District leaders across the country are broadening and personalizing their approaches to attendance because the old way of sending truants and their families to court often fails to bring students back to school.
“It’s important to get to the root of why students aren’t coming to school and be able to align the solution with the problem,” says Gerry House, president of the Institute for Student Achievement and a former superintendent. “If you take the punitive approach, more than likely you’re not going to see any improvement in the attendance.”
Students miss large amounts of school for a variety of reasons—from chronic illness to caring for younger siblings to jobs, disinterest andbehavioral issues. And academic success and, in some states, funding depend heavily on students being in class.
While there is no national standard, chronic absence is generally defined as missing more than 10 percent of schools days. And schools have long sent counselors to the homes of chronically absent students and have connected families to badly needed social services.
While those efforts continue, districts that have had success cutting truancy are also working more closely with courts to keep truant students out of the juvenile justice system; adding specialists to monitor and react swiftly to absences; and directing principals to make attendance a top priority.
“In our quest for academic achievement—as we move to more active learning and the Common Core—attendance will matter even more,” says Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that helps districts develop solutions to chronic absenteeism. “Once we get more active learning and more innovative learning, kids can’t make up for it at home. They need to be in the classroom to get it.”
