To reach parents, Attendance Works has developed a new toolkit: Bringing Attendance Home: Engaging Parents in Preventing Chronic Absence.

Created with the help of practitioners who have worked successfully with families to improve attendance, this free toolkit is filled with ideas, activities and materials that you can use to spark conversations with parents about how good attendance can help them fulfill their dreams and aspirations for their children’s futures. It contains:

• Research showing a positive relationship between parent involvement and attendance as well as the results of new studies examining parents’ attitudes about school absences and their implications for messaging and action.
• Key Principles for engaging parents on attendance.
• Materials to share with parents about the importance of good attendance
• Interactive Exercises to spark awareness, conversation and action with groups of parents about the consequences of poor attendance on their children’s futures.

Beyond making good attendance a priority, parents can also alert schools and community agencies to barriers that keep kids from attending class, ask for and monitor data on chronic absence and demand action to address systemic barriers that may be causing large numbers of students to miss too much school. We’ll be in San Antonio this week, sharing our tools and ideas at a parent engagement summit sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. We’ll also be participating in a roundtable discussion with U.S. Department of Education officials tonight (Tuesday 5/21) about the value of family and community partnerships to improve schools. To watch the event on live stream, click here.

Take advantage of this free, new resource for engaging parents in your community,  click here.

If you’re getting involved in Attendance Awareness Month this September, register for our next webinar on June 7 at 1 p.m. ET. Click here.

Children who go to school every day are winners. They benefit by learning more and developing the habit of regular attendance that will help them succeed when they go to work. Yet, across the country, as many as 7.5 million school-age children were chronically absent. 

What can you do to help? Join us as we hear from several local communities about what they are doing to rally their communities to send the message that going to school every day matters for success in school and in life. They will share how they are enlisting a broad range of stakeholders and their plans for the fall. In addition, representatives from Attendance Works will share the latest resources for launching Attendance Awareness Month, including ideas for hosting an “Attendance House Party.”

Register now!

If you can’t join us for our webinar, you can get started with our Count Us In! toolkit released last month that can help you start planning activities in your community. The toolkit includes:

• An explanation of the importance of attendance and chronic absence
• Ideas for community partners & coalitions
• Proclamations, press releases & media tools
• Suggestions for incentives, contests & events
• Advice for tracking data to identify & intervene with students

Later, during a fellowship at Harvard, Jackson requested the data as a researcher. The school district complied but with firm restrictions on how he could use it. He found he couldn’t publish what he wanted in the paper. Finally, more than a decade after the first request, a data came with no restrictions. The result was a remarkable series of stories by Jackson and his reporting partner Gary Marx that outlined the extent of absenteeism in Chicago’s elementary schools and the connections that link absenteeism, poverty, disabilities and jail time.

The series by Jackson and Marx, The Empty Desk Epidemic, received a first prize for investigative reporting from the Education Writers Association on Saturday. (Interestingly the second place prize went to the Columbus Dispatch for a series that documented how school administrators were falsifying attendance records to make their schools look better.)

The Chicago Tribune series also received the Freedom of Information medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors. And it was the awarded the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, an honor given by Hunter College in New York City for reporting that exposes widespread injustice and examines possible reforms.

“Absenteeism data is a basic accountability tool that can tell you how a school district is doing,” Jackson told a room full of reporters at the Education Writers Association conference in Palo Alto, Calif.

Among their findings were:

• Nearly 32,000 students in kindergarten through eighth grade — or roughly 1 in 8 — missed four weeks or more of class during the 2010-11 school year.
• About 42 percent of K-8 students with an emotional disability missed four weeks of classes, compared with 12 percent of students without a disability.
• About 74 percent of the 182 boys and young men recently locked up in Illinois’ three medium-security youth prisons were labeled chronic truants. Nearly 60 percent couldn’t even read at the third-grade level when they were booked in.
• Some students simply vanished from school with no record of them attending at all. One girl who was forced to stay home to babysit her younger siblings missed five years of school.

Jackson and Marx combined their data analysis with compelling stories of students lost in the system and good examples beyond Chicago of communities taking action to reduce absences. Their series took months of reporting, but other reporters are finding that school districts have compiled chronic absence data and can share not only attendance information but also examples of progress happening in schools that are taking attendance seriously.

Duardo, who was just named LAUSD’s Executive Director of Health and Human Services,  has a clear understanding of the connection between attendance and achievement. It’s personal for her.

An article just published by her alma mater, UCLA, details Duardo’s own story, that started with dropping out at age 15.

Duardo was pregnant and working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken when she decided to drop out after a week of high school. “There are some, who are like me, and didn’t think school was interesting,” she told UCLA Today. “Others drop out because they’re really smart and bored, some have issues with substance abuse or violence, or they have kids of their own.”

