By: Kara Stern, Ph.D
I recently spoke with a middle school principal in the lower Hudson Valley who challenged her team to a simple exercise: reading down the entire school roster, could someone in the building speak knowledgeably about each student’s life outside school, their challenges, hopes, and circumstances? The uncomfortable silences revealed gaps that attendance spreadsheets, academic metrics, and behavioral records—all the data schools meticulously track—could never capture.
This moment illustrates the heart of our national attendance crisis. While chronic absenteeism rates remain alarmingly high across grade levels—with concerning disparities affecting Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander students—our solutions often miss the mark because they fail to understand the individual stories behind each absence.
From Data Points to Human Stories
Traditional approaches to attendance often rely on punitive measures or generic interventions that don’t address the specific barriers students face. The question we should be asking isn’t just “Who’s missing school?” but rather “Why is this child not coming to school?” Is it transportation challenges? Family responsibilities? Mental health struggles? A sense of disconnection from school culture? Only by understanding these individual stories can we craft meaningful interventions that actually work.
Knowing a student’s story means understanding that the Indigenous student missing Mondays might be traveling home from weekend cultural ceremonies. It means recognizing when absences spike around the first of the month due to housing instability. It means identifying when a student’s avoidance of third period stems from a conflict with a particular peer. This detailed knowledge—gathered through authentic relationships, not just data systems—is what enables targeted, effective interventions.
The disconnection between students and schools is reflected in troubling statistics: only 42% of students report feeling like part of their school community, and a mere 22% believe their teachers understand their lives outside of school. These numbers aren’t surprising when we fail to understand students as individuals. Attendance isn’t just a data point; it’s a daily referendum on school culture and connection.
Building Meaningful Family Partnerships
Understanding why students are absent is only half the equation. The other half requires authentic partnerships with families who play a critical role in student success.
Recent research reveals significant gaps between how schools communicate and what families actually need:
- Educators primarily use emails and phone calls, while families strongly prefer a mix of emails and text messages
- Nearly half of families feel communications aren’t frequent enough
- Only about a quarter of families feel “very well-informed” about their child’s academic progress, despite nearly half of educators believing families receive comprehensive information
Schools that invest in strong family engagement show measurable results. A 2023 analysis found that schools with stronger family relationships before the pandemic weathered COVID disruptions far better, with a 39% smaller rise in chronic absenteeism and significantly smaller declines in achievement.
The question isn’t whether families care about education—they overwhelmingly do—but whether our systems make meaningful participation possible across different cultural backgrounds, work schedules, and communication preferences.
Creating Community Knowledge Networks
The most effective solutions emerge when we tap into the expertise of everyone with a stake in student success. This means creating networks that include:
- Student advisory councils that provide regular feedback on school climate and curriculum relevance
- Family engagement teams with diverse representatives, especially from communities with historically high absence rates
- Teacher collaboration groups focused on understanding attendance patterns
- Community partnerships with local organizations who interact with students outside school hours
Consider Nydia Natividad, Director of Media & Communications at Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD, who discovered the power of such networks when she invited absent students to serve as “attendance influencers.” These students provided insights into why their peers missed school and developed peer-led initiatives that resonated in ways adult interventions hadn’t.
Similarly, Alvord Unified School District instituted “Community Connection Days,” where their Educational Services team would go into the community and “knock on doors, not as disciplinarians, but as concerned educators looking to help.”
Measuring What Truly Matters
Districts have an opportunity to rethink how they measure success by creating assessment systems that value what communities value. This starts with asking students and families what matters to them: When did they feel most connected to school? What barriers have they faced? What would make school a place they want to be?
As one student articulated, “We’re young, but we deserve respect. My guess is that the ‘[Mental Health]’ days are a result of us telling you we need a safe place, and you guys choosing to create a program by yourselves without working with us. That’s a huge issue. You said it yourself: don’t just HEAR us, LISTEN to us. You have to work alongside us.”
Districts could implement regular feedback sessions with students and families—not as compliance exercises but as genuine drivers of improvement. Crucially, they must then report back on how this feedback led to specific changes, creating a transparency loop that builds trust and demonstrates that family and student voices truly matter. When communities see their input translated into tangible action, they become invested in the solutions.
Moving Forward Together: A Call to Action
To improve attendance and achievement, the most powerful insights already exist within our communities. District leaders can take action today by:
- Building systems that capture real-time insights from students, families, and educators
- Elevating student and family voices in decision-making, ensuring policies reflect their lived experiences
- Strengthening the connections that foster both engagement and achievement
We should demand better from our national leaders. But in the meantime, the most valuable knowledge for solving the attendance crisis is already in our communities—if we choose to listen.
The uncomfortable silence in that principal’s meeting should remind us all: knowing every student isn’t just a nice ideal—it’s the foundation for any meaningful solution to chronic absenteeism. When schools implement the approaches outlined here—building authentic relationships, creating knowledge networks, measuring what truly matters—those silences transform into confident voices. Staff members begin to understand why the student who lives with his grandmother misses Thursdays for her dialysis appointments, or how housing instability affects the family that moved three times this semester. With this knowledge, attendance improves not through punitive measures, but through targeted support that addresses each student’s specific barriers.
When students believe that someone at school truly sees them, understands their challenges, and cares about their success, that’s when they show up—not just physically, but fully engaged and ready to learn.
Dr. Kara Stern began her career as an ELA teacher, then shifted into administration as a middle school principal. Dr. Stern is a fervent advocate for equitable communication and family engagement. She spent five years as Executive Director at Math for America, where she designed the professional learning community that exists to this day. An unexpected move to Tel Aviv launched her into the world of EdTech where she became the Director of Education Content for Smore and then the Head of Content at SchoolStatus. She is now the Director of Education and Engagement at SchoolStatus.
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