said students with legal residence are also wary of going to school when ICE is in the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker said Connecticut is aiming to bring its chronic absence numbers down even further. The State Board of Education has set a target of 6% chronic absenteeism statewide; Russell-Tucker described that number as ambitious but achievable.

“It’s bold … but I really believe that it just causes us to dig in even more,” Russell-Tucker said.

As for Lamont, his message to students at the start of the school year was simple: “Come to school. We miss you. We love you.”

This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.