Actionable Strategies For Increasing Attendance and Reducing Chronic Absenteeism

While efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism typically focus on adolescents, we now know that the early grades are the place to start, because as many as 25% to 50% of children in pre-kindergarten programs are chronically absent. However, it is often dismissed as an issue of immediate concern because 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds who aren’t in school aren’t immediately disruptive to society in the same ways that adolescents are, which limits investment in preventive measures.

Chronic absenteeism among children during the early grades should be viewed as a critical and actionable warning sign of later academic distress. The later grades build on skills and information learned in earlier grades, and if young children aren’t there, they can’t learn the content. It is unwise to wait until students take their first standardized tests in the third grade to identify those in need of more intensive support.

Research suggests that chronic absenteeism in the early grades is a fast-moving snowball that quickly increases to substantial academic challenges. Kindergarten readiness scores are lower among students who are chronically absent in preschool, and this lower level of readiness for school is linked to academic challenges as students progress through their academic careers. Research by the National Center for Children in Poverty shows that the same risk factors that make students more likely to become chronically absent, such as poverty-related mobility or an unstable home life, only serve to intensify the problems caused by missing school. 

Consistent school attendance in the early grades is necessary for building children’s sense of themselves as part of a community of learners, as well as their academic motivation and achievement. These connections can help close achievement gaps for vulnerable students. Young children, particularly those with multiple risk factors, benefit from regular attendance at high-quality early education programs, where they learn to work independently on tasks and develop other behaviors essential for school success. Strong attendance in preschool programs also provides opportunities to identify early warning signs of developmental and academic delays, which are much easier to remedy when identified early.  

Preschool is the ideal time to introduce children and families to the importance of consistent, on-time school attendance and to encourage strong attendance habits. An often-overlooked element of supporting a smooth transition to kindergarten is helping families understand the critical importance of attendance and overcoming challenges to getting to preschool or school.  

Every NC school district has work to do to reduce its chronic absenteeism rate. Nearly three out of every four school districts across the state reported that 23% to 39% of their elementary school students were chronically absent during the 2021-2022 academic year. Data for individual school districts can be found in the North Carolina School Report Card breakdown. As expected, chronically underresourced school districts need much more targeted support than others to ensure that students are present and able to benefit from high-quality instruction. 

Of the 25 districts where 40% or more of students were chronically absent, 15 of them are also districts where 25% or more of public school children live in families with incomes below the poverty level. In comparison, an average of 16% of families across the state have incomes below the poverty level, based on data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. The district with the highest chronic absenteeism rate, at 60%, also had the highest poverty rate, at 50%. 

The association between absenteeism and poverty means that many of our most vulnerable students are missing out on a positive developmental environment that can support their healthy development. A report by the National Center for Children in Poverty states that the effects of missing at least 10% of the school year in kindergarten extend to the end of elementary school for children in poverty.

Given the complex set of barriers listed below, a multi-tiered system of support model is needed: 

• Physical health, asthma in particular, is a strong factor in chronic absenteeism, with the severity of the asthma impacting the degree of absenteeism. Children from poorer families are both more likely to suffer from these types of chronic health issues and more likely to miss school because of these issues than their wealthier peers. 
• Social-emotional health and self-regulation are closely tied to regular school attendance through multiple pathways. Children who struggle with social-emotional skills early in schooling are more likely to become chronically absent. This is, in part, because they are more likely to be disciplined in ways that remove them from the classroom, through mechanisms such as suspensions and expulsions, which further contribute to chronic absence. 
• Lack of safety at home can sometimes be the underlying cause of chronic absenteeism, which the child welfare system may view as “educational neglect.” However, it is critical not to respond to parents and caregivers with punitive actions and instead to view chronic absenteeism as a symptom of broader family challenges, such as the stressors of poverty, mental health challenges, domestic violence, or substance use, that may require intervention and support. 
• Parents’ access to formal and informal supports is critical to enabling them to cope with life’s stressors in healthy ways, thereby helping them to prioritize things that are important for children’s healthy development, such as school attendance. 
• School climate refers to the extent to which the various interpersonal interactions among students, educators, administrators, and families are positive and welcoming. Schools that successfully engage with students and parents, operate as places of belonging, effectively manage transitions, and address students’ non-academic barriers to learning are likely to have low levels of chronic absenteeism.

This list is not exhaustive; there are many more barriers to consider.

The importance of viewing absenteeism through the lens of prevention is illustrated by what Baltimore officials found when they sought to understand what’s behind pre-kindergarten absenteeism. They found parents and caregivers who were struggling to cope with life’s challenges and stressors, such as: 

• Children being placed in or moved to a different foster care placement
• Children sick at home with asthma
• The family moving out of a given school’s attendance zone and not knowing that they can or how to access the program in their new neighborhood
• Lack of access to reliable transportation
• Children exhibiting a behavioral challenge that is causing them to be excluded from school 

This complex set of barriers suggests that school districts should adopt macro strategies that require policymakers and educators to move beyond targeting individual families to addressing the broader ecosystem in which families raise their children.

Creating an ecology that facilitates regular school attendance and participation for at-risk children starts with reorienting from the negative framing of managing truancy to the positive framing of promoting attendance. This shift in framing means going from nudging, demanding, and punishing families for non-attendance to asking deeper questions about the underlying reasons why children in that district and school are chronically absent.

