Houston Republic

As schools enter a new year, there continue to be concerns about disengaging students from the educational process, and the Houston Independent School District (HISD) has only located a fraction of the students who fell off the radar after the COVID-19 outbreak last spring.

In all, ABC 13 estimated that approximately 25% of Houston ISD students either were not contactable or were not fully engaged during the spring. While the Houston ISD has attempted throughout the summer to contact 8,500 students who were either uncontactable or not engaged in the spring, the group of specialists working those cases has only been able to reach about 1,000 of them, according to reporting by ABC 13.

"I want all HISD parents to know that your HISD family is here for you 100%," HISD Senior Manager of Innovative Projects Billy Solomon told ABC 13 Investigates last week. "Whatever the case is, we want to make sure that your kids have everything they need to be successful on Sept. 8 (the first day of school)."

Billy Solomon | LinkedIn

In addition to the 7,579 students that Houston ISD failed to reach, ABC 13 found that 25,064 were never engaged, another 2,584 were contacted in May but not engaged, and 13,410 were neither contactable nor engaged from May through the end of the school year.

"We know that the vast majority of our kids who didn't engage last year, didn't engage because they didn't have access to either a device to complete their daily assignments or they didn't have access to the internet," Solomon told ABC 13. "Once we solve that issue, we have to address the other needs. In HISD, What we call the wraparound services needs [can be], 'I became homeless,' 'my family lost their jobs,' 'we don't have food,' 'I don't have a space to work.'"