A new analysis of data from the first half of the 2025-2026 school year issued in March shows that an intervention used by a group of school districts across the county has boosted attendance, while progress fighting chronic absenteeism has slowed nationally in recent years, according to an Education Week article.
The intervention: early, frequent, and positive interactions with families of kids at risk of becoming chronically absent (typically missing 10% of school days). Connections made in the first 60 days of the school year help families and schools working together to emphasize early on that attendance is important. Those connections also address barriers to getting students to class consistently.
“There’s not ever going to be one single solution to chronic absenteeism, but… we’re seeing really predictable patterns,” says Kara Stern, the director of education for SchoolStatus, the K-12 communications company that conducted the analysis and issued the report.
“We can tell early in the school year who’s going to be chronically absent. If parents get a personal outreach in the first month of the school year, they stay more engaged for the entire year, and that cuts down on absences,” she says.
The study surveyed 146 districts in eight states enrolling more than one million students. The districts had a chronic absenteeism rate for the first half of this school year about three percentage points better than the most recent national average.
Through the first 90 days of the past three school years—from 2023-24 to the current academic year—chronic absenteeism has dropped from 22.4% to about 19% across participating districts, the report states.
SchoolStatus says these schools aren’t a nationally representative sample – they are schools that use the company’s attendance-management software.
Attendance increases were consistent across grades, with the biggest gains in pre-K and kindergarten. The results add to growing evidence supporting the idea that the timing of when schools reach out to families about students’ absences matters, along with what they say when they do.
A separate report by SchoolStatus found:
- Families were most likely to engage with and respond to messages about absences when the school sent them around 8 a.m. and between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays. During those windows, parents who responded did so within 11 minutes on average; parents responded 73% of the time.
- Messages with specific and action-oriented language are more engaging, Stern says. For example, a message noting that a child had missed four days this month was better received than one that said, “We’ve noticed some absences.”
- Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” outperformed those with lengthy explanations of the district’s attendance policy.
The March SchoolStatus report found:
- Families were more responsive to schools’ communications throughout the entire year when their first interaction happened early in the school year—before the start of school or within the first few weeks of classes.
- Communications—whether emails, text messages, or other forms of outreach—should be welcoming and personalized, and don’t have to have anything to do with a child’s attendance, the report says. Establishing connections between parents and the classroom early can make families more receptive to conversations later in the school year, according to the report.
- In the first half of the 2025-26 school year, about 200,000 students in the 146 participating districts were flagged as at risk for becoming chronically absent 60 days into the school year, based on attendance trends through the first few weeks of classes.
- Those students’ families were notified, and school leaders reached out to answer questions, problem-solve, and remind them of the importance of their children attending class every day.
“If you let it get to April or May before you’re doing something about their absences, you’re in an entrenched situation that you’re really not going to be able to turn around,” Stern says. “In November, there’s a whole lot of opportunity.”
Education Week
