Tackling Chronic Absence. A Toolkit for School Communities

Tackling Chronic Absence A Toolkit for School Communities

Tackling Chronic Absence A Toolkit for School Communities Everyone has a role to play when it comes to making sure every student is in school every day. By working together, the entire school community can create a school climate that makes school a place that students want to be and a place where teaching and learning can thrive. To improve student attendance, all members of the school community need to collaborate to develop a multidimensional plan that fosters a positive school climate and engages all students and families. A successful plan will incorporate 5 Universal Strategies for Building a Culture of High Attendance Expectations (Adapted from www.attendanceworks.org) I. Recognize good and improved attendance II. Intentionally and proactively engage students and families III. Monitor attendance data and daily practices IV. Facilitate personalized and early outreach to students with attendance concerns V. Identify programmatic responses to barriers to school attendance This toolkit consists of research-based, best practice strategies that support school efforts to tackle chronic absence. Many of these strategies can be implemented by any member of the school community for students at all grade levels. Be creative and have fun!

I. Recognize Good and Improved Attendance By recognizing students with good attendance, schools reinforce that strong attendance habits are valued within the community. Rewarding students for improved attendance demonstrates a school s commitment to supporting and celebrating students who are working to develop better attendance habits. Try these interventions for recognizing good and improved attendance. Trips and activities: Connect already planned year-end trips or activities to attendance. Breakfast and recess: Turn breakfast, lunch, or recess into an attendance celebration by providing a special treat, such as snacks or extra recess time. Morning announcements: Acknowledge classrooms or students with perfect, good, and improved attendance during the school-wide morning announcements. Bulletin boards: Use school bulletin boards to highlight classrooms or students with perfect, good, and improved attendance. ParentLink: Use the ParentLink automated phone system to send positive and fun messages to families, congratulating students who have good attendance or are improving their attendance. PTA/ School Family Council: Ask your PTA or School Family Council to host an event or competition that focuses on attendance. Community partners: Ask your community partners to sponsor an event at your school focused on attendance. Network staff: Ask your network staff about allocating Title I funds to assist with planning parent recognition events focused on attendance. Attendance visuals: Encourage staff to work in teams with students to create posters that highlight the importance of attendance. Posters can be hung throughout the school. Sponsor an unveiling and invite parents and district staff to view the posters throughout your building. School newsletters: Include articles about attendance, what's being taught in school or highlighting recent attendance activities in your regular newsletters. Middle Alternative Program at Lombard dedicated their April newsletter to attendance - Principal Carmon and an educational associate wrote about the importance of coming to school every day and incentives the school offers. They also shared pictures of a recent trip to the National Aquarium for students with good attendance.

Grade-level or classroom attendance contests: Create friendly competition among classrooms or grades. Classes can compete for most improved attendance or highest attendance in a certain timeframe (such as the 4 th quarter). Or challenge classes to take a classroom selfie, and reward the classroom that has the most students present for its selfie. Watch a video about Lakeland Elementary School s March Madness attendance competition. Staff competition: Create friendly competition among teachers. For example, teachers who submit attendance on time every day for three full weeks could win extra prep time. Field day: Host a field day as an incentive to encourage perfect attendance. Sports and craft activities are a great way to excite students of all ages. Period fun: Make the first period of the day fun. Offer a special breakfast treat, host a morning dance for the first 0 minutes of class, and bring in a karaoke machine. This can also be used to encourage students to arrive at school on time. Free play: Reward students with improved attendance free activity time as a special treat. School-wide assemblies: Host grade-level assemblies that focus on attendance. Provide attendance awards and certificates to teachers and parents for their efforts to get students to school daily. Student tracking: Create student attendance trackers in classrooms that allow students to mark their attendance daily on a public display. Awesome attenders: Reward students with good or improved attendance with special time with a school staff member of their choice. For example, winners could eat lunch with their favorite staffer. 4

