Bibb County presentation links early literacy, Lexile growth and chronic absenteeism; district outlines attendance interventions

Dr. Lett presented to the Bibb County Board of Education on the district’s literacy and attendance data, showing growth among pre-K students, detailed Lexile score distributions across grades and schools, and the district’s actions to address chronic absenteeism.

Dr. Lett said Bibb County’s pre-K students made “impressive growth in foundational math skills” and showed notable early literacy gains in phonemic awareness and letter identification. He explained Lexile scores as a measure of both text complexity and a student’s reading ability, and emphasized the importance of the jump from third to fourth grade when students move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

The presentation included grade-level Lexile data: many current fourth graders clustered around a 400 Lexile, the largest single group at 550 (within the grade-level band of 520–669), and groups at 650, 700, 820–850 and above 1,000 for higher-performing students. For the cohort that took the fourth-grade end-of-grade assessment last spring (now fifth graders), Dr. Lett reported roughly 28% below grade level, 14% in the grade-level band, 33% in the grade-level-plus range (including 374 students at 850), and 26% above grade level (including 131 students at 950 and a “veil” of readers above 1,200).

On attendance, Dr. Lett used the Georgia Department of Education definition that a student is chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of enrolled school days for any reason. The presentation showed that students with lower absence rates performed substantially better: in one slide, the share of students scoring in the “distinguished” category was lower among chronically absent students (2.8%) than among regularly attending peers (6.9%). Districtwide figures cited later in the meeting reported average daily attendance for August at 94%, perfect attendance at about 41.5% of students, and chronic absenteeism at 17.5%.

To address absenteeism, district leaders described a multi-pronged strategy: school-based attendance review teams (breakthrough teams), a district truancy specialist making weekly supports and home visits, a district attendance and transfer coordinator, an attendance mentorship program pairing chronically absent students with trained mentors, weekly action meetings to monitor intervention plans, real-time data analysis, and community outreach (including attendance billboards). Board members were told the district has identified roughly 2,400 students who meet the chronic-absence definition and that staff are reviewing those students “student by student” to identify barriers and target supports.

Board members pressed for clarifications. Mr. Morton asked for a percentile-range definition for the label “beginning learner”; Dr. Lett said it “differs by grade level” and offered to provide specifics later. Miss Johnson asked where students begin to drop off after pre-K; Dr. Lett pointed to first grade as the major inflection point—in particular, when students must master phonics and early decoding—and said the district has trained teachers in Georgia’s structured literacy approaches for K–3 and is considering K–2 summer programming to close gaps earlier.

Dr. Lett and district staff said more detailed attendance data will be available next month and stressed that staff are actively implementing and monitoring the attendance plan. The presentation concluded with a glossary of terms and references to additional math data included for board review.

The presentation was framed as informational; no formal board action or policy change was proposed during this item. The district committed to provide requested percentile definitions and the next round of attendance trend data at an upcoming meeting.