Once we see chronic absenteeism as more than an individual student or individual family problem, a broad range of interventions that focus on how life’s stressors impact families and children are opened up. Even when the interventions are delivered at the individual level, they are done with consideration of the bigger picture. Let’s take physical, emotional, and mental health challenges, for example. Low-income children, who suffer from physical health challenges such as asthma, are much more likely to miss school than children without health challenges and children with health challenges who have access to high-quality health care. A comprehensive understanding of the challenges, along with policy and practice guidance, is provided in Addressing the Health-Related Causes of Chronic Absenteeism: A Toolkit for Action. 

School climate and the extent to which children and families feel a strong sense of belonging to the school community matters tremendously in the ecology of factors that can compel high rates of attendance. They won’t want to miss out on a welcoming school that supports them by addressing attendance challenges and responding to the importance of maintaining relationships with educators who make them feel like their child’s presence is missed when they aren’t in the classroom. 

Schools with a welcoming climate will be most successful at increasing attendance when they are in districts and cities that address the logistic and material barriers to attendance. Young children at-risk for chronic absenteeism are often in households with parents who work long and nonstandard hours for low pay and are often also coping with transportation challenges and housing instability. These larger structural factors must be addressed simultaneously with individual student-level interventions when a school district or school as a whole has a high absenteeism rate. 

In some cities, cross-cutting organizations like the United Way have coordinated efforts across schools, local governments, and community organizations to orchestrate interventions and resources across all levels of the system. FutureEd’s Smart Strategies for Reducing Student Absenteeism Post-Pandemic playbook provides a range of attendance-focused interventions that can improve all aspects of the environment in which families are attempting to raise children.

Many voices should be mobilized to communicate the school attendance message to parents and families, such as those from the local media and faith community. For example, in Ware Shoals, South Carolina, Rev. James Davis, pastor of Dunn Creek Baptist Church, collaborated with local educators to communicate the responsibility for school attendance to parents, grandparents, and extended family members. This type of community-level messaging reduced the district’s percentage of chronically absent students from 32.2% in 2020-21 to 25.2% in 2022-23. 

Use our Attendance Awareness Social Media Toolkit, developed with resources from our national partners at Attendance Works, to support advocates, leaders, and community organizations in raising awareness about the importance of attendance.

• Sending frequent text messages is proving to be an effective way of increasing overall attendance and targeting individual families with high absences. One of the most effective types of attendance text messaging involves school staff sending interactive, two-way, person-to-person messaging: “Dear Name Of Caregiver, This is Ms. Wilson, a school counselor. Jordan has missed 14 days of school so far this year.  Please text me back or call me at ### so we can set a time to talk. I am here to help.” 

Text messaging is an effective strategy because: 

• Texts can reach parents quickly, and most received texts are read within minutes
• Texts can be automated to provide “just-in-time” information on the day a student is absent
• Text messaging is low-cost
• Texts can easily adapt in response to changing trends, such as increased absence rates for individual children
• Texting can complement other attendance improvement strategies

Any communication to parents and caregivers about attendance should utilize positive messages. In 2024, the Ad Council Research Institute tested messages with over 5,000 parents and caregivers and found that attendance messaging that are most effective: 

• Are positive in tone
• Communicate the opportunities associated with in-person learning, not the consequences of missing school
• Focus on how school develops their child holistically, beyond academic performance
• Include realistic goals for parents to work toward, such as attending as much as possible, versus citing a specific number of days or saying “every day”
• Avoid chastising or shaming parents by telling them what’s acceptable or not
• Are delivered by a child’s teacher; this is the school messenger whom parents say they trust the most

These toolkits can strengthen your attendance communication strategies: 

• How to Text Message Parents to Reduce Chronic Absence Using an Evidence-Based Approach 
• How To Overcome Chronic Absenteeism And Encourage Parents To Send Kids To School Consistently 
• Attendance Works: Engage in Effective Attendance Messaging With Families and Students
• Resources Targeting Ending Exclusion From Early Learning And Preschool Environments 
• Examples of school social media posts and Class Dojo messages promoting attendance

As detailed throughout this action-focused brief, reducing chronic absenteeism is about much more than getting families and children to believe in the importance of schooling. It is about real-time collection and use of actionable data to identify families and at-risk children, identifying and responding to barriers to attendance with wraparound services, and utilizing family- and child-level interventions that have demonstrated effectiveness, adapting them to the cultural needs of the specific school community. Here are a few final toolkits that can strengthen your efforts to increase attendance:

• The Go-Learn-Grow Toolkit focuses on improving attendance in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. It includes simple, easy-to-use resources and handouts to support districts, schools, and early childhood providers in improving school attendance.

• The GRAD Partnership Chronic Absenteeism Toolkit includes a core set of evidence-based practices that schools have successfully used to address chronic absenteeism, an action planning tool with guiding questions for school-based teams, and more.  
• The Supporting School Attendance toolkit is structured around six evidence-informed themes: build a holistic understanding of pupils and families, and diagnose specific needs; build a culture of community and belonging for pupils; communicate effectively with families; improve universal provision for all pupils; deliver targeted interventions to supplement universal provision; monitor the impact of approaches.