5 II. Intentionally and Proactively Engage Students and Families Schools where students and families feel welcome, supported, and respected reinforce a culture of high attendance expectations and are exciting places to be. Try these interventions to keep students and families engaged. PTA/School Family Council: Use the first 0 minutes of School Family Council or PTA meetings to celebrate students and their families. Wake-up calls: Get Schooled offers a program that sends out wake-up calls from celebrities. Schools can also set up wake-up calls using the district s ParentLink system. Title I funds: Ask network staff about allocating Title I funds to assist with planning parent recognition events. Positive phone calls home: Call parents/guardians when a student demonstrates positive behavior (attendance or other) to nurture a positive relationship between the school and family. Student/parent/school contract: In collaboration with the parent and student, develop a contract that outlines the school s expectations as well as the parent s and student s needs as they relate to attendance. Morning welcome: Have a greeter at the front entrance of the school when families arrive. Use signs to welcome and recognize students for coming to school on time. For example, City Neighbors Charter School staff personally welcome on-time students and use two signs for students and families running late. Say thank you: Have office staff wear buttons or post a sign by the front entrance that says, Thank you for bringing your child to school today. Parent workshops: Ask families what topics may be of interest to them and then provide the time, space, and expertise for a workshop on those topics. For example, have someone from the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) discuss how to get a non-driver s MVA card. Invite someone from a local community college to talk about GED classes and other college entry opportunities. Have someone from the Housing Authority present about processes involved in getting housing services. Theme-based family socials: Potluck French Fry Friday or Tuna Tuesday can help build a sense of community and make the school a welcoming place to be.

6 III. Monitor Attendance Data and Daily Practices Collecting accurate data on a daily basis allows schools to monitor individual student attendance patterns as well as schoolwide attendance trends (for example, a higher rate of absence when it rains). Try these interventions to monitor attendance data and school practices. Instructional Leadership Team: Add attendance to the agenda of every ILT meeting or dedicate an entire meeting to the issue. Attendance monitors/student Support Team chairs: Organize a Data and Dessert session to review student attendance. Student Support Liaisons: Your network s SSL is an expert in understanding the various attendance reports available through the district s data tools, including the weekly climate reports. Be sure to include your SSL in developing and as part of your 4 th -quarter attendance improvement strategy. District data tools: Use reports available in SMS, Datalink, TSS, and Principal s Dashboard to better understand your school s attendance trends and to inform your school s attendance improvement plan. Student check-ins: All staff members who have regular check-ins with students (e.g., guidance counselors, teachers, nurses) should have attendance data readily available and use them as a strategic part of each check-in. Submitting attendance daily: Make :00 p.m. (or a specific time that works for your school) the deadline for submitting attendance. Use the daily email alerts that are sent out as a tool to track which classes have not submitted their attendance for the day. Direct entry: Teachers with access to SMS in their classroom should enter attendance directly into SMS (as opposed to taking attendance with pen and paper for later entry). Unsubmitted attendance: As a team, dedicate one or two days each week to focus on your school s current backlog of unsubmitted attendance. On Mountain Moving Monday or Tackle Tuesday, each staff member spends one hour eliminating any backlog of unsubmitted attendance. Attendance warning system: Group students by the number of absences and identify strategies to be implemented with students at the various levels. Take a look at Liberty Elementary s attendance warning system.

7 Student tracking system: Assign a group of students to every staff member in the school. Each staff member is responsible for tracking their students attendance and connecting with them about their absences. Student groups should be diverse in their level of need so that staff members are not overwhelmed. Frederick Douglass High School has used this approach to support students with attendance challenges. Barrier buster system: Group students according to barriers to attendance (uniforms, asthma, safety). Create teams to focus on identifying strategies and resources needed to overcome each barrier.

8 IV. Facilitate Personalized and Early Outreach to Students with Attendance Concerns With personalized early outreach, school staff connects with students to identify barriers in the home, the community, or the school building that hinder the ability to attend school every day. Engaging students in this way promotes positive engagement among the school, students, and families. s to provide personalized early outreach include the following. All hands on deck: Phone calls or home visits can be more effective when they are conducted by individuals who have an existing positive relationship with the student or family. Staff in the following positions can assist with phone calls and home visits: administrators, teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, police officers, coaches, secretaries, crossing guards, and parent advocates, who all have regular contact with students. Student Support Team: Ensure that every student has been referred to the SST and has a comprehensive SST plan ready to be implemented. Grade-level meetings/content area meetings: Use attendance data to identify grade-level attendance concerns, patterns, and best practices. Findings can be used to target a particular group of chronically absent students. Research-based strategy: Use indicators derived from student data to identify students at risk of becoming chronically absent. Students who have indicators (e.g., prior year s chronic absence, in transition grades, entering kindergarten without pre-k or Head Start) can be targeted by your team. School-based strategy: Use your school s data to inform your early outreach strategy. These questions can guide your review of the data: Which students had the highest chronic absence rate in the past three quarters? Did these students have attendance challenges in previous school years? Do these students walk to school or take the bus? Where in the city do these students reside? Home visits: Organize a home visit campaign with members of your school staff. Using your attendance data, identify a targeted group of students to visit at home (e.g., students in a specific grade who have missed more than seven days in the past two weeks). Attendance folders: Create folders for students who have poor attendance habits. Have the attendance monitor maintain these folders. Use them to track communications and interventions.

9 Morning sessions: Have school staff members facilitate morning sessions with students who are at risk for being chronically absent. Create a list of targeted students to distribute to every adult in the building. When students on the list arrive at school, the nearest adult should escort them to the morning session. Student rap: Allow upper year students with good attendance to facilitate rap sessions for younger students struggling with daily attendance. Peer mentoring: Assign upper year students with good attendance to younger students who are struggling with attendance. Provide a quiet, safe, and private space for the two to have weekly check-ins.

0 V. Identify Programmatic Responses to Barriers to School Attendance Schools that focus on creating programmatic responses to identified attendance barriers are better equipped to support the needs of students and families and to increase overall attendance rates and academic achievement. Strategies to identify programmatic responses to barriers include the following. School community: Organize members of your school community to discuss systemic barriers to daily attendance. Identify how each member may contribute to mitigating the barriers (e.g., the issue of safe routes to school could be addressed by a watch plan created by School Police). Community partners: Host an informal session in a classroom at the beginning or end of the day for community partners and selected school staff. Have partners introduce themselves and their work. Identify one or two schoolwide barriers to student attendance and don t leave the room until an action plan has been created that involves all community partners. District and network staff: Host a data-sharing meeting and invite your Student Support Liaison and a staff member from the district s Attendance and Truancy department. Share your data trends and schoolwide observations to get support with developing programmatic barriers. Ask your Family and Community Engagement Specialist for help coordinating a community event to engage school staff, families, and local businesses. Tap into the Homelessness Associate for attendance concerns related to homelessness or the Special Education department for attendance concerns among students with special needs. Home and Hospital: Host an information fair for parents and staff, where staff from the Home and Hospital program discuss parent supports for students with health concerns. Coordinate a session on asthma management. Out-of-zone guidance: Be sure that students and parents/guardians understand the responsibilities for travel associated with school choice. Distribute out-of-zone guidance to all students and parents. Focus on your climate: Everyone responds positively to being respected, celebrated, and engaged. Make your school climate a priority. Bring together a few staff members to create a cool, calm, and collected climate. Focus on welcoming students, having positive conversations with students, and hosting activities and events that merge learning and having fun. Contact the Student Support and Safety department at the district office to request a climate training for your school. 4

District office: Partner with a team or department at the district office to coordinate an event or activity that promotes student attendance (for example, the Career and Technology Education department to host a cooking challenge). Community businesses: Present a proposal to a local business requesting a donation of incentives or sponsorship of a school event (e.g., use food donations from a local business as an incentive or reward for the first 00 students who arrive to school in the morning). Ask your Family and Community Engagement Specialist for help with this. Make school the rule: Start a campaign that targets businesses and organizations with store fronts in your community. Create signs that read Have a great day at school! Ask businesses to hang the signs and commit to not allowing students to hang out on their premises during school hours. Parent advisory group: Identify a group of parents willing to focus on improving student attendance. Encourage them to meet biweekly and share data trends (instead of individual student data) with the group (e.g., grades with highest rates of chronic absence, days of the week when students are most frequently absent). Plan for re-engagement: Create a plan for how your school will support students who return after an extended period of absence. Identify who will connect with these students, and put plans in place to help students compensate for missed instruction. Maintain contact: Create a grade-level competition to encourage parents to update the contact information on file for them at school. Create information forms that also request e-mail addresses for family members. The grade level that submits the highest number of completed forms within a two-week period wins a prize. Make sure to update phone numbers in SMS as they come in: Remember that daily ParentLink calls about absence only work if the phone number in SMS is correct! Know your school: If your school s attendance is worse on a certain day of the week or time of year, create a special event for that time. If you know that some families struggle with finding a safe path to school, work with a community partner to create a walking school bus. If you know that many of your students miss school because they need to work, consider creating an alternative schedule or tap into partners to find paid internships for after-school hours. 4