As school winds down, it's a perfect time to enlist elected officials to sign proclamations declaring that September is Attendance Awareness Month. Download and tailor template proclamations for elected officials, superintendents, school boards and community organizations. The templates can also be adapted for state leaders, national and local organizations.

Also consider recruiting local sports stars or other celebrities for end-of-the-year school visits and assemblies or make plans for them to attend your back to school events in the Fall.

Contra Costa County Office of Education is celebrating its third year of a county-wide Attendance Awareness Campaign. Community members can purchase a 2017-18 calendar that displays the winning submissions from the "Every School Day Counts" poster contest for K-5 elementary students. The calendar includes monthly themes, key messages and a list of district principals recognized with the Principal Attendance Awareness Challenge.

 

Attendance Works, The Hamilton Project, the Brookings Institution, FutureEd, and the Everyone Graduates Center analyze the new OCR data in a blog post. Better data reporting, not a spike in absences, explains the jump in the number of chronically absent students in 2015-16. Find the blog on the Brookings Institution Chalkboard.

 

A report from The Hamilton Project shows how health issues negatively affect student attendance. Check out their video illustrating how strong attendance is a key building block for academic achievement. 

Todd Rogers and Avi Feller sent personalized letters home that corrected parents' misbeliefs about their child's absences. The letters, sent to families of students in K-12th grades, reduced chronic absenteeism by 10 percent. This type of intervention that empowers parents can complement more intensive student-focused absenteeism interventions. Find the study: https://buff.ly/2rd4s32

Incentives are often used by schools as part of comprehensive approach to reduce chronic absence, yet not all incentive programs are created equal. Researchers Rekha Balu at MDRC and Stacy Ehrlich at NORC at the University of Chicago have developed a framework, with questions educators can consider, to help design incentive programs that work.

Our next free webinar, Team up for Attendance: Community Matters, is on  August 15, 11-12:30 pm (PT) / 2-3:30 pm (ET). Hear real-world examples of how health care, early childhood, and national service volunteers are helping students and families overcome barriers to getting to school and cultivating a culture of attendance that encourages showing up every day even when it isn't easy.  Registration opening soon!

Did you miss our earlier webinars? Look online for the PowerPoint presentation and recordings of Leadership Matters, (3/28) and Working Together Matters (5/8). Find them on our website.  

Module 2 of our online, interactive series of courses is open! Creating a Culture of Attendance emphasizes Tier 1 universal, prevention-oriented strategies. Module 2 offers courses for primary grades and secondary grades. Module 1 explains what chronic absence is, how it impacts achievement, and offers strategies to combat absenteeism.  Register to access the curriculum.

Join us at IEL's  annual National Family & Community Engagement Conference July 11-13. We'll be speaking at a plenary and two workshops. Learn more.

We look forward to seeing you at The Campaign for Grade Level Reading's GLR Week in Philadelphia July 23-27, an event to strengthen the connections that exist within a growing network of 360+. Join us at two workshops and a concurrent Plenary on Thursday, "Reducing Chronic Absence Requires a Trauma-Informed Response." Register.