Improve Your Budget Forecasting With Early-Warning Tools
Accurate student counts are a critical component of K-12 budget planning each year. With school enrollments projected to dip below 2019 levels in the next few years, it’s even more important that administrators cover all the bases for reliable enrollment forecasts that don’t leave the district underfunded.
Data that predicts chronic absenteeism provides a valuable tool to refine your enrollment projections, while also highlighting opportunities for absence mitigation, so you can keep more students in district.
Early warning through attendance trends
Some districts rely on a few snapshots of attendance data throughout the year, but that doesn’t paint a clear picture. When district staff can regularly monitor attendance trends with easy-to-read visualizations, it becomes simple to separate out explainable spikes in absence, such as flu season or the holiday weekend pictured below. Staff can then be alert to more concerning trends of absence, ones that might point to student disengagement.
Monitoring attendance rates over time is another way to gauge future enrollment. A chart like the one pictured below lets you compare attendance for the same portion of the school year across multiple years. Is attendance trending up or down over the past several years? Are the trends impacting each school and grade in similar ways, or are there specific populations in the district who need attention?
Administrators can also review attendance rates by grade level or by student characteristics. Is chronic absence suddenly increasing as students transition to middle or high school? Are students in a certain demographic or using a particular service more prone to attendance challenges (and potentially withdrawal)?
Knowing the precise groups with attendance challenges helps districts know how to allocate their resources, for both the current year and long-term planning. If students with a shared academic need are missing school, perhaps a mentoring program should be in the budget. If attendance is declining in a particular school, building administrators may need to devote some resources to absence responses and proactive communications with families.
BLOG: Learn how to build a culture of attendance in your district
Risk analysis for student retention
It’s also helpful to understand what other factors may be contributing to student absence or withdrawal. A high-level risk indicator is an efficient way to monitor for early signs of student disengagement. According to research by the National High School Center, poor grades in core subjects and low attendance are both key factors in determining dropout risk. By compiling data from several domains, such as grades, assessment performance, and discipline, districts can get early warning of students who might need additional support to stay in school.
Educators can delve into the data in each risk group to determine common concerns and how resources might be used to impact the most students. Some districts have even found success with offering cash incentives to students with perfect attendance, using a small reserve to “completely rebound” their attendance counts to pre-COVID levels. The downstream effects of this type of investment could be significant if students acquire more consistent learning, perform better on assessments as a result, and ultimately raise performance across an entire building or district.
Conclusion
At SchoolData, we know the stakes are higher than ever for districts to keep your enrollments — and by extension, your funding — strong. Our Homeroom+ bundle is designed to provide K-12 educators with all the tools necessary to address students’ needs today and plan for success tomorrow. Daily dashboards, absence reporting via SMS messages, intervention plans, and more make Homeroom+ your single stop for data-informed decisions that win results for your district.
Discover the results you can achieve with SchoolData. Contact us for a free demonstration.
--
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.
.png)
.png)
