Attendance Awareness Month starts in September, but planning begins April 15 with the first of four webinars and the release of the Count Us In! toolkit 3.0 providing updated resources for schools and communities. Speakers on the Ready, Set Go! webinar will describe how they rallied their communities to take action. Future webinars are set for May 13, August 12 and September 9.

• Register now for April 15 webinar
• Visit the Attendance Awareness Month website
• Sign up for regular updates

Last fall, 324 communities nationwide participated in activities calling attention to the importance of school attendance. We hope to enlist even more this year. Don’t miss this opportunity to address chronic absence, an urgent issue affecting our children’s education!

The webinar will provide updated resources for your school or community to use in planning and launching Attendance Awareness Month. Be inspired by the creative ways in which various groups drew attention to attendance and learn from our special guests how they rallied their communities to take action.

While every school day counts, the start of each school year presents an opportunity to lift up an increasingly urgent issue: Too many children are missing too many days of school. Once a child misses 10% of the school year and becomes chronically absent, he or she is headed off-track for college and career.

Children who are chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade are much less likely to read proficiently by the end of third grade and are more likely to have poor attendance in later grades. By middle and high school, chronic absence is a proven early warning sign that a student will drop out. This is especially true for those students living in poverty who need school the most and are sometimes attending the least.

Let’s get all our children ready and set to go to school every day!

Don’t miss out!  Register now.