As schools and communities take stock of the impacts from disrupted learning, putting in place meaningful ways to engage students and their families is critical to addressing the absenteeism, enrollment declines and educational inequities exacerbated by the pandemic. The Showing Up Matters for R.E.A.L. toolkit offers a memorable way to explain how being in school supports students’ social, emotional and physical well-being while providing opportunities to learn and achieve.
Some of the materials in the toolkits were created prior to March 2020. We recommend that you follow your local health department, district and/or state guidance related to safety and education for the current school year.
Toolkits
Attendance Works has developed toolkits tailored for educators working with students in preschool through secondary school, as well as principals and school districts. The toolkits are filled with strategies and resources for monitoring, understanding and addressing chronic absence.
The approaches can be implemented in the classroom, or at the school, district, community or state level.
All resources can be downloaded and used without express permission as long as Attendance Works is attributed. See our Usage Policy.
Created with the help of practitioners who have worked successfully with families to improve attendance, this toolkit is filled with ideas, activities and materials that you can use to spark conversations with parents about how good attendance can help them fulfill their dreams and aspirations for their children’s futures.
Our Count Us In! toolkit is the indispensable planning tool to help you plan and implement an Attendance Awareness Campaign activity or year-long effort. The toolkit is full of handouts for parents, resources for mentoring programs, strategies for tracking data and the ideas for promoting awareness across your community.
Find the toolkit on the Attendance Awareness microsite.
Attendance Works has developed a template with handouts, activities and local resources that can be easily adapted to help schools and local partners reduce absenteeism. You can use all or a mix of the documents to create your own local toolkit.
The US Department of Education's Data Sharing Toolkit For Communities: How To Leverage Community Relationships While Protecting Student Privacy, is designed to simplify the complex concepts of federal privacy laws. It can be used as a comprehensive guide and a collection of one-page resources.
Preschool is the ideal time to introduce children and families to the importance of consistent on-time attendance and to encourage strong attendance habits. Early and Often is designed to provide you with ideas and materials to help children and families develop strong attendance routines from the outset of schooling.
Early Matters is a guide for integrating attendance into key district, school and community practices designed to smooth the transition into and through kindergarten. It offers strategies for welcoming and actively partnering with families with the goal of making attendance and learning a priority this important school year.
State leaders are uniquely positioned to take action to reverse the attendance crisis. This toolkit provides a step-by-step approach to assembling a team, identifying a reduction goal, choosing the right strategies and working with partners to create a road map towards improved engagement and attendance.
While everyone can help ensure students show up to class every day, the leadership role that a principal plays is irreplaceable. Principals are uniquely positioned to ensure their school adopts a comprehensive, tiered approach to improving attendance that fits with their overall approach to promoting academic achievement.
Attendance Works has developed some tools and messaging for families that school leaders can use to encourage good attendance around the winter holidays.
This toolkit offers a framework, tools and resources for how to forge pathways to engagement, especially for those who have lost out on significant instructional opportunities during the pandemic.
This two-generation program engages children daily in monitoring their own attendance, honors parents monthly for getting their children to school on time and translates attendance data into management information for school administrators. The program is designed for school and center-based settings serving preschool and early elementary children and their families.
As students head back to school, this toolkit calls for using absenteeism records from past years and from the first month of school to connect the most at-risk students to personal relationships and positive supports that motivate them to show up to class every day.
This toolkit is designed to help school districts, particularly the administrators charged with establishing an elementary success mentor program, leverage ideas and resources available from national partner organizations as well as the pioneering work of a growing number of local efforts. It’s filled with strategies as well as materials you can take and tailor to the needs of your community.
Simply emphasizing the impact of days missed on learning does not adequately recognize the overwhelming stresses many students and families are faced with during the pandemic. This toolkit offers a new framework for communicating about attendance that is embedded in a whole child perspective. Find free, ready-to-use messaging resources to incorporate into regular school operations. Find the toolkit.
States and districts across the country have adapted Attendance Works materials for local audiences to create their own toolkits to help schools and local partners reduce absenteeism.
The transition back to school for the 2020-21 school year was like no other in recent history. This guide offers a systemic approach to transitioning back to school that is data-informed and restorative, provides deeper support for students who missed out on accessing instructional opportunities and welcomes families.
Teaching Attendance 2.0 is filled with free, ready-to-use resources for everyone who understands that helping students get to school every day enhances the ability of teachers to teach more effectively.
Do you have a school in your district that is beating the odds, recording higher attendance rates than schools with similar student populations? If so, do you know why? This toolkit will help you look beyond the numbers and find out how these positive outliers are bringing more kids to school every day.
These resources can help families and community members develop strategies to overcome weather-related barriers that stand in the way of getting children to school.
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