Baltimore City Public Schools are setting up an attendance telephone hotline this weekend to try and track down missing students.One month into a new school year, more than 1,000 Baltimore City students are still missing from the rolls."When you're not in school, you are not learning, and so we want our students to learn," said Tanya Crawford-Williams, the district's coordinator of the Office of Student Conduct and Attendance.State school funding is based on the number of students on the rolls. The funding can help administrators make key staffing and resource decisions.But district officials said it's not just a dollars-and-sense issue -- even though millions of dollars are at stake -- but one also focused primarily on keeping students from falling even further behind.A team of school system workers was plugging up telephones Friday for the attendance hotline to be held Sunday in yet another push to get students into the classroom."We went out this summer and we knocked on doors, we made phone calls. But these are families, and students that just have not shown up or they may have shown up for a few days, and we want them to show up a lot more," Crawford-Williams said.Larry Simmons, chairman of the district's Parent and Community Advisory Board, is also on board with the efforts."We want to make sure that our parents and families are doing their part and updating all of their contact information every year so that schools can connect with families," Simmons said in a statement. "I'm kind of confused as to why folks haven't made it to school yet."Officials said they may have an idea why the district is coming up short in finding students."We know that in the past couple of years, our families have been hit very hard with COVID, we've had homelessness, job loss and our families have moved around a lot, unfortunately," Crawford-Williams said.School districts across Maryland have until Sept. 30 to report enrollment numbers.