Organize Attendance Campaigns that Reach Families with Young Children Inspiring Examples
Grand Rapid’s Strive for Less than Five reduced chronic absence from by 25 percent. Its bilingual campaign urges students to strive to miss fewer than five days of school each year through posters, billboards, yard signs around town and giant leaderboards that offer monthly update on how each grade is doing. It provides both attendance incentives, as well as a unifying theme for agencies and community partners.
Pittsburgh’s Be There Campaign created an Attendance Challenge Toolkit that lays out the different sorts of contests and incentives that schools can offer and provides a step-by-step guide to successful challenges. Schools and programs are provided with stickers, small incentives and school supplies, as well as posters and postcards to help communicating the importance of attendance.
Jump In Nashville is a citywide campaign bringing together an ever growing coalition of partners aiming to double the number of children reading on grade level by third grade by 2025. The program has incorporated attendance messaging into all of its online resources and tools including materials that adapt and build off Grand Rapids’ slogan.
Impact Tulsa is a partnership of leaders from education, business, philanthropic, nonprofit, civic and faith communities who all believe education is the key to the community-wide prosperity. The Be Here to Get There campaign created inspiring videos featuring young children that bring home the message that being in school can help you achieve your dreams of a successful future.
The Stanislaus County Head Start program in California set a goal of reducing chronic absence by 10 percent within 5 years. The strategy included making attendance a daily presence in classrooms, supporting families when children are chronically absent and creating large-scale incentives for families with significantly improved and excellent attendance.
Stanislaus County is a Campaign for Grade-Level reading site, so the awareness that chronic absence is important was high, but not within the preschool community.
Planning was a two-year process of trial and error. The earliest steps involved gathering data and assessing attendance policies. The Head Start reviewed local attendance policies, explored with family service staff how to incentivize parents and gathered input from teachers. They also designed a messaging campaign based on research and handouts for parents and a tracking tool for children to use at home with parents.
Attendance is a daily weekly and monthly presence in all classrooms. Teachers choose their own method for supporting attendance recognition within the classroom and keeping attendance a high visibility, positive value. Family service staff check with families when children are absent more than 10 percent of the time, and create a plan with parents to improve attendance. The Quality Assurance Team reviews the family attendance plans to confirm they are individualized and realistic.
A Red Carpet celebration for children and families who had excellent attendance or significantly improved attendance at the end of the school year, and a shopping spree for the same families for school supplies just before kindergarten start, generated community enthusiasm.
Chronic absence was reduced in Head Start by 7 percent by the fourth year (and second year of full implementation of the campaign). After the first year of awards, 70 percent vs 51 percent of Head Start graduates in the prior year were not chronically absent in kindergarten - a great transition success!
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