Choosing the right incentives to motivate students can make or break combatting chronic absenteeism, according to a K-12 Dive article.
Promoting perfect attendance awards is a common mistake, says Anne Vernon, an assistant principal at Myron J. Francis Elementary School in Rhode Island.
“Things are going to happen, and to say that we expect perfection is unrealistic,” Vernon says. Perfect attendance recognition on a yearly or even monthly basis can be punitive for students who tried to be at school every day but maybe had to take a sick day, she adds.
Still, incentives can be a critical tool to tackle absenteeism, she says.
Some of the key factors for successfully implementing an attendance incentive include a school’s positive climate and strong student-teacher relationships, Vernon says. The incentive should also make students more self-aware of attendance policies, including tardiness or leaving school early. And involve families by sending positive letters home, newsletters and attendance updates.
To help school leaders successfully implement an attendance incentive program, Vernon developed a framework adapted from the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences.
Principals should make attendance a strategic priority and should ask their school improvement teams questions about whether the school monitors weekly attendance, what is done with that data, and how the school celebrates student success and progress on attendance, she says. This is a key component to starting an incentive program.
The implementation framework developed by Vernon includes these five steps:
- Diagnose. What is the underlying cause for a school’s attendance problem? A team of key players analyzes and pieces together the data to make the diagnosis the most accurate.
- Select incentives. Attendance incentives must be age-appropriate, positive, and reinforcing, and align with a school’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program and culture. Don’t start with a completely new incentive system that can confuse students and teachers. Instead, schools should add onto their existing systems. Incentives could be awarded on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the school’s absenteeism rates.
- Plan. Form an attendance team and develop a clear implementation timeline. Build a communication plan that includes a staff rollout on the new attendance incentive system as well as one for student and family messaging.
- Implement. Schools need to consistently track attendance data and award the incentives on schedule. Schools also must maintain visibility and continuously talk about the incentives.
- Evaluate and revise. Attendance incentives should continuously improve based on outcome data and feedback from students and parents. A school might scrap an old system and bring in something new, make a shift, or start a new way to communicate the incentives to boost progress.
“For this type of intervention to produce the desired outcomes, it must be implemented in an environment with a positive school culture,” Vernon says. “Without this foundation … incentives cannot be meaningful.”
K-12 Dive
