How Adaptable Districts Can Reverse Chronic Absenteeism with Jen Perry

Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody. You are listening to Resilient Schools on the Bee Podcast Network. Thanks for being with us. I think this will be a great conversation. I'm your host today, Ross Romano, co founder of the Bee Podcast Network, and it's my pleasure to be talking to Jen Perry. 

Jen is Senior Manager of Learning Design and Whole Learner at Edmentum. She has worked for over 30 years with youth in educational and community settings. As a teacher, administrator, and trainer, Jen's passion has been to help educators develop an understanding of the importance of social emotional learning and build trauma informed responses and systems. 

This work has included supporting youth, administrators, and schools in understanding behavior, implementing transformational change through strength based approaches. Jen, welcome to the show! 

Jen Perry: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. 

Ross Romano: I actually wanted to start it by giving you a little bit of a chance to define our show for us in a [00:01:00] sense you know, as we mentioned, the school is called the show is called Resilient Schools and, you know, I think that means a lot of things to a lot of people. Right. And there's a lot of different approaches and programs required to create schools and districts that are resilient in the face of challenges, crises, change. 

So I wanted to hear from you when you hear that phrase, resilient schools, what does that call to mind with respect to your work and how you think of the term? 

Jen Perry: Oh, my gosh. I love that question. I'm really excited that you asked it because it's something I was thinking about and I was wondering sort of the way in. So awesome. This word resilience, so as someone who has spent a good portion of my time working with kids who often we use the phrase at risk. I call them at promise, right? 

In that this word resiliency gets thrown around a lot. And I was actually I lived for 18 years in Rochester, New York, and [00:02:00] my most sort of recent job there was to run a juvenile diversion program with five community based organizations, probation, child protective, and the city school districts. 

And as part of that, I sat on a council for resilient schools. It was a resiliency collaborative. We had 16 different districts. community based organizations, hospitals associated with us. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that word because I think in our culture, we think about resilient as like. 

This rock that can get battered against by the waves and we stand strong and right, that's such a miss, I think, on the really breadth of that word, and the best definition I've heard for resilient is that it sort of equates to adaptable, right, that it isn't about just having trauma batter you and staying strong, right. 

It's about being able to adjust and adapt, ideally in healthy ways, [00:03:00] to the systems and the things that are around us that we have to be resilient in. And in schools, we often talked about it. As like, sort of expect kids to meet the framework and the expectations. And if you come to school and you haven't had breakfast and we're saying like, no, you have to be in class right now. 

You have to be resilient, get your work done. Is that acceptable? Is that an acceptable definition of resilience? Or should we say like, We also need to adapt, feed the child, and then, you know, help them adapt and adjust to the kinds of things that their needs present in that setting. So, I like the definition of resilient as adaptable. (ad here) 

Ross Romano: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's we talk about going beyond trauma informed schools to schools that are ready for anything that's thrown at them. And that looks like a lot of different things, of course, right? There's individual student traumas, and there's the social, emotional, and relationship [00:04:00] aspect. 

There is you know, there was the pandemic with societal and systemic traumas Yeah. Both in the sense of the impact that had on people and mental health and families and physical health, but also the system with schools not being open and needing to be resilient to deliver instruction in new modalities. 

And you know, that was You know, one of the ways that I, one of the projects I worked on where we talked about the Resilient Schools Project was with the National Nonprofit Future of School, which was a, you know, an awards and then grant based program for schools or even individual educators who found Things that worked to be able to deliver remote and hybrid learning and wanted, you know, needed to secure funding to be able to continue those and wanting to do some of those things. 

And that was more, you know, technology adaptable, adaptive, as you said, to being able to, okay, this actually really works well. This keeps students [00:05:00] engaged. This allows us to deliver instruction in a variety of ways and not be You know, contingent upon the status quo. Okay, we can teach if The school is open, every teacher is here, every student is here, we're in our classroom, okay, then we can teach. 

If something disrupts that, eh, you know, maybe not anymore. So that adaptive piece. What are, I'm wondering, you know, with this Resiliency. Are there particular, and this, you know, I'm sure you're not going to be able to go through all of them because there probably are more than we can count but indicators of trauma within a school community when we talk about trauma informed responses, right? 

And for each school, each district, those are going to be look different. But in order to have that response, we have to figure out what we're responding to. Are there indicators that are most [00:06:00] common or just ways to identify the indicators, right? To say, all right, we know we want to develop our system here to be resilient. 

