A student at Shaw High School missed nearly a month of class in September, and instead of a truancy letter, the response came from school social worker Erin Drakeley, who dug into what was keeping the teen home. That kind of individual follow-up has become the backbone of East Cleveland City Schools’ strategy against chronic absenteeism, a problem that still touches more than half the district’s students even as officials say the approach is working.
As reported by Signal Cleveland, Drakeley is one of several staffers at Shaw High who track individual students rather than treating absenteeism as a single districtwide number. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% of the school year or about 20 school days, has long been one of the most stubborn obstacles facing a district built largely on students from low-income households. Official Ohio Department of Education and Workforce data for the 2025–2026 school year puts East Cleveland’s rate at 54.2%, even as the district serves 1,140 students across six schools, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.
The district’s response starts with people, not paperwork. State-appointed Superintendent Dr. Henry Pettiegrew II assigned attendance oversight to Terrence Roscoe, the former ninth-grade principal at Shaw High, who now manages attendance, open enrollment and athletics across all of East Cleveland’s schools, per the same Signal Cleveland account. Under Roscoe, each school holds weekly attendance meetings built around color-coded student data, and staff conduct home visits when families don’t respond to outreach.
Bus Tickets, Uber Rides and a Store Called Kirkmart
Much of the intervention targets transportation, long cited as a leading barrier to attendance in a city where many families don’t have reliable access to a car. The district offers a $12.50 seven-day unlimited RTA pass to help families get kids to school, and it hands out a two-way bus ticket for every day a student attends, letting students bank unused tickets for the following week, the report notes. Roscoe has overseen the purchase of thousands of bus tickets as part of that effort, and in some cases the district will even arrange an Uber ride for a parent who needs to get to an important school meeting…