Duardo’s child was born with spina bifida, and she found she couldn’t understand much of what the doctors were telling her. She decided then that she needed to finish her education. She took another decade to get her high school diploma while she and her husband had three more children. She earned her bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in social work at UCLA (which recently honored her as the Luskin’s Department of Social Welfare Joseph A. Nunn Alumna of the Year.)

From there, she got a job as a Pupil Services and Attendance Counselor at a Los Angeles high school. She continued to focus on students with attendance problems throughout her career, including a stint as an assitant principal at the middle school she once attended.

“When you’re in a school as an assistant principal, you’re running the intervention program and Saturday school,” Duardo said in the article. “You’re helping students and families who are under-represented and who are really struggling. You’re a counselor and you’re doing home visits and you truly understand that some families are living in garages without electricity or two entire families are living together.”

Her current job connects her to attendance in many ways, putting her in charge of student medical services,  nursing, mental health, pupil services and dropout education.

She tells UCLA Today:

“That continues to be my passion, to get kids to understand that they’re entitled to that education,” Duardo said. “When a student drops out of school, it affects all of us as a community because they’re more likely to be in poverty or depend on welfare. They’re more likely to be involved in criminal activities.

“I wish someone had been there to help explain what school is all about, and how much a diploma would mean to my future. That experience informs my work every day — I want to make sure every at-risk student in our district has the opportunity I never had.”

These students are showing what can be done with a mission and community collaboration.

The Wide Angle Attendance and Design team has worked closely with the Baltimore City public school district, the Baltimore Student Attendance Campaign, Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) and Experience Corps to create five different media campaigns and events promoting attendance and public transportation improvements to the city’s students. The school district has a contract with MTA to get middle and high school students to and from school on public transit.

“In Baltimore, transportation creates obstacles for its residents, and this is no less true for its young people,” says Sue Malone, executive director of Wide Angle Youth Media, a nonprofit that provides Baltimore students with media education. “Late buses, skipped stops and rude drivers are major barriers to students getting to school on time. Frequent school attendance is the best and only route toward a brighter future. Students from public high schools in Baltimore are not only taking note of this, but are also doing something about it.”

The Open Society Institute-Baltimore  is supporting the students’ work with Wide Angle to produce media campaigns that reach out to students, parents, teachers and principals in a variety of ways, including:

• Creation of an attendance-themed take-home folder for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students. Developing a habit of attendance early is crucial, and studies show that children who miss too many days in these early years can struggle academically in later years.  The team hopes to reach more than 10,000 students and their parents for fall 2013 back to school efforts. The attendance-theme folder includes: monthly attendance scorecards, activities to do at home aligned with monthly learning objective, attendance tips and a parent checklist
• Creation of a “Calculation Station,” which was used at the annual BCPS Middle and High School Choice Fair to help families take transportation into account when deciding which school to attend. Design Team members assisted nearly 70 students and parents in identifying bus routes and transit times for the different schools they were considering.
•  Production of a 30-second Rate Your Ride commercial targeting students.
• Design of postcards and attendance messaging for principals explaining the new Uniform Guidelines and offering resources and suggestions for best practices.
•  Distribution of more than 100 attendance posters featuring student photography and attendance messaging to 50 schools.

In a speech he gave April 7 for the James Joseph lecture at the Council on Foundations Annual Conference, Dr. Ross outlined the urgency of the problems with black male youth:

• Homicide rates that are 13 times greater than white males.
• Incarceration rates that are more than 7 times greater.
• HIV/AIDS are 8 times higher
• Fatherlessness is more than 100 percent higher.
• Poverty rates are three times higher.
• Wages and earnings are one-third lower.
• High school graduation rates that are more than one-third lower.

He took a three month sabbatical to study the issue and talk with more than 60 people–political and community leaders, educators and students, judges and inmates. He emerged with what he considers an early warning and support system, essentially a radar that detects when a child is headed for trouble, academic or otherwise, and alerts schools and communities to support him.

Ross says it best himself:

I landed on three evidence-supported, primary early warning signals where boys or young men are essentially telling us: “I may be in trouble and I may need to be connected to some help.”  

Those three warning and intervention opportunities are: 1) Third grade reading levels; 2) Chronic school absence; and 3) School suspensions or expulsions.

My friend, colleague, and mentor Ralph Smith of the Annie E. Casey Foundation helped point me in the direction of the criticality of Third Grade Reading.  Through his leadership in the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, we understand that in most urban public school districts, 80 percent or more of black boys are reading at less than proficiency in the 3rd Grade.  Let me repeat that:  Eighty or more percent.  This is utterly unacceptable and should have black people writhing in collective agony over this somber reality.  

Moreover, education experts tell us that between preschool and third grade children are learning to read; after third grade they read to learn.  If you have a significant gap in reading proficiency at third grade, the chances for educational doom increase significantly in the school years that follow.

