From Policy to Practice: How Principals Make Attendance Systems Work for Students

Priority No. 1. Butts in seats. Principals talk about students’ chronic absence in different ways, but getting students to school is a key topic for many school leaders. Principals know that chronic absence is connected to a range of negative outcomes for students, including worse achievement, and adverse health, social, and employment outcomes compared to their peers who go to school regularly.

As they head back to school, leaders share below the strategies they’re using to make sure kids are in the building, learning and getting what they need. The principals who are successfully keeping kids in school recognize they can’t do it alone—attendance is everyone’s job.

Not All Absences Are Equal

While absence or absenteeism refer to missing any school, chronic absence or chronic absenteeism means missing 10 percent or more of a school year (around 18 days or two days a month of the school year). It’s important to note that any absenteeism can be harmful to students, but students who are chronically absent are at much greater risk of the negative outcomes mentioned above.

Researchers are beginning to understand that absenteeism is not evenly dispersed across all schools. One study of Delaware elementary school students examined the attendance patterns of the state’s K-3 students over four school years. The researchers found that there are low-average absenteeism schools in which very few students miss more than a few days a year. Very few, if any, students in these schools are chronically absent.

In low-absenteeism schools in the Delaware study, the average student misses less than one day of school a month whereas, in high-absenteeism schools, the average student misses one day of school every other week.  Moreover, in these high-average absenteeism schools, about one in every 20 students misses more than 50 school days a year—nearly a third of the school year.

School-level attendance can be thought of as a schoolwide resource. When most students are in school most of the time, teachers can do their jobs and deliver instruction in ways that meet students’ learning needs. Conversely, when students are chronically absent, the effects rippled across every student in the school.

Chronic Absenteeism Makes Everyone’s Job Harder

When students are out of school, they miss a lot, including opportunities to socialize and interact with peers, manage tasks and develop executive function, and learn.

“Even when one child misses school, we aren’t OK with feeling like they’ve missed something,” said principal Chandra Phillips of Seaford Central Elementary in Delaware.

Consider the following example: In a school with average absenteeism of just five days a year, 80 percent of students are likely to have proficient scores in both Math and ELA exams. In contrast, in a school where the average rate of absence is 10 days a year, fewer than 20 percent of students are likely to score proficient on Math and ELA exams.

As an associate professor at the University of Delaware, I have conducted research that has shown that when chronic absence is at very high levels, it is not only a challenge to educators, but it also creates a larger erosion to the effectiveness of the organization. High levels of schoolwide chronic absence render the organization less capable of persisting in its normal function, making it much more difficult to deploy resources to address learning loss due to absenteeism.

“It’s definitely taxing, especially in the classroom,” says Seth Buford, principal of Milford High School in Delaware. “[Chronic absence] puts stressors on the teachers—when was the last time you were in class, how do I get this information to you, how to make up lost instruction. [And it] puts stress on the classroom. It triggers some depression in kids, which then becomes cyclical because they feel lost or out of place, they feel like they’re behind, so it creates a cycle when they don’t come back again.”

What Principals Can Do

What can principals and other school leaders do to address trends in chronic absenteeism? Synthesizing a host of research and successful school- and district-level practices, we offer four categories of work. These strategies come from both low-absenteeism schools, where principals have maintained high rates of attendance, and from high-absenteeism schools, where principals address—with many successes—the challenges that are unique to their contexts.

1. Cohere to Attendance Procedures

Coherence means that district and school level systems must work together to identify chronically absent students—or those in danger of becoming chronically absent—and deploying resources to get them back to school.

Phillips says that her school closely follows the district attendance procedure, including convening a Student Attendance Review Team within the school, but she “changed some of the timeline since [she] was in charge.” When families receive the district’s form letter with a warning about their student’s attendance, Phillips or her assistant principal are quick to get on the phone with families.

“When the AP and I make that call, we start with backing down from the harshness of that letter,” said Phillips. “It is a form letter; it has to say certain things. We also [ask], ‘How can we help you? Is there something going on with transportation or your work schedule?’ ”

Phillips and her team make the mandatory systems work for them by making it a pathway for communication and problem-solving with families. They use district data and systems, but by the end of that phone call, Phillips says, she can get families into a different conversation: “What can we do together in this partnership?”

Recommendations

• Use district tracking and communications to amplify school’s resources and efforts;
• Soften legal language, when possible, to make conversations more accessible for families; and
• Reiterate to families that schools also want the best for students and part of that means being in school.

2. Create a Culture that Values Attendance

Culture is an organization’s set of shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that guide behavior, according to the Annual Review of Psychology—or an organization’s DNA.

“The culture here is special,” Phillips said about familiarity that teachers have with families and the surrounding neighborhoods.

In schools where absenteeism is low, students want to be in school for a lot of reasons—they are academically and socially engaged, they feel safe, and they value the learning that they do in school. Relatedly, parents and families proactively collaborate to understand when, why, and how to offset students’ disengagement from school. It’s just a part of who they are. Principals in these schools engineer instructional and administrative systems to establish and maintain this culture.

Teachers—critical to a school culture that values attendance—might require support in developing engaging instruction and translating the school’s climate to the classroom setting. Attendance Works, a nonprofit and research organization focused on reducing chronic absenteeism, has identified four barriers to students’ attendance and one of them includes disengagement from school.

Effective principals can shape students’ experience of school through the quality of instruction delivered by each teacher and the overall climate of the school. Often, Phillips says, “People think that because kids are on grade level, they have space to miss. We [tell them] we can’t keep this up, it gets harder, we need the teacher, they can’t keep missing two to three days a week.”

Recommendations

• Attendance needs to be a whole-school effort and evident in expectations, communication, and systems;
• One key way to prevent absence is to ensure that classrooms are safe and engaging, which are characteristics principals can emphasize in their walkthroughs and other instructional supports; and
• Principals and other family-facing school staff might need to do some myth-busting regarding when it’s “OK” to miss school: it’s not—every day counts.

3. Communicate and Engage Families

“It comes down to communication,” says Phillips. Consistently engage families and connect them to needed resources. Student support and family communication need to go beyond just informing families of their students’ absences and the dangers of chronic absenteeism.

Laura Schneider, a former elementary school principal, tells a story of a student who was staying two and a half hours away from school for medical treatment. Because the school’s data team recognized the attendance gaps, they were also able to contact the family, set up remote schooling, and offer wraparound supports to both the student and the family when they returned to the state.

The conversation about chronic absence continues and solutions need to be tailored to each student and each school’s unique context. However, systems of support like those mentioned here are replicable and scalable.

Recommendations

• Consider augmenting existing meeting protocols to discuss attendance patterns or concerns;
• Create pathways for families and caregivers to communicate their experiences and needs; and
• Develop a resource hub for efficient connections between families and supports.

Reducing chronic absenteeism requires the creative application of numerous strategies and organized effort from the whole school team on behalf of every student.

Lauren P. Bailes is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware.