This new analysis from Attendance Works and Everyone Graduates Center shows how many schools across the nation and in every state face high levels of chronic absence. Almost 10,000 schools, or one out of every 10 schools in the nation, have extreme levels of chronic absence affecting 30 percent or more of their students.
For more information, see the Attendance Works website.
School breakfast can improve attendance!
Eating school breakfast increases student attendance by an average of 1.5 days of school per year.
Attendance at school is essential for academic success. Yet, chronic absenteeism (missing 10% of more of school for any reason) is negatively impacting the lives of hundreds of thousands of California kids.
Visit the California Food Policy Advocates website.
This brief is designed to help district decision-makers in California think about how they might collect and use chronic absence data, with an emphasis on leveraging their Student Information Systems (SIS) to support this work. It lays out approaches to maximize the opportunities presented by recent changes at the state and federal level, including CALPADS new attendance data collection for 2016-17 school year, and new chronic absence reporting requirements in the Every Student Succeeds Act. The brief also provides suggestions for how to best leverage SIS providers for tracking, analyzing, disseminating, and using chronic absence data to develop strategies to reduce chronic absenteeism among students.
On September 23, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Fund: Learning Communities for School Success program into law. This new program will provide grants to local school districts to implement research-based strategies to improve school climate and to mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline.
Get Ready to Apply:
We encourage school districts and community organizations to start preparing now for this competitive grant opportunity.
A Request for Proposal process is expected to begin in early 2017.
Attorney General Kamala Harris issued her fourth annual statewide report on elementary school truancy and chronic absence in California, In School + On Track 2016. Drawing from four years of longitudinal data — a sample of almost half a million K-5 students Read more →
Many schools, districts, and communities are interested in analyzing their attendance data for the first time to see if chronic absence is a significant problem. To simplify the process, Attendance Works has partnered with Applied Survey Research to develop self-calculating spreadsheets for school districts called the District Attendance Tracking Tools (DATTs). These tools are especially effective for smaller districts with more limited data capacity. The companion tools are the School Attendance Tracking Tools (SATTs) which provides school-level analysis down to the individual student level.
Organized into three separate modules for grades K-5 (Elementary), 6-8 (Middle) and 9-12 (High), the DATTs and SATTs are designed for small to mid-sized school districts.
Users have a choice of the original version of the DATT which is applicable to any school district with a student information system or a California-specific version that also looks at truancy and suspensions.
Bringing Attendance Home Toolkit
For schools working to improve individual attendance and reduce chronic absence, this is a toolkit with activities and materials for sparking conversations and working with families.
A report providing an in-depth look into the local attendance patterns of students in Oakland, including an examination of overall attendance, differences in attendance patterns by group and grade levels, how attendance is impacting outcomes. Also an examination of strategies being employed at the district level to impact attendance.
An overview of chronic absence including definition, research findings on the impact on student achievement, and how to use this indicator and improve attendance.
A video describing the measure, chronic absence. Includes: definition, research findings on the impact on student achievement, and how to use this indicator and improve attendance.
