Tucked away through a side entrance on the ground floor of the Baltimore City Public Schools’ massive neoclassical headquarters is the district’s “Re-Engagement Center.” As the name implies, it’s where students who have fallen away from the city’s schools or been released from incarceration come to resume what’s left of their public-school education.

Only they mostly don’t come on their own. When students stop attending one of Baltimore’s schools, administrators file paperwork declaring them withdrawn. When that happens, their names cross Roger Shaw’s desk, triggering a range of interventions, from visiting their homes and getting social workers involved to transferring them to different schools and working with families on a “reentry” plan. The students often are re-enrolled in schools such as Baltimore Career Academy, a small alternative high school that offers both academic and vocational training. The thrust of its work is first to bring disengaged kids in for a landing and then push, pull, or drag them across the finish line.

A lifelong veteran of Baltimore schools, Shaw began his career as “a really shy middle-school teacher” and rose through the ranks to become the principal of Dunbar High. Ten years ago, at an age when most veteran educators are counting the days until retirement vests, he launched the Re-Engagement Center. It was long before “chronic absenteeism” was a phrase on educators’ and policy-makers’ lips, but the city’s effort to get kids back on track offers a glimpse into how public-school systems are likely to respond to this problem now that it has reached historic levels. Baltimore has struggled with it for decades: Only 70.6 percent of eligible Baltimore City Public Schools students graduated in spring 2023, a bump of 1.9 percentage points from 2022 but significantly below the statewide figure of 85.8 percent.

Last year, nearly 1,500 kids were on the Re-Engagement Center’s caseload, the most ever. Shaw and his colleagues claim a 70 percent “stick and stay” rate, representing the share of students who have either earned a diploma or a GED or are enrolled and receiving credits.

When I visited his office for the first time last November, Shaw’s phone rang constantly. Eventually he paused our conversation to answer it. The call was from a 17-year-old named Elijah who’d been an honor student at Towson High before drifting away from school. After Shaw arranged for him to transfer to a smaller school, Elijah began texting and calling every morning. Once he called because he didn’t like the way someone at the bus stop was looking at him. Shaw stayed on the phone with him until the bus came. “Mostly, he wants me to Cash App him for something to eat,” said Shaw, who began giving him $20 or $25 out of his own pocket. Elijah began calling several times a day to talk about some problem or other, but almost always asking for money.

It became a family affair. When Elijah’s mother told Shaw she had a Thanksgiving turkey but nothing else for the table, Shaw’s wife went shopping for sides and dessert for them. Once, when Elijah called his home late at night, Shaw’s own children pitched in to send him $100. “I said to them, ‘This is great. He’ll be able to eat tonight, but we’ve got to have a long-term plan.’ And the long-term plan is to get him a job.”

Those for whom education is an unquestioned stage on the journey to adult life and responsibilities may find it hard to believe just how tenuous the relationship with school can be for those who have minimal expectations of it or who grow up not knowing anyone for whom it was a means to any productive end. It’s particularly tenuous in a city such as Baltimore, where the poverty rate is nearly double the national average, and the percentage of residents with high-school diplomas or any secondary education lags well below national averages. Small things become deal-breakers. Shaw arranged for one young man who showed up in his office to be enrolled in a new school the next day. The kid told him he couldn’t. “Why not?” Shaw asked. The student put his feet up on the conference table in Shaw’s office. There were holes in his shoes. “He said, ‘I don’t have any shoes.’ ”

Shaw got up from behind the same table, led me into the hallway, and unlocked the windowless door to an office next to his. It opened into a room that looked like a Foot Locker store. Metal shelves were filled with boxes of new sneakers, including unopened boxes of $160 Steph Curry models from Under Armour, which is headquartered in Baltimore. There were shorts, socks, polo shirts, and neatly folded khakis. A bulletin board behind a barrel-shaped, Pepsi-logoed cooler, the kind you see in convenience stores, read “Toma Lo Que Necesitas” and below, in English, “Take What You Need.”

Elijah called again. He’d gotten into a fight and was asking Shaw to change his school again; Shaw wanted him to stay until the semester ended in a few weeks. “I just know where he could end up,” Shaw explained.

It is impossible not to be moved by Roger Shaw’s earnest dedication to these students. It’s equally hard not to see in Baltimore’s Re-Engagement Center a harbinger of things to come. Given the stark and sudden rise in chronic absenteeism, school districts will be under pressure to track down kids who stopped attending, reach out to them, counsel them, and use any available means to help them earn a high-school diploma or a GED.

One of those means is called credit recovery. It allows students who have failed a course to retake it or complete additional work to stay on track for graduation. While these programs can help raise graduation rates by providing students with a second chance to earn credits, stories of abuse are legion. In 2015, for example, the New York Post reported on a high school’s credit-recovery “grade-fixing scheme,” dubbed “Easy Pass” by the students, in which they got science credit for watching Jurassic Park. It’s an extreme example, to be sure, but one that would also be almost impossible to notice from a transcript, since schools rarely differentiate between traditional classes and credit recovery. A 2018 report by the Fordham Institute found that credit recovery is a widespread practice, with schools that serve the country’s most at-risk youths relying on it the most. And that was before Covid raised absenteeism to crisis levels.

A sobering 2022 study by Vanderbilt professor Carolyn J. Heinrich linked online credit recovery to a rise in high-school graduation rates but not to an improvement in student learning. This defect appears to catch up with them. “High school students who participated in online credit recovery initially had earnings on par” with those who matriculated in the more typical manner, Heinrich found, but over time a wage gap opened up between credit-recovery students and traditional high-school graduates.

The moral dilemma is obvious, and American public education will be on its horns for years to come: Schools and districts are held accountable for meeting certain performance benchmarks, including graduation rates. The pressure to keep kids enrolled and persevering toward a degree through any means, fair or foul, and the incentive for school districts and politicians to pat themselves on the back for tackling the problem of chronic absenteeism will be immense, even irresistible. Yet there is little to be gained by denying students a diploma, without which they might struggle to land even a minimum-wage job.

“I have a different view of this at 56 than I did at 26,” says Shaw’s thoughtful boss, longtime Baltimore schools CEO Sonja Santelises. “My expectation for re-engagement is that we reconnect students to school so that they are on the path towards [meeting academic] standards, but that we are also comfortable with differentiated pathways.” And that includes “making sure that young African-American males, the ones you saw with Roger, can make a family-sustaining wage and raise healthy families.”

I haven’t been back to Baltimore since the school year ended in the spring. But I recently called Roger Shaw to check in. I had to ask: “Are you still in touch with Elijah? How’s he doing?” I feared that Elijah had been playing Shaw, treating his kindly would-be mentor as a personal ATM. Shaw put Elijah on the phone. He’s working at the district office and has earned 12.5 credits, more than halfway to the 21 he needs to graduate. The day before, when Shaw was behind closed doors in a meeting, Elijah texted to ask whether he was hungry. Would he like some fish and fries from the food truck parked outside the Re-Engagement Center?

He bought Roger Shaw lunch.