Chronic absenteeism isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom, writes Luvelle Brown, the superintendent of New York’s Ithaca City School District and special advisor to Concentric Educational Solutions, in an eSchool News essay.
In speaking with school leaders across the country, I’ve found near-unanimous agreement that the real issue is disconnection. When a young person stops believing that school has anything to do with their future, they stop showing up. Because somewhere along the way, school stopped feeling relevant to them.
Personally and professionally, the fact that some students don’t see school as relevant is hard to admit. But if you actually sit with a teenager who has disengaged from school and ask why, “I don’t feel like it” is rarely the answer. Rather, you’d hear something closer to “no one there really knows me” or “I don’t see the point.”
Attendance is the outcome, not the mission. The mission is reconnecting young people to people, purpose, and opportunity. Get that right, and attendance follows.
Students go where they feel connected. Belonging, trusted relationships, and hope for the future move young people far more reliably than rules ever will. You can install every attendance tracking system in the world, and it won’t out-motivate a kid’s need to feel like they matter to somebody.
This is where I think schools–districts like mine included–have sometimes gotten it backwards. We’ve treated disengagement, and by extension chronic absenteeism, as a compliance problem best solved with stricter policies and more consequences. But you can’t discipline your way into belonging. You have to create belonging.
Here’s the part that took me longer to accept: even the best schools can’t build that web of belonging by themselves. Humans are social creatures. Our brains are wired for connection and community, and that community has to extend beyond the school building.
That’s why I’ve stopped talking about youth disengagement as a school problem with a school solution. It’s a community issue that requires a community-wide answer. Reconnecting disconnected youth is something communities do with schools.
Consider all the parts of your community young people interact with after school. Each should ask: How can we become one more reason young people stay connected?
Eight community connections:
- Youth sports. A coach who shows up early to talk with a struggling player about how things are at school before discussing the game plan is doing identity-building work, whether they know it or not.
- Libraries. A librarian who remembers a teen’s name and saves the next book in a series is actually saying, “I know you, and I expect you back.”
- Faith communities. Churches and congregations have long been anchors of belonging, offering young people mentors, structure, and a sense of purpose that stretches beyond any single Sunday service.
- Employers. A local business owner who gives a 16-year-old their first job is handing that young person proof that the adult world has a place for them.
- After-school providers. Here in Ithaca, we’re fortunate to have organizations like the Greater Ithaca Activities Center, the Ithaca Youth Bureau, and Village at Ithaca doing this work daily, wrapping kids in mentorship, activity, and community after the final bell rings.
- Mental health agencies. Counselors and clinicians in the community help young people work through the barriers–trauma, anxiety, family stress–that no attendance letter home will ever resolve.
- Mentoring organizations. A mentor who keeps a standing weekly appointment with a teenager teaches that young person, through simple consistency, that they’re worth showing up for.
- Local businesses. In addition to offering jobs, businesses sponsoring teams, hosting events, or simply knowing their young neighbors by name add another connection to the network.
We’re not simply trying to improve attendance numbers. We’re building a community ecosystem that reconnects young people to opportunity.
Communities don’t solve chronic absenteeism by demanding students show up. They solve it by becoming places young people want to show up for. It’s less about enforcement and more about invitation. Less about tracking kids down and more about giving them somewhere worth going.
School systems still play the most prominent role in engaging students and ensuring students go to school, and we’re backing that up: building relational advisory structures, training staff in trauma-informed practice, redesigning what engagement looks like inside our buildings.
But we’ve also learned that our work only goes so far if it stops at the schoolhouse door. Reconnecting youth is a responsibility shared by schools, families, employers, youth organizations, places of worship, libraries, coaches, mentors, and local businesses. Each of those groups holds a piece of the puzzle that schools simply can’t hold alone.
I keep coming back to this image: Attendance is the scoreboard, connection is the game. Watch any scoreboard by itself, and you’ll miss everything that actually matters, the strategy, the effort, the relationships built between teammates over a long season. The score just tells you the outcome. It doesn’t tell you how you got there.
The same is true for our young people. Attendance numbers tell us something happened. They don’t tell us why, and they certainly don’t tell us how to fix it. If we want different numbers, we need a different game–one built on belonging, trusted adults, and genuine opportunity.
Don’t wait for the school district to solve youth disconnection on its own. It won’t, because it can’t. This is community development work as much as it is education work. If we want young people connected to school, to work, and to their own futures, every sector of our community has a role to play.
The question isn’t whether our kids will show up. The question is whether we’ve given them enough reasons to.
eSchool News