First, we need to determine in our unique learning context, what does that mean? What 

Jen Perry: I feel like you just handed me the right question. So, so there are formal indicators of trauma, like the adverse childhood experiences, you know, assessment that we can do. And many schools do that. And we know that kids who score high on the adverse childhood experience scale are more likely to experience trauma. 

don't do as well, right? And but it's also, we also know it's not like a fait accompli. There, there are things that we can do that are protective factors once we understand trauma in people's lives that can help them thrive, right? It's not like we say, okay, well, you have over a four on the A scale, So now your health demographics are going to be terrible, and your life is going to be terrible, and you're going to, like, do all these things. 

What matters [00:07:00] is, when we know it, what are the protective factors that we can help build to do that? And that and and so I'm going to go from that to, I think, to attendance in a second. But the other thing I want to say about trauma is that, Trauma is about perspective, right? So we often will fall into the trap in some way of thinking trauma happens for people who look like X or in communities that look like Y, right? 

But we learned even from 9 11, right, that there are people who were present in New York City when that happened who have relatively low trauma from that, and we also know that there are people who were in California who watched it on TV who weren't there, who didn't have anybody who perished, who were very traumatized by that experience, and it changed their life, and so our, the way that we sort of imbibe an experience, and the perspective that we have around that, determines whether something is [00:08:00] traumatic for us or not. 

Now, that said, we know there are common things that are likely to be traumatic. Poverty, you know, lack of food, abuse, all of those kinds of things. And that's what the ACEs piece matters or measures. And so, So I think there are those very clear things that we can look at. If someone's not screening for ACEs, we can look at frequent challenges or demographics. 

We also need to challenge a perspective when we think maybe out of our frame of reference into maybe a well off community. Well, what does it mean to have resources? Do those resources match? what they need. And one of the examples that stands out to me is we, I've been in schools where people say, well, they have lots of support. 

They have all these familial relations, people who show up for them. And yet the person is struggling with something like gender identity and their family has a perception of where that should fall and it doesn't match the person's. And [00:09:00] so that support is, you know, quantitative but not qualitative, right? 

It doesn't actually mean they feel supported. So those are indicators of trauma and for me in the work that I did actually in that diversion program attendance is a great indicator that something's going on because, right, what we know developmentally is kids want to be connected. people happy. people happy. They want to belong. They want to learn. They want to grow, right? So if they're not coming to school, there's something getting in the way of that. And we can ask lots of questions around that. And and so I think one of the things we're here to talk about is like that impact of. what those things have done to contribute to chronic absenteeism. 

And there's really good research that if I were to give you only one solution to a very complex problem, connection and developmental relationships are a pivotal protective factor. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. [00:10:00] Yeah, there's, there are, there's so many. And I think, you know, part of what you are illustrating in your response is about the mindset and mindfulness about what could be different sources of trauma and not. Assuming that it only means a certain demographic, a certain type of, you know, a certain student that we think, oh, this student probably has trauma in their life, this one doesn't, or that you know, even as you referenced, I think in the 9 11 example, there's different ways things may have real effects. 

On learners and the way that they're able to show up and engage in their learning. It's making me think about a completely different podcast that I recorded last week which was not resilient schools, but it was about equity and access. But I was speaking to an educator named Eli [00:11:00] Davis, who's getting his PhD right now, focused largely on the study of epigenetics and You know, there's a lot to investigate there about historical traumas and, for example, you know, what effect does it have on a student who, you know, is an African American student and reads about slavery? 

Like, how does that affect their psyche and their ability to engage in their learning and, you know, in, in ways that are maybe invisible on the surface, but over time, when we're not being mindful about what's in our curriculum, what's in our textbooks, are we being more representative of the cultures? 

Okay, the only things I'm reading about are you know, past, you know, negative, very negative things or even in, you know, even the [00:12:00] heroes of the civil rights movement who you know, many of whom were assassinated, right? Like, like this is, this builds up over time and it's somewhere in my head that's associated with my identity, not me a student and That's traumatic, right? 

And there's a certain, there's going to likely be a certain disengagement from a lot of the subject matter, if not school as a whole, where when I'm taught to, you know, to learn that, okay, well, when we're learning about people that look like me, it's not going to be a happy chapter, right? 

Jen Perry: Yeah, right, right, right. 

Ross Romano: Yeah, 

Jen Perry: Yeah, so I mean, so as someone who's a senior manager of learning design, right, we think about representation and all sorts of things in how we develop. And as a digital product, one of the things that we can do is help create curriculum that allows people to feel it's meaningful to them, that it's, that they're, they can see themselves reflected. 

They don't just see an image removed from or just negative, that there's this sort of [00:13:00] broader holistic understanding of the beauty of the world and the sort of diversity of it. And that can help elevate curriculum to a meaningful piece. So the segue for me, right, from that back to what we were talking about is I, you know, from a behavioral perspective, and that's one of the things I'm really interested in is the neurobiology of our brain and how that's changing our understanding of how people learn, right? 

