School District Administrators
Assessing Chronic Absence in Your School District
The first step to your students’ success is determining how well your district and community addresses chronic absence now. Consider using our self-assessment tool.
To address the issue of chronic absence most effectively, it is important to compile and analyze data on attendance for your district. Analyzing by grade, school, and sub-population will allow you to target your response to the groups that need it most. Sign up for our free data tools.
Superintendents can lead the effort to improve attendance starting in the early grades in your community. While schools alone can’t do all it takes to improve student attendance, every successful initiative ultimately relies on educators deciding to make the reduction of chronic absence a priority.
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.
The Corporation for National and Community Service has created an Education Toolkit to help school districts and education leaders learn about utilizing service programs like AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to help reduce chronic absenteeism. The toolkit is a guide for finding the right national service program to meet the needs of students and also explains how to partner or apply for those resources to support student success.
Good state and local policies can help track data and provide district-wide, systemic solutions to a chronic absence problem.
Learn More
A sample policy for chronic absence and truancy, California School Boards Association
A sample school board resolution, San Francisco Unified School District
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