Building a Collaborative Culture of Attendance

Building a Collaborative Culture of Attendance

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With chronic absence rates remaining high, schools need support at school and at home to encourage better attendance and accelerate learning recovery. Explore the tools from SchoolData.net + Munetrix that power low-effort and high-impact strategies for improving student attendance.  

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Key takeaways

• Effective absence interventions require clear data on your district’s current attendance trends

• Communicating absence impacts with families invites collaboration and helps prevent Tier II and III interventions

• Automating absence responses frees attendance staff to support students with more complex challenges  

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A critical first step for schools looking to close achievement gaps is improving student attendance. According to a May 2024 White House fact sheet, “absenteeism can account for up to 27% and 45% of the post-pandemic test score declines in math and reading, respectively.”

With chronic absentee rates still 75% higher than before the pandemic, preventing student absence is easier said than done. In this post, we’ll review some of the best practices recommended by attendance thought leaders, as well as tools to make those practices efficient and sustainable.  

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Leveraging data to understand trends

Before schools take action to improve attendance, it’s important to understand the attendance patterns already in effect. How is attendance trending year over year? Which students need extra support? What are the main causes of absence?  

A wide variety of conditions may be at the root of absence issues, so schools benefit from specific and disaggregated data when choosing the most effective interventions. For instance, absences that seem to be family-focused might benefit from home visits conducted by attendance personnel. If the data points to high absence among specific classes or student groups, then the next steps might include a survey to better understand how perceptions of school safety and belonging are contributing to student absences.  

Highlighting attendance trends on shared data dashboards can help ensure consistent and appropriate action by educators across the district. Homeroom+ from SchoolData.net is one such dashboard, allowing administrators to examine data such as the percentage of students at or above 90% attendance for the school year, student counts of attendance by tier, and attendance trends for the last month or 14 days. With simple updates to the dashboard’s settings, users can review attendance for one or more schools — or see multiple years of attendance data in one chart.  

The experts at Attendance Works recommend reviewing prior-year rates of chronic absence to determine “how extensive and intensive your foundational and Tier I schoolwide strategies should be.” Some districts break Tier I into two groups, as shown here, to better identify students approaching Tier II.

Districts can zero in on the student subgroups experiencing the most attendance challenges by easily disaggregating the dashboard charts by grade, gender, race, services, and other demographics.  

Homeroom+ offers the additional benefit of surfacing attendance data on role-specific dashboards at every level of a school, from superintendents to specialists. This shared emphasis is critical in fostering a “culture of attendance” in which every staff member is informed and empowered to support students’ presence at school.  

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Improving attendance through family engagement

When it comes to understanding why absences are happening, it’s best to start with self-reported data. The Absence Alerts function of the Homeroom+ bundle solicits absence excuses from parents/guardians via SMS text message to enable fast insights into why student absences are happening. By meeting families where they are, schools are seeing significant increases in prompt absence reporting. The absence reasons provided by parents are also fed directly into a table for quick processing. With faster responses and clearer excuses,  

The generally accepted thresholds for tiered absence interventions. Note that a culture of attendance that includes and supports families is the underpinning for the whole process.

Text-message Absence Alerts are just one example of a Tier I intervention that provides early notification to families of their child’s absence and encourages parental communication with the school every time an absence occurs.  

Attendance Works, the nation’s leading nonprofit concerned with school attendance, states that “the higher the rate of chronic absence in a school or district, the more you should invest in universal Tier I strategies,” with the goal of reducing the need for more time-intensive Tier II and Tier III strategies.

Homeroom+ also supports family engagement by generating automatic notifications home, once a student meets a specific absence condition, such as 3 absences in 1 month, but well before they reach the need for Tier II interventions. By increasing effective communication with families via an automated absence response, schools can extend that “culture of attendance” to include the wider school community.

The Absence Response feature of Homeroom+ allows attendance staff to send bulk notifications to families. Tables automatically surface the students who meet an absence condition, and staff can choose to suppress letters for families who have extenuating circumstances.

Inviting families to review the same attendance data that educators see can help correct broader misconceptions about the impact of absences. Some schools now include simple data visualizations in their absence notification letters to show parents/guardians how continued absence is likely to affect their student’s academic performance. Any chart used to inform parents should be kept simple, since experts advise that all communications sent home should be brief and clear, as well as supportive in tone and written at a reading level all parents will understand. 

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Streamlining attendance management

By automating a significant portion of the attendance recordkeeping, schools can increase their capacity to implement more proactive attendance strategies. Time that was previously spent in processing voicemails or making follow-up calls can be used to make a difference for students entering Tier II and III.  

See a student’s status every time attendance is recorded, whether by the half-day or the class period.

Homeroom+ allows attendance staff to access detailed attendance info for any student in their building. Absence Response makes it clear which days or periods are being missed, so educators can begin to diagnose possible causes for the absences.

When it comes to addressing the needs of students in Tier III, Absence Response provides all the documentation necessary to facilitate parent-teacher conferences, file truancy reports, or perform other interventions. Of course, the goal is to prevent as many students as possible from progressing from Tier II to Tier III, especially since more punitive policies can make people feel “attacked or blamed,” rather than understood and supported. Schools who consider families their partners in students’ education foster the kind of trust that creates a cascading effect — the more families work with schools to prioritize their child’s attendance, the more students reap the academic benefits.  

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Conclusion

With informative and timely communications, accessible attendance data, and streamlined tracking processes, districts can develop a culture in which educators and families are working collaboratively to improve student attendance and success.

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About Homeroom+

The Homeroom+ bundle provides more than easy-to-use data dashboards and performance analytics. A Student Plans module empowers educators to refer, document, and track interventions or actions taken with identified students, monitor their progress, and log family interactions. And the Attendance Improvement portion supports streamlined absence management, including two-way communications with families.  

Together all three of these components — Homeroom Dashboards, Student Plans, and Attendance Improvement — provide a comprehensive toolkit in one platform for both practitioners and school/district leadership.

About SchoolData.net + Munetrix

SchoolData.net and Munetrix, two dynamic providers of K-12 data analytics, have now joined forces. Combined, these applications provide districts with early warning tools, student performance analytics, college and career-ready preparation, CTE reporting, human resource management, school performance analytics, peer benchmarking, financial analytics, and tools that simplify compliance reporting. By putting actionable insights about academic and financial data at administrators’ fingertips, SchoolData and Munetrix help districts support students at risk, foster public transparency, and drive gains in student achievement.