And this idea that emotions come before learning. So you just gave this great example of like, if I read something and it causes me to have a negative emotion, I'm going to be less receptive to that learning. I'm going to be more disengaged. So how do we understand now that we have to engage positive emotion to increase the, you know, brain's capacity to learn? 

Super, super important. And, So when we learn, you know, learning has to be meaningful. So we know from a behavioral perspective, we're only capable of doing what we have the skills to do. And we're [00:14:00] only motivated to do it when it's meaningful in some way. Right? So, so you can create meaning to your point by innately building something that's going to spark somebody's passion, but that's hit or miss because we're different people and we have different passions. 

Or we can build a connection to say, this is going to be important to you in Your goals and your future plans, 

Ross Romano: Yeah. 

Jen Perry: or we can say the people here meet your needs. Right? And so, like, to me, that's the thing that's going to be most like that's the easy win in some ways, right? That's the connection piece. So I'm going to give you an example. 

It's a story. My son knows. I tell it. I have a 26 year old who Who you know, had AD, has ADHD, had some sensory issues, struggled early in school with things like writing, even though he's very good at writing. And here's something we can all relate to. So picture a subject that you hated. 

You just didn't like it, but you [00:15:00] loved the teacher. Just loved them. Did that make it easier to go to class and learn? Like, if you think about that teacher, for him, it was his teacher. Like, English teacher, and she just knew how to pull the best out of him, you know, and he was, he didn't avoid the class because he wanted to see her. 

Versus, he loved math, he went through calculus in high school, he went to college, he went in, he's like, for fun, I'm going to take calculus too, I don't know, right? And, he went in and the teacher was, had his back to him, and was writing on the board, and there were 200 students, and was very sort of clinical about it, and he was like, I can't take this class, I'll end up hating math. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. 

Jen Perry: right, what is the pivotal point that allows you entry into learning? It's that relationship piece. And the Search Institute, who's been around for a really long time, right, they started maybe almost 40 years ago looking at the developmental assets, like 40 developmental assets, internal, external protective factors that help us thrive, and to your point earlier, [00:16:00] help manage trauma, right, trauma informed care around ACEs. 

And they sort of. Created what was most impactful, and I think intuitively we all know this, teachers know this, and it's the relationship. So they've created like a framework that helps, a rubric that helps teachers look at how they can measure connection and developmental relationships with kids because we know that that can do so much. 

And so, so what's happened to connection that has changed and had such a negative impact on chronic attendance? Thanks. That's the, that's the conversation point. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. And even kind of, as we're sort of transitioning into that a little bit and talking about the attendance piece I think there's even a little more to, to extrapolate about. the relationship between educator engagement and student engagement. And that's something that I've thought about, talked about a lot on a lot of these podcasts is like, we put so [00:17:00] much of this emphasis on student engagement, and that conversation isn't always integrated with the conversation about teacher burnout and, you know, teacher retention, attrition, turnover, and all of that. 

And understanding that There has to be a relationship, right? That like, how do we expect the student to be engaged in their learning if their teacher is totally burned out, disengaged, etc. In contrast, the example you gave, This is not my favorite subject or it's one of, I'm struggling in this class, but this teacher really loves it. 

They're engaging. They're clearly putting the effort in and you know, so I'm more likely to see the possibility there, see the potential. If it's a math teacher, me personally, like math was never my favorite subject. I was, you know, fine in it, but it, I. It didn't strike me as the most interesting, but when I had a teacher who clearly loved math, it would say, well, I guess it is possible to love this way. 

[00:18:00] Like, it might not be me, but at least it's like, it's, you know, it's not something that everybody, it's not everybody's least favorite, you know, some people love it. And it just makes you a little more interested, a little more willing to see their point of view. But, you know, as we work our way into, yeah, I think particularly some of the conversation, chronic absenteeism and all the facts related to that is there a little more to be said about at least the importance of integrating these conversations and saying, you know, let's make sure that we are keeping our educators supported and engaged in their work because that's In the classroom, you know, that's probably going to be the number one factor on those students, or at least our number one resource in being able to, you know, be, to have a response to student traumas or disengagement is we need those educators to be really ready for that task,[00:19:00] 

Jen Perry: Yeah. I mean, there's so many, there's so many lessons in that. And you know, where we ask people to model skills that maybe they have not developed themselves. Like one of the things that's happened. In 30 years of education is like the perspective on what we're supposed to do has shifted. So right now we hear that teachers like, well, you know, we weren't trained to be social workers. 

