Success Stories Related to Improved Attendance
Oakland
The Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, California, is a leader in tracking and addressing chronic absence, using a city-wide approach that has reduced chronic absence rates from 16 percent in 2005-06 to 11.9 percent in 2013-14. The entire 37,000-plus student school system is working…
Pittsburgh: Be There Campaign
Across the Pittsburgh region, schools, volunteers and community partners are delivering a consistent message to students about school attendance: Be There! Launched in 2013 by the United Way of Allegheny County, the Be There Campaign has reached 12,000 students across 21 school districts. More than…
Rural Maine: Relationship Building Improved Outreach During Covid-19
In 2015, educators at Waterboro Elementary School in rural Maine rarely talked about attendance with families. Like in many schools, staff members believed the administration or home school coordinator were responsible for contacting families. So, when the district introduced its new chronic absenteeism…
Sac City: First, Focus on Infrastructure
Located in northern California, Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) has a highly diverse student population of 40,660 students with 72% of families living in poverty. In September 2018, the district had a chronic absence rate of over 16 percent, nearly 5 percent higher than…
San Francisco: Hope SF
In 2012, leaders of HOPE SF examined data across schools, city agencies, and the housing authority in San Francisco. The data match revealed that a whopping 53 percent of students living in public housing complexes were chronically absent. Improving student attendance quickly became a top…
Vernon: Data-Driven School District
Students form habits – including good school attendance – at an early age. So it was particularly disconcerting for the central Connecticut town of Vernon to discover that 16 percent of its kindergartners were chronically absent. “The real killer was kindergarten attendance,” says Dr. Mary…
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