Attendance Awareness Campaign Update
A project led by Attendance Works
August 28, 2019
Good Health is Associated with
Good Attendance!
Illness is the top reason students and families give for missing school! Research from Texas A&M University found students who received flu shots at school had fewer absences than their unvaccinated peers. Consider promoting immunization activities in partnership with health providers. Learn more in the Attendance Playbook from FutureEd and Attendance Works.

How can you establish partnerships with health professionals, particularly pediatricians and nurses, to act as allies for communicating with parents and schools about the importance of preventing school absences? Give them a copy of  the American Academy of Pediatrics', The Link Between School Attendance and Good Health, a resource for health providers that shows what they can do to prevent health related absences.
Attendance Tools

3-Tier Strategies 
Alex Mays of the Healthy Schools Campaign presented a three-tiered approach to addressing student health issues during the August 8 AAC Webinar, Open Doors: Create a Healthy School Climate. Strategies including providing school-wide health screenings; ensuring a safe, clean school environment; and creating behavior intervention plans can all improve student health and attendance. Download the webinar recording and slides.

Schools and communities can support families in addressing chronic illnesses and mental health problems. When illness-related absences begin to add up, you can bring it to the attention of others, such as the school's family outreach or health staff members. Find health-related resources for families in our Count Us In! toolkit.

New Videos! Children's Health Fund
Two new videos, developed in collaboration by Attendance Works and Children's Health Fund, explain the importance of attendance, how it is linked to health, and ways to create positive attendance culture in schools. Combine the videos with other resources to build student action plans to reduce unnecessary absences. Download the videos.
We Belong in School!

Humor can help build learning relationships, reduce stress and tension in the classroom, and improve retention of information, writes Maurice J. Elias in a blog post. It can also contribute to a positive learning environment that encourages students to attend school. In Using Humor in the Classroom, Elias provides nine "humor strategies" to lighten up the environment in classrooms. Read the post on the Edutopia website
National Policy

ICYMI: National leaders discussed policy solutions that can improve the ability of education and health sectors to collaborate on improving student health, and in turn, attendance. Read about the conversation co-sponsored by the Healthy Schools Campaign and the Bipartisan Policy Center on the Diverse: Issues in Higher Education website, and watch the full video!
Share Your Story

Do you have your cameras ready? We are looking for your Attendance Awareness Campaign stories and images that show how you engaged people around school attendance with the start of the new school year. Please send us your photos or graphics and a brief description of your activities using the form on our Attendance Awareness Campaign website, and we will post it! Learn more.  
AAC Webinar

Register today!  Our final webinar on September 10, A Place Where We Belong: Improving Conditions for Learning, will highlight the September Brief, Using Chronic Absence Data to Improve Conditions for Learning, from Attendance Works and the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Speakers will describe conditions for learning and their relationship to chronic absence, detail case studies from Georgia and Cleveland, Ohio, and offer a School Action Framework.

Sample Tweet
Join @attendanceworks @UnitedWay on 9/10 for an AAC webinar! Speakers will discuss how positive conditions for learning can motivate students & their families to come to school, even when there are hurdles to getting there. Register today: https://www.attendanceworks.org/resources/webinars/ #SchoolEveryDay 
Twitter Chat

Our chat co-sponsored by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Attendance Works and Foundations, Inc. focused on plans to reduce chronic absence at the start of the school year. Read our blog post about the chat.

Save The Dates
Thursday, September 12, 3-4pm ET, Attendance Awareness Month #PromiseChat cosponsored by America's Promise Alliance, FutureEd, and Attendance Works.

Thursday, September 19, 2-3pm ET, #MentorIRL Attendance Chat cosponsored by MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership and Attendance Works.
New Partner!

This week we welcome our new AAC State Partner:   Oregon Association of Education Service Districts (OAESD)

Partner Spotlight

High schools can use Get Schooled's Fall Attendance Challenge as a fun way to tackle attendance and motivate youth around their educational goals. The Challenge has increased attendance as much as 10 percent. Youth can earn individual incentives and schools can earn grants up to $2,000. Get Schooled also has resources to help educators engage students on issues foundational to success in school and beyond. Email [email protected] to learn more.

A survey conducted by Get Schooled showed 25 percent of teens who responded said they are more likely to skip school during the spring semester rather than during the fall. When asked why, 17 percent of those who said they would miss school reported that nothing really happens in class in the last few weeks. Read more about the survey in our blog post.

Healthy Schools Campaign (HSC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making schools healthier places for all students. HSC provides leadership development and tools to school stakeholders and advocates for better access to nutritious school food, physical activity, school health resources and clean air to shape children's lifelong learning and health.

Healthy Schools Campaign and Attendance Works are calling on partners across the country to sign on to the Here + Healthy campaign to raise awareness about the connection between chronic absenteeism and health. Download the fact sheet showing how you can reduce health-related absences.

Corporate Attendance Sponsors

We want to send a big thank you to this year's Attendance Awareness Corporate Sponsors. Find out more on our webpage

Attendance in the News
Spread the Word!

Addressing childhood asthma can help improve attendance & achievement: bit.ly/1oqfID7 #schooleveryday

Sometimes good attendance is simply a matter of good health: bit.ly/1oqfID7 #schooleveryday 
Campaign Convening Partners
See the full list of Attendance Awareness Campaign partners here.
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