We weren't trained to be all these, you know, different things. Absolutely. Right. We don't even do well in schools of higher education for teachers and looking at behavior management. That's, you know, typically not an in depth topic that, that people go into. And so, as. Things have shifted and those skills have been more required. 

We sort of run up against a wall and to the same in this in the same way administrators, right, have had a perspective for years that educators that anybody in a job comes to school and leaves their emotions at the door and just figures it out, right? But if we actually [00:20:00] believe and understand now, because we can see from MRIs and brain, and you know, mapping the brain, that emotion is connected to our ability to learn and grow and be present, then. 

the premise that we leave our emotions at the door is just, it's not, you know, our brain doesn't work like that. It's integrated. So that's true for everybody. It's not just true for students. And so that means administrators also have to have a new set of skills around how they interact with staff and coach and support and, you know, think about wellness and all of those kinds of things. 

And in order to create a staff that can trickle that down to students, we have to model that. You know, from the top, from our systems, and from all those pieces. One of the things, actually, as someone who's worked in trauma and social emotional learning, that has been really, um, made me optimistic, actually, about COVID, was that we shifted our lens from a particular population that struggled to everybody. 

We went from, like, those kids or [00:21:00] those people who have this problem to, Oh, yeah, everybody needs support. Right, like all my coping skills didn't work during COVID either. What am I going to do about this? And so we've really normalized this understanding more, you know, we, we still don't have the time to do or the money or the resources to do all the things that we need to do. 

But I think from a mindset perspective, we're less judgy about, you know, the fact that we need to support everybody. And I think that's a good thing. And so I think you're right that, like, Thinking about there, there's a project in the resiliency consortium that I did that we, we taught schools and it sort of nods to this. 

It's called the Dot Project and, It's the, it's a mapping of a school's connection. And so you first think, okay, well, I'm mapping students who are connected, but really it's also about teachers to your point. So this is a nice bridge. The activity is basically you [00:22:00] have students put a dot next to all the people in the school they feel connected to. 

Everybody, you know, bus drivers, secretaries, lunch people, everybody. And with Littles, you could do pictures if you wanted, but we'll talk about it from a, like, middle and high school perspective just for now. And at the same time, you have teachers put dots next to the kids that they feel connected to, right? 

There's a lot of things you can do with that data. You can look at that data and you can say, like, okay, well, Johnny doesn't have any dots, and oh, by the way, Johnny flags on attendance all the time. You know, maybe that's telling us a particular story, but from a teacher student lens, you can also say, well, did Jen note that she's connected to lots of people, but lots of people didn't note that they were connected to Jen. 

So, is there a perception that difference between how I, as the adult, feel like I'm relating that makes me think I'm connected that isn't translating. And so as an administrator, I can look at that and I [00:23:00] can say, Oh, well, that's really interesting. Like this person, Jen, feels like she's doing a great job, but there's a miss somehow. 

So what skills do we need to build? What supports does that person in order to be more effective? And and Ross. You know, Mark that he's connected to lots of people and guess what? They also marked that they feel very connected to him. So maybe Ross can help us skill build around. What are the essential things that we can do to help build those connections? 

And so the trick is to not use that as a punitive exercise, but to use it as a growth and learning exercise to say, okay, you know, everybody, we only. We only have the skills we had experience and exposure for. Now I have to create experience and exposure for people who don't have those skills or who feel like they need more support. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. 

Jen Perry: So yeah, 100%. It's got to, it's got to be across the board to really create that kind of cultural shift. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. And so if it, and it's, if it's not already clear to listeners, I'm sure it is, I'm sure they know [00:24:00] coming into this the importance of, you know, connectedness and engagement and you know, response and approaches that account for student traumas. You know, one of the consequences of lack of connectedness, disengagement, et cetera, is absenteeism and chronic absenteeism, right? right? Right. Which and of course there's all these factors that can inhibit a student's learning and performance when they're even in school, but if they're not there at all, even you're going to be a lot more difficult. And there's and this is something that There was increases widespread during the pandemic, but also hasn't necessarily been a full bounce back, but it's something that you specifically have looked at you when you're part of the Rochester City School District of New York and I'm sure you've continued to kind of keep up with what's been happening, but you know, what did you, Learn what have you learned as far as what were the causes of the chronic absenteeism, what's been happening with that as time has [00:25:00] continued? 

Jen Perry: Yeah it's such an interesting question and I this piece of why it hasn't rebounded to me is slightly different than why it was there to begin with, right? So one of the things that we know about chronic absenteeism is that there's inequitable representation across the school districts where that happens, right? 

