School Zone

At the end of the second week of school, more than 3,000 students still had not shown up in the Buffalo Public Schools.

(That's some improvement over the 5,300 kids who were missing at the end of the first week of school, but still nearly 10 percent of the student population.)

Where are all these students?

Some have enrolled in charter schools or private schools. Some have moved. Some have dropped out.

This happens every year.

And it's worst at the lowest-performing schools.

Consider: At the Academy School 131, the district's version of an alternative program, 157 students were signed up for school this year. By the end of the first week, 56 of them had shown up. A week later, that number had crept up to 82 -- meaning about half the students in that program just hadn't shown up at all by the end of the second week of school.

At International Prep and Bennett High School, about one out of four students had not shown up by the end of the second week.

Compare that to City Honors and da Vinci, where 3 percent of students were unaccounted for by the end of the second week.

The picture is somewhat better in the city's elementary schools. But still, at eight elementary schools -- about one in six -- more than 10 percent of the students were nowhere to be found by the second week of school.

Here are the latest numbers, broken out by individual school. (By way of explanation, the number of students enrolled are those who had signed up to attend the school. The number registered reflects how many had actually shown up at least once by the given date.)

Elementary schools:

High school:

- Mary Pasciak

facebook.com/mary.pasciak     twitter.com/SchoolZoneBlog    mpasciak@buffnews.com