A body of research that predates the pandemic shows when students feel connected to school, they’re more likely to attend and perform well academically, according to Education Week.. They’re less likely to misbehave and feel sad and hopeless. Some research has even linked health benefits well into adulthood to a strong sense of connection to school.
Students’ ties to school revolve around the relationships they have with adults in the building and their peers—whether they think others genuinely care about them and welcome them for who they are—as well as opportunities to participate in activities they find meaningful.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified mentoring, service learning, student-led clubs, and classroom-management training for teachers as strategies to build connectedness, reducing unhealthy behaviors and strengthening students’ engagement.
Trying to reverse sagging attendance, the Tacoma, Wash., school district in the past two years has deployed a range of initiatives that aim to foster a sense of belonging among students at greater risk of becoming chronically absent.
They include community-based mentors who come into schools for regular check-ins with students and affinity clubs aimed at Indigenous and LGBTQ+ students, who—district data show—are more likely to have irregular attendance.
One initiative is called the “Walking School Bus.” It provides younger students with a safe way to get to school with a group of peers who are led along an established walking route by high school students or educators. The high school student route leaders get a paid internship and course credit.
It was a response to survey feedback from parents who said their kids didn’t have a safe way to get to school, presenting a barrier to attendance, says Jimmy Gere, Tacoma’s attendance and engagement counselor.
In Albuquerque, N.M., Manzano High School built connectedness into its early-warning system, so staff could more readily notice when a student is falling behind.
The school’s weekly, 30-minute advisory periods are a time when school staff check in with their advisees and deliberately review their grades, attendance, and behavior over the prior week. If a student is struggling, the adviser refers them to one of the school’s student-success teams, which then works with the student to identify the root cause of their challenges and solutions.
When the Arlington Central school district in New York surveyed students after their return to campus from pandemic closures, staff discovered that older students, students of color, and students in special education felt a weaker sense of belonging.
The high school started holding activity fairs to proactively bring information about extracurricular activities to students, and administrators solicited student ideas on new clubs, says Daisy Rodriguez, Arlington’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
In the district’s middle schools, Arlington last year established regular advisory periods set aside for check-ins and social-emotional learning. Groups of students are assigned to the same adviser throughout the three years of middle school. The district ultimately hopes to bring similar advisory periods to its high school.
And through curriculum audits, the district has tried to respond to student feedback that the books they read in class weren’t relevant by swapping in more current selections.
Dozens of high schools make relationships central to their improvement efforts as part of the BARR (Building Assets, Reducing Risks) model, through which teams of teachers are assigned to designated groups of students so they can form strong bonds and quickly notice when a student might need extra support. Years of federally funded evaluations of the model have highlighted the dividends: reduced 9th grade course failures and lower chronic absenteeism, as well as improved teacher collaboration
Researchers have linked a range of long-lasting benefits to strong student connections to school.
CDC researchers tracked more than 14,000 middle and high school students over 20 years and, in a 2019 study, found that those who reported feeling connected to school as adolescents were half as likely as adults—or even less likely—to have used illegal drugs or misused prescription drugs, been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease, experienced emotional distress and thoughts of suicide, or been the victim of physical violence.
Education Week