So typically it's higher pre pandemic in schools who are more challenged than other schools, right? So all the trauma things that we talked about have an impact on attendance. And and then you add in, you know, so why is that? I think Increasingly, school has not translated well into people's understanding of meaningfulness, right? 

So, in the And one of the things in the Juvenile Diversion Program that I would do and in non secure, actually, and this is actually true in the boarding school that I worked at, is I would say, like, what do you, how do we create meaning for your [00:26:00] story? And if someone said to me, well, I want to be an NBA star. 

I mean, I had lots of kids who said, I want to be a rap star. I want to be an NBA star. Now in no matter what school it's I want to be a YouTube star. I want to be like a gamer. I want to make my money that way, right? In any of those, it's very hard to make the leap to say, how does this matter to me? How does being in school matter to me? 

Right? So with the NBA example, I would say, well, do you know what the NCAA guidelines are for enrollment? Like, if you want to play college basketball, You know, you actually have to pass certain classes and there's like a threshold. And so let's look at what you're taking and how does that fit in? And how do we create meaning for this vision that you have? 

And I don't think, I don't think we've moved off of traditional, our traditional understanding of school and how we implement schooling to help bring kids into that story. And less, they're already so far out of that story that we're really reaching to pull them back in, [00:27:00] right? And then we vary our approach. 

But the other thing that's happened, right? We know that kids, particularly middle and high school, want to belong. And typically, 30 years ago, right, the only place you could go to have a peer group, a social group to connect and belong with school, right? That's where you wanted to be generally. And and if you weren't there for academics, you were there because you could, you know, have friends, play sports do all those kinds of things. 

With the increase in social media, right, more and more kids have found ways to meet that need. Sort of essential need for having a peer group or belonging, whether or not it's effective is another conversation, but through that platform and and there's a sort of quick, you know, dopamine serotonin. 

I got my, like, I'm excited. Like, it's hard to compete with that immediate gratification. And, and what happened during the pandemic is we took kids who were already in these sort of tenuous [00:28:00] situations with connection in school, and we move them into a fully virtual world now. Look, I work for an ed tech company, and I believe that virtual curriculum can be supportive of teachers and in fact, free them up to do some of the connective things that they need to be able to do in order to meet the needs of students. 

But that said, when we talk about, you know, that immediate gratification of social media and things online that the pandemic sort of further disenfranchised kids. And then what do we do? Then the pandemic ended. We brought them back in and we said, all right, let's get back to normal. And everybody was like, well, wait a minute. 

Now I have this different perspective on what I'm doing and how it fits into my life and whether it's meaningful and whether I need it for social or academic status, you know, and People started asking questions. Parents got more involved. They wanted to know more about what kids were learning and how that would be valuable. 

[00:29:00] I mean, it's really actually positively impacted the rise in career and technology training and the desire for that. I don't know if you remember when kids came back, there was a TikTok challenge. And it was like, Kids were going in and destroying bathrooms in schools and like destroying their environment, right? 

And to me, that was like the, you talked about indications early on. the biggest indication of feeling disconnected. Like, I don't care about my environment so much that I actually care more about the like I'm going to get for doing damage to something. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. 

Jen Perry: And then what do we do? We suspend them. And what we really need to do is pull them in and say, well, how can we connect to you? 

How is this, how can we create meaning for you? How can we make this a valuable place for you? Which is, you know, it's hard because obviously for safety and for all sorts of things we make other decisions. But for me, that really illustrates this. Like, Disconnection between what kids [00:30:00] are articulating their perceived needs to be and how we are trying to engage them or connect with them. 

And so we've got to start to shift that and figure, figure that out. (ad here) 

Ross Romano: Yeah. And I think, you know, part of what's standing out is that, is The school system had not traditionally done a good enough job of making the case for its importance to students, why schooling is valuable, and why it is universally valuable, regardless of What you may believe you want to do in the future. 

And there's always been small examples of that. When am I ever going to use this right kind of thing? And there's ways to make that curriculum more relevant about, you know, if it's [00:31:00] math and financial literacy or whatever the case may be, small things to say, look, this is all. These are all things that are valuable to know. 

It doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to go into X profession, where this is the main thing that you use when it relates to life, but then post pandemic, once students through that process had learned that, you know, throughout each of their individual experiences of trauma and all the challenges associated with it, once You know, the pandemic was ending and schools were reopening. 

They had learned that life goes on if I'm not going to school every day. And, you know, now you really need to make, if you want to just revert back to normal, now we need to make the case when in most of the rest of society, right? Other professions, the workforce, et cetera. Things did not just go back to the way they were. 

Now, companies [00:32:00] do need to make the case for if we're doing in person or hybrid, and we're not allowing our employees to work remote, we have to make a case for why that is, why that's a necessity and, you know, then that's the same thing that would have to happen in schools is to say, okay, why are we doing this? 

What does this look like? And, yes, if students who are already engaged by a thread, maybe by the thread of proximity, you know, and not actual emotional connectedness, then lost that because they were no longer there or they were, you know, sort of part of that kind of invisibly, chronically absent group during the pandemic where they really weren't even present in the virtual schooling. 

Now. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot more to be done to, to re engage them and and it's something that is, is not easy, but is it's not [00:33:00] going to likely fix itself, I guess, as maybe the assumption was. Okay, well now this pandemic thing is over and some of these things that we were never quite able to solve in our district during the pandemic, at least now that'll be done, and Not so much because now everybody has had a different experience and a different view on it, I suppose, but also presents, I mean, a good opportunity, a good challenge to think more deeply. 

I think I, you know, use the phrase show, don't tell right? I talk about that a lot with schools as far as, you know, showing, for example, all of the positive things they're doing and being more proactive with that communication and storytelling. And instead of just saying, well, teachers are the experts in this, which if you just say that it either doesn't make the case or it's antagonistic toward parents, because it's kind of saying, trust us, not yourself. 

Jen Perry: Yeah. 

Ross Romano: Show them that by [00:34:00] showing actual examples of what you're doing, and it's the same, you know, the same thing. Show them as you mentioned, you know, relating the things that they are interested in, these careers, and how they would use this knowledge. 

Jen Perry: Yeah, you, I like the parallel that you used around the. the workforce adapting, but not necessarily the schools. And for me, what stands out, the phrase that I would use is it's compliance versus collaboration, right? And so those examples that you just gave about working with parents, understanding the needs, all of those kinds of things, like those are examples of collaboration rather than compliance, which is like, this is our schedule, school's back in, time to show up, this is work, this is when, right, we have to, we're in a spot now in general. 

Like the, one of the positive things I think about. Social media is that it's opened up this perspective of comparison of like, oh, my life could be different. I could see these other options. There are these other things that I can compare it to. It's not just like what happens in my house or in my thing is the way the world is. 

And so we do [00:35:00] need to, like, move from compliance to collaboration and thinking about how to create. engagement and meaning at all levels. So I love that you pulled that out as an example as an example there. So one of the things that you sparked is like, so the real, one of the real case scenarios that we used was a school that I collaborated with in Rochester called East High School. 

It was one of the lowest performing schools in Rochester. I was on the Community Action Committee, right, as part of the program that I was running where they pulled community providers in to help support the larger needs of the schools. And the graduation rate when we started was 33%. And and this year it's 85 percent right? 

Suspensions dropped 90%. Attendance improved. How did they do that? Right? Like, so, so to me, this is like the crux of it. It was a hard to engage population. People were very [00:36:00] disenfranchised. People didn't have transportation, lots of ACEs, you know, high ACEs data, lots of things going on. What they did was they asked students what was important to them. 

They asked families what was important to them. They created points of engagement. They provided transportation. They really looked at what I would call the eco cultural niche of the student, like this larger world that they lived in and the things that were going on. They helped bring in providers who could deal with homelessness, food poverty, trauma, like dental work, you know, all of those kinds of things to say like, We know someone can't learn when they're in the midst of survival. And so if we're going to ask you to be compliant with attendance, we actually have to be collaborative in terms of determining what's going to, what's going to allow your brain to function, you know, in, in that way. They also ask students like, You know, you, you mentioned, like, well, how is math relevant to me? 

Poor math gets a bad rap, right? Generally, that's why I like my son's [00:37:00] example, because he loved it. But One of the things that I think is interesting about the rise in career connected learning is, and we're working on CTE courses that are connected to America Succeeds and Durable Skills. And so this idea of durable skills are like, companies tell us. 

That while they want, let's say, subject matter expertise, what they want more are resilient workers, to your point. They want people who are adaptable, who can communicate, who can adjust because we don't even know what the careers are going to be in 20 years. Like, who can be flexible? I had an uncle who was a mechanic who had to learn robotics in order to keep his job. 

We have to be, have a growth mindset. We have to do all those things. And so, in some ways, school subjects are a vehicle. for learning those larger skills of critical thinking and problem solving and, [00:38:00] right? Math is a great example for learning critical thinking skills and order of operations and problem solving and all of those kinds of things. 

But we don't intentionally make those connections for kids to say like, okay, well, maybe you won't need that equation. In 20 years, but you are going to need to know how to problem solve and learning a process for that and learning how to pick out the details of what might have thrown off your decision making is going to be super important. 

