Personal Engagement Improves Attendance

School cuts absenteeism by enhancing the warmth of its messaging

I have never met a leader who didn’t want their students to come to school. At the same time, research- and data-driven solutions to combat chronic absenteeism (when kids miss more than 10 percent of a school year, or about 18 days) in elementary schools has remained relatively scarce, leaving many of us to our own devices in the quest to do what’s best for kids.

All of that changed when absenteeism rates doubled from a longstanding average of 15 percent to approximately 30 percent almost overnight during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have since failed to return to pre​pandemic levels; current statistics indicate that 29.7 percent of students nationwide are chronically absent.

Even with the limited research available, promising strategies are starting to emerge. Getting more students to attend school more of the time is no longer a pipe dream. Family perceptions and school communication can make a big impact.

Playing Catch-Up

In elementary school, most chronic absenteeism occurs in kindergarten and first grade. Research suggests that parents sideline daily attendance because of perceptions about the “ease” of the academic tasks in the lowest grades. They mistakenly believe their child can “just catch up.”

Time and experience have shown us that this is not the case. We know that student attendance effectively predicts the achievement levels a child will reach in the future. Students who are chronically absent throughout
kindergarten and first grade achieve lower proficiency in reading by third grade and are four times as likely to drop out of high school.

When surveyed, parents of high-absence students underestimated how many absences their children had by more than half. So there is a disconnect between well-meaning parents who love their children and their misunderstanding of the impact a child’s absences can have in life.

Luckily, the way school leaders leverage the tools already available to connect and correct these perceptions can have a significant positive impact on lowering rates of chronic absenteeism.

Data and Personalization

Since the Every Student Succeeds Act was passed in 2015, every school should have methods of tracking and reporting absences. Once we know who’s missing, a simple pattern often emerges from the data: The positive effects of reducing chronic absenteeism increase with the warmth and personal nature of the contact.

Most schools, for example, have an automated process to contact parents of students—maybe an automated phone call or absentee letters or postcards. While these efforts aren’t nothing, they represent the lowest possible effort and also return the lowest results, typically reducing absentee rates by about 2.4 percent.

After a simple shift in protocol that has the student’s teacher make a phone call home, however, positive impacts skyrocket. In such phone calls, the teacher outlines the student’s attendance data, discusses the importance of attendance on student success, and leaves a clear call to action or invitation for the student to come to school. Nearly 90 percent of families who received such phone calls responded positively and saw a reduction in subsequent absences, and the rate of chronic absenteeism was impacted by nearly 10 percent.

The next logical step in communication, warmth, concern, and connection is a home visit made by an administrator and/or teacher. I love to do home visits, and I’ve seen the power of these short, in-person interactions on students and teachers.

In summer 2023, our school secured a generous grant that paid teachers to visit every student’s home the week before school. I sketched routes for every grade-level team, and we hit the pavement for two days to ring doorbells, make personal invitations to students to come to school, meet parents, hear their excitement and concerns, and share the importance of school attendance. The experiment made our chronic absentee levels drop precipitously.

In a Title I school, the shifts were striking. “You know, that short chat is changing everything for me,” one teacher remarked. “I know I am going to be much more patient and work so hard for that kid. I have to.”

The word got out. Kids started waiting on their front porches, watching for the telltale sign of a teacher coming down the street. They felt as if they were a part of something, and on the first day of school, they came. They came the next day, and the next. Parents opened their homes to us, and because we showed up for them, they started showing up for us.

Joshua Brothers is an assistant principal at Rose Creek Elementary School in Salt Lake City.