Ensure Access to Chronic Absence Data

Ensure your district can make available, on a regular basis, how many and which students are chronically absent (missing 10 percent or more of school for any reason including excused, unexcused or suspensions) for the entire district, by grade, sub-population and school. Keep in mind that in the first month of school, just missing two days of school is chronic absence and should be a trigger for receiving extra support. Such data should be available district-wide in order to detect patterns across schools and populations as well as for each school.

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This information is critical to determining how to target the launch of your elementary success mentor program, as well as eventually providing participating schools with the lists of students who need to be matched with a success mentor. Ideally, schools should receive reports identifying which students are chronically absent on a weekly or at least biweekly basis. Or, ensure that principals and key staff have access to and can use a real-time data dashboards which include chronic absence data.

Resources
Sample Chronic Absence Reports from Oakland, CA.

The Oakland Unified School District developed a publicly available, interactive data dashboard with reports to share with schools, parents and the community can access a variety of chronic absence reports.

These include:
  • Weekly reports with chronic absence and suspension rates at each of the district’s 90 schools. Click here for OUSD’s weekly attendance reports for 2015-16 school year.

  • Summary of district-wide chronic absence rates for grades K- 12 over a three-year period. The data is disaggregated by grade level, sex, English Language Learner, disability status, low-income, foster youth, ethnicity and home language. Click here for the 2011-2014 summary.

  • Sample list of chronically absent students including days absent and attendance rate.

Sample Chronic Absence Reports from New Britain, CT.
  • The Consolidated School District of New Britain provides schools with individual school reports.

  • Sample Excel spreadsheet showing chronic absence reports by school. This report is produced every 10 days.