So let's dig in. And by the way, I love math. I love your idea of having a passionate teacher. And so I'm going to show you why, you know, like, to me, that's, we go back to this idea of how do you create meaning. Like you have to have that conversation intentionally that says, tell me what I didn't learn. 

And what they did at East High School is they said that to kids. And so they taught literature through hip hop. They taught, you know, they, they, they increased the representation. They let kids decide some of the topics that they, you know, would find important to them. And I [00:39:00] think sometimes we, we sort of miss the opportunity. 

the boat with understanding that our subjects oftentimes for many kids are just the vehicle for these larger skills that in fact companies want and people want and we need and might spark joy and passion because kids are exposed to new things in the process. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And those are all great examples related to, you know, this is kind of somewhat far afield from this conversation, but I think it's relates is AI right now. Right. And the fact that I believe that it's going to change the future of work and what jobs are in the workforce in ways that are very different from how other technological advancements have. 

Because. It's going to relate to, you know, both your quote unquote, blue collar, [00:40:00] white collar jobs, 

Jen Perry: Yeah. 

Ross Romano: knowledge, worker job, you know, all different types of industries, all different sectors of the economy will be changed. There might be certain pockets within all of them that are more or less, you know, replaced by, or completely revolutionized by the technology. 

So it's. It does present an opportunity for that career connected learning piece to have that relevancy and that connectedness and also to approach it with a curiosity and a humility around the world is fast changing. What we aim to do is equip you with the skills so that you will be able to adapt and create. 

the future. Like we don't exactly know what that's going to look 

Jen Perry: Yes, 

Ross Romano: We've operated with certainty in the past and not been right anyway, but even so, you know, that it's about understanding that's happening fast. That could be in five years, 10 years, and so on. That and that's borne out, I think, in the, you know, the past, The current trends, [00:41:00] at least in the workforce, are you're going to have multiple careers. 

You're going to change from time to time. And if you have the skills to do so, then you have more choice to dictate what those career paths are versus, you know, being at the mercy of what's available when the thing that you used to do no longer exists, or you know, whatever the case may be. But yeah, I mean, that, that's really important, I think, for students to feel that way, to feel That this is designed for them and and they could be, you know, okay, if you're fortunate enough to become a YouTube star at that spot, you know, YouTube might not exist in 10 years, I mean, 

Jen Perry: yeah, 

Ross Romano: knows, right? 

Like, so get, develop as many skills as you can, and then you can use those skills to do a lot of things, 

Jen Perry: Yeah, so let's bring like, you know, you [00:42:00] threw that AI example out. I don't want to like, that's not necessarily my world, but let's use that as an example of a tool. Right? So I think, you know, I'm. Like, students would say I'm old, so I'm old, right? And so I might say to a student, like, a new piece of technology has come, and I don't know how to use it, and I need them to set it up for me, and they get really excited, and they can set it up for me, and they know everything about it, and they know all those different pieces. 

And yet we say, well, we don't want you to use that. Right? And so we talk about how we leverage tools and how things are changing in this idea of adaptability. And so when I think about your example of AI, and I think about you know, the biggest thing schools are talking about, and in relation to that is cheating, right? 

And so, so follow my thread here. Like, I'm thinking about Chronic absenteeism and I'm one. There are lots of reasons why kids are absent. One of them is kids have anxiety about going to school. They might have learning differences. There are all sorts of, you know, challenges related to poverty, but let's stick with that. 

[00:43:00] Like maybe learning. learning challenges piece. Either I haven't, I've been out of school for so much time that I don't have the skills to be where my peers are, so I feel behind, or I have some kind of endemic learning challenge or whatever, and I go to school and I I'm trying to be engaged and I need spell check because if you're like Jen, you can't spell. 

And I use it on all my documents in my life all the time. But if I use it in certain settings in school, that's Cheating, right? It's not okay to do that. And so if I use a tool like AI in ways that now allow me to engage and make a student's life and learning more accessible, my attendance is going to go up versus saying, right? 

And so now I've created attendance. Now I have a kid in a room. When a kid's in a room, they can absorb learning. In ways they can't when they're not in the room. So I've now taken a tool that I feel maybe ambiguous about because I don't [00:44:00] completely understand and figured out how to use it in a way that allows a student to become more engaged. 

And now I have an opportunity to teach them some of these skills that are going to serve them well. In, in, in their life. And so I do think that you know, if we pull AI back a field to what we're talking about, there are lots of examples of ways that we can understand the knowledge that kids have about the skills that they need to survive and how we can leverage those tools to re engage them in being successful in things that they might not be aware that they need. 

