Shifting the Narrative From Chronic Absenteeism to Chronic Attendance

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Schools across America are facing an epidemic of empty seats. More than four years after the start of the pandemic, school attendance rates still lag far behind pre-COVID levels. 

The figures are stark. The number of kids who are chronically absent has doubled since 2016. More than one-quarter of all U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of the 2022-23 school year. That’s equivalent to more than three weeks of classroom time.

Accepting chronic absenteeism as the new normal simply isn’t an option. It can — and must — be stopped. 

The crisis is everyone’s problem, but it doesn’t impact everyone equally. The school districts that have experienced the largest spike in chronic absenteeism are low-income and majority nonwhite, with absentee rates 13% higher in the lowest-income districts than they are in the wealthiest ones.

This trend bears significant long-term costs, as attendance at school is strongly correlated with academic success, graduation rates — and even future job prospects. Students who are chronically absent are more likely to be socially disengaged and alienated, and to have an encounter with the criminal justice system. 

At Caliber, the network of public charter schools we help run in northern California, we have made tackling this crisis a priority. Caliber serves primarily low-income Black and Hispanic students from transitional kindergarten — an additional year of school before kindergarten for students needing extra support — to eighth grade. As at many schools, our attendance levels dropped after the pandemic and chronic absenteeism began to soar. During the 2022-23 school year, over 40% of students at Caliber schools qualified as chronically absent. 

At the start of last school year, we rolled out a pilot program to shift the narrative to one of chronic attendance. Our nonpunitive, data-driven approach could serve as a model for other schools.

A key component of our strategy is our Student Wellness and Attendance Team — our SWAAT team. Its members, who include school therapists, administrative staff and other professionals, track daily attendance and maintain a database that enables Caliber’s administrators to detect patterns across time. Using this data, we identified “red flag” days when students were most likely to skip school — like Fridays, especially before a holiday.

To counter that trend, we gave students a teaser: Mystery Fridays, a surprise event one Friday per month that celebrates them. They don’t know which Friday it will be, so there’s a strong incentive not to miss one.

Family outreach has been another key pillar of our strategy. Like many schools, we check in at home every time a student misses school. But we also discuss with parents what material their children missed, how they can get caught up and what future lessons will cover. Our goal is to reinforce the message that when students skip school, they’re missing out on valuable instruction and relationships with peers.

Instead of involving law enforcement — which fails to engage students or address the root causes of absenteeism, and has been shown to have a negative, long-term impact on attendance — we refer students who miss 20% of class to a support panel. Its members work with the student, parent and/or guardian to discuss appropriate services for underlying issues, including housing instability and mental health challenges. Non-punitive solutions like counseling are prioritized in this early intervention effort.

By the end of the year, we had reduced chronic absenteeism by more than 13 percentage points, from 40% to 26.8%, and we’re off to a good start in 2024: both schools in our network averaged over 95% daily attendance in the first month of the year.

There’s still work to be done. One in four public school districts say nothing they’ve done has been effective in reducing chronic absenteeism, but chronic absenteeism won’t get better on its own. Our experience shows that with positive and proactive approaches, it can be reversed.

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