The second warning point is chronic school absence.  On the basis of some terrific research by Hedy Chang, we now know that children who miss 20 or more days per year of school are signaling serious risks: health, dental health, or mental health issues; a depressed or substance-abusing parent in the home; potential family dysfunction, child neglect, or just plain chaos.  The risks hold true whether the child is in kindergarten or the ninth grade.    

The third warning point is the matter of school suspensions. At The California Endowment, we have already established, driven by input from community leaders in our Building Healthy Communities’ sites, the issue of school suspensions as a critical marker of community health.  Folks, ever since the combination of the so-called national War on Drugs, in combination with the fallout of the school shootings at Columbine, we have seen an insidious and pervasive epidemic brewing on suspending and expelling kids from our nation’s schools.  And surprise, surprise: black and brown boys are suspended from school, at all grade levels, at disproportionately alarming rates….

I would argue for and submit a fourth intervention point, which is that of our boys and young men in our juvenile justice and probation systems.  We must transform these systems from those merely housing thugs-in-training to ones of reconstructing pathways to opportunity, achievement, and well-being.

• An explanation of the importance of attendance and chronic absence
• Ideas for community partners & coalitions
• Proclamations, press releases & media tools
• Suggestions for incentives, contests & events
• Advice for tracking data to identify & intervene with students

The percentage of kindergartners missing 10 percent or more of school days dropped from 30 percent in the past school year to 21 percent so far this year. “We’ve put most of our resources and work on parent engagement into the kindergarten level because getting to them early is so important,” said Joe Vaverchak, New Britain’s director of attendance. “It’s working.”

Through a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain, the school district hired two part-time workers who meet with parents and monitor absenteeism for kindergartners.

Attendance Works, which has worked closely with the district, this week presented New Britain with a commendation for its efforts to date, noting the community reduced chronic absenteeism  despite snowstorms and hurricanes.  Attendance Works also is partnering with the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Foundation and the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading to bring together a select number of districts across Connecticut to analyze their chronic absence data and learn from the New Britain experience.

Here’s some news coverage from the event:

• New Britain officials pleased with improving absenteeism rates in lower grades, New Britain Herald
• Getting Kids in New Britain to Come to School, WTNH
• National Authority in New Britain Tackling Chronic Absenteeism, NBC Connecticut

Join us this September in recognizing Attendance Awareness Month. It’s a chance to rally  your community around the importance of attendance and its role in academic achievement. We’ll formally launch the effort with the release of an online toolkit and a webinar on April 9 from 1 to 2:15 p.m. EDT. Register here.

You can participate in Attendance Awareness Month in a variety of ways, including:

• Organizing parent summits, letters and outreach to families
• Arranging contests, celebrity visits and other incentives for students
• Calling for proclamations from  mayors or superintendents
• Developing public service announcements for national or local media
• Advocating for improved  data tracking to identify students with at-risk attendance
• Organizing community-wide attendance campaigns

The Attendance Awareness Campaign is organized by five national organizations: America’s Promise Alliance, Attendance Works, the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Civic Enterprises, and Points of Light Institute, and is supported by a growing list of organizations.

The Ad Council decided to explore some common misperceptions in a set of focus groups and interviews with parents. The council and the U.S. Army have recently adopted attendance as a key issue in the BoostUp dropout prevention campaign they are sponsoring. They set up focus groups with  parents of students who missed 10 or more days of school . The interviews focused on parents with children in fourth through ninth grade, particularly those from low-income and minority families. They were conducted interviews in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Sheri Klein, vice president for research and evaluation at the Ad Council, explained the findings in our webinar Wednesday:

• Parents are consistent in saying they want a better life for their children and  see high school graduation as key to that better life.
• Parents don’t make the connection between attendance in elementary and middle school and eventual graduation. They say they’ll get stricter when their child reaches high school
• Parents have a problem with their children skipping school, but not with excused absences for illness, rest, family visits, avoiding bullying or even as a reward for good grades. “With Hispanic moms, in particularly, there was a lot of guilt about not spending enough time with their children, so letting them stay home was an expression of love,” Klein said.
• Parents believe that consecutive absences can affect academics, but missing an occasional day is not a problem.

“So in sum, parents don’t make the connection between attendance and academic success they care so much about,” Klein said. The interviewers then tested a variety of messages and found parents slow to believe that absenteeism in the early grades would affect the later years. Parents also didn’t respond to messaging about the juvenile justice system, since they didn’t believe that would apply to their kids.

Using these insights, the Ad Council is airing PSAs and developing further ads and materials for a campaign that focuses on middle school students. “We hoping to make sure parents are aware of the importance of attendance, that they’re monitoring their child’s attendance and that they’re making sure they’re going every day,” Klein said.

Attendance Works will be releasing a parent engagement toolkit in April that provides strategies, materials and interactive activities for parents with children of all ages..