But that we can now engage them in, and that's a great way to start to combat, like, I, I think as someone who has, like, I'm a little reticent sometimes about learning something new because I like my, ways, like now we're asking a whole generation of teachers to learn new things. I mean, we learned this during the pandemic when everybody had to learn online learning. 

And for years before [00:45:00] when we talked about that, people were like, no, I don't really have, no. And then when it came down to it, we learned it. We figured it out for better, for worse. In some cases, we figured it out. We can also pull those things that kids think are important skills to them in and leverage those. 

And that, that could have a positive impact. on re engaging people, I think. 

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. Engagement is personal. And so it does require that, you know, that effort, that work to determine the causes of disengagement and also the causes that would engage somebody. And Jen, there's, we could talk about this for hours and hours, and then maybe in the future, we'll have a chance to talk more, but I, we have to try to sort of tie this together here. 

And I'm thinking maybe the way to do so is You know, via the whole learner work, the whole learner framework. And you know, maybe you can tell us a bit about what that is and how a lot of what we talked about here is kind of represented in that work and in, you know, the work you're doing with Adventum [00:46:00] and really accounting for so much of this critical you know, state of schools, right, in trying to develop an ability to deliver education that is that is going to be effective and innovate in the ways that we need to be innovating. 

Jen Perry: Yeah. So, I think that's a great way to wrap up. When I think about a whole learner, like, there's lots of jargon out there, but I like to simplify things. So, basically I think it's important to look at the things that get in the way of how people learn, and if we want them to leave as successful, thriving, capable people to be engaged in the process of learning what they need, then we have to understand that there's more to engagement than what we, the behavior that we see. 

They've got to be. It's got to be meaningful. It has to be relevant. They have to have some agency and choice over it. And we have to understand that emotions are part of that. And so when I think about Whole Learner, I think about what are [00:47:00] those things and wherever you are, whatever environment you're in, what are the things that are impacting your students and families lives and how do we speak to them? 

And we know from a Whole Learner neurobiology, brain science perspective, that, The brain works in an integrated way. We used to think like, okay, I'm going to give you information into your prefrontal cortex. You're going to remember it. Nothing else matters. Just focus, you know, and you'll learn the skill and that's just not how our brain works. 

And there are things like trauma that Our brain turns off empathy to survive trauma. Our brain, you know, doesn't pick up, it picks up on nonverbal and tone before it picks up on content and words. And so how we portray ourselves, how we're perceived, how we engage, and what we put in our curriculum matters. 

And so when I think about a whole learner perspective I think about how do we teach to an integrated brain in a way that's going to light it up. [00:48:00] And I think about it all the time from the curriculum that we build, and the ways that we talk about people, and the scaffolds that we put in to, to break things down, to meet all learners needs. 

And I think about it in terms of creating enough teacher support so that they can, you know, Be present for the person and not just the task because really whole learner is about understanding who's in front of you and what they need. And so, you know, for me, like if we talk about that perspective, we're going to have a positive impact on the people around us that should absenteeism. 

It should help engagement and it's not as you pointed out earlier, specific to students, it's about understanding everybody around us. 

Ross Romano: Excellent. So, listeners, of course, can check out Admentum. com to learn about all the different things that are going on over there. Is there anything in particular that you'd [00:49:00] recommend people to check out if they either want to learn more about some of these topics we're talking about or if they're looking for support? 

Jen Perry: Yeah, sure. We, I just published an article. It's in the district administrators. And that's on the topic of absenteeism and connection. There's lots of resources in that and a larger scale. Adventum is rolling out. CTE curriculum that is inclusive of durable skills. So we're teaching through that lens of like these larger skills and trying to create meaning for kids and in the ways that things are connected and we integrate that into curriculum. 

And there's lots of resources on our website that talk about talk about those topics. And yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's, look, we believe in teacherful learning. No digital curriculum. Is independent on its own. We need to support an educator first perspective. And for me, we got lots of resources on how to be educator first and [00:50:00] find ways to support freeing up your time to meet people's needs. 

It's great. 

Ross Romano: Excellent. Listeners, yeah, so you can check that out. You can go to Edmentum. com to find all the different resources there. We'll also grab that link to the article that Jen referenced. So if you want to click on that, we'll put that in the show notes below. And, you know, if you're listening here, I'm sure you are interested in all these topics and there's a lot more to explore. 

Let us know if you want Let's talk about these some more in the future. So, everybody hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you want to hear more shows about a variety of topics for education leaders, head over to bpodcast. network to learn about the rest of our 40 plus podcasts. Jen Perry, thanks so much for being here. 

Jen Perry: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you.