A recent RAND study noted that one in four students today doesn’t think being chronically absent from school “is a problem,” according to an article in The 74. About 40% of school districts consider reducing chronic absenteeism among their top three most pressing challenges.
The software company SchoolStatus finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks, based on a review of four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts.
Here are four key takeaways:
1) Early intervention works
Contacting families before students become chronically absent is crucial. Contacting parents early with a letter improved attendance dramatically, reducing absence rates by 28%. Researchers found that 51% of students whose families receive just one letter don’t need a second one. Many families may not realize how quickly absences accumulate.
2) Timing and communication methods matter
Parents are highly responsive to text messages, researchers found, with 73% of texts garnering a response from parents in just 11 minutes. They’ll engage with schools when communication is “accessible, timely and specific.”
Placing a phone call, on the other hand, is “for those more critical conversations,” says Joy Smithson, a SchoolStatus data scientist.
Around 8 a.m., when parents and students are preparing for school, or 2-4 p.m., typically during pickup times, are the best times to text families, the data suggests. These are the times when parents are most likely to check their phones.
The best time of year to engage families is August or September. Parents who hear from schools early maintain higher response rates throughout the year. By January, 33% of these parents are still engaging with schools, compared to just 16% of parents who first heard from schools later in the fall term.
3) Messaging should be direct and specific
Being specific about how much school a student has missed outperforms vague messages such as, “We’ve noticed some absences,” according to research.
Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” also outperform lengthy explanations of attendance policy.
Direct messages can be very effective with older students. “When a school is able to reach out to the kid and say, ‘Hey, Greg, we missed you today, what’s going on? What do you need to help you come to school?’ that’s a really different experience than having a form letter appear at your house saying, ‘Greg has missed school six days,” says Stern.
“Communication is intervention,” she says. “It’s not extra work. It’s the work that makes everything else stick.”
4) Pre-K, 6th grade & high school absences merit extra attention
Pre-K students have the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any group, mostly due to the high frequency of illness and families underestimating the impact of missing school.
Sixth grade is “the tipping point,” says Stern, with chronic absenteeism spiking by 3.3 percentage points from fifth to sixth grade, the sharpest increase across all grades.
In high school, chronic absence rates more than double, and students have lower response rates to traditional methods like letters. This suggests schools should contact students directly. A text message to a high school freshman can start a conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Pairing these messages with notes to parents can improve response rates in these critical years, researchers found.
Timely, data-informed engagement of families is essential but “it is not always sufficient and should be combined with other strategies for identifying and addressing barriers to getting to school,” says Stern. She suggests that a tiered system of interventions is sometimes necessary, including “intensive interventions” for students who miss more than 20% of school days.
Stern and Smithson say the findings boil down to the importance of what they call “active noticing” about attendance.
“I really think that it would be a big plus for faculties to actively notice every week and go through their rosters,” says Stern. Smithson says “timing is everything. Do not wait. Act with urgency. It’s about building those relationships, and it’s just so important — and it’s so important to start right away.”
The 74
