Written by: Dr. Rachel Edoho-Eket, principal of Waterloo Elementary School in Maryland
Time to Read: 5 min read
I still remember pulling up our attendance report one morning and staring at a list of names. Behind every name was a family, a home, a reason. Some I knew well. Some I’d never spoken to at all.
That’s when it hit me: building real relationships with every family in a building, relationships that actually move the needle on student outcomes, is one of the hardest things a principal carries. It’s not one task. It’s dozens of small ones, stacked on top of each other, done family by family, week after week. And here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: none of those steps matter if you can’t reach the family in the first place.
That single truth reshaped how our team at Waterloo approached attendance.
1. Go Beyond Notifications to Build Real Connection
The old model of school attendance outreach waits until a problem is big enough to escalate communication. Ours starts the moment a student hits two days absent in a row, before it becomes a pattern. This proactive communication has proved to be instrumental.
Our homeroom teachers send a quick message through TalkingPoints as soon as that two-day mark hits. Not a warning, but a simple check-in. Something closer to “We miss having your child in class, is everything okay?” than “Your child has been absent.”
Here’s what makes that possible in the first place: it’s just a text. No app to download, no account to set up, nothing standing between a teacher and a parent’s phone. Families can text back in the moment, from wherever they are, on whatever phone they already have. That two-way communication matters as much as the outreach itself. A message that only goes one direction is a notification. A message a parent can actually respond to is the start of a conversation.
See how TalkingPoints makes this easy: Families can respond to a check-in text from whatever phone they already have, no app or login required to get started. (The app is there for families who want more, but it is never the barrier to reaching them.)
Our families felt that difference immediately. What used to feel like getting called out started to feel like being noticed, and on our end, the data does its own work behind the scenes: filters help us spot the students who need more than a check-in text, and those cases get flagged straight to members of our student support team. Care and data, working together instead of against each other.
2. Look for the Patterns, Not Just the People
Once we started paying closer attention, we noticed something we couldn’t ignore: our attendance dipped hardest on Mondays and Fridays, week after week.
Instead of treating that as just a fact about our families, we treated it as an invitation. We built school-wide incentives and activities on those two days specifically, and used TalkingPoints to get the word out ahead of time so families knew something fun was coming.
It’s a small shift, but it provided another incentive for students and families to show up more consistently to school. We didn’t need a new program. We needed to notice the pattern and meet it.
3. Reach Families in Their Own Language
Our school community speaks a wide range of languages, including Spanish, Punjabi, Chinese, Urdu, French, Russian, and Yoruba. For a lot of our families, a message that shows up in their home language isn’t just a convenience, it’s the difference between being reached and being missed entirely.
That’s true beyond quick texts, too. Flyers, letters, and other documents can go home translated as well thanks to the document translation package from TalkingPoints, so language access covers the full range of what we send home, not just our shortest messages.
One story still stays with me. It started the way so many of our conversations do now: a routine care and concern text after a two-day absence. Our district typically uses a phone-based interpreter line for a lot of conversations, but for this family, TalkingPoints made something different possible. The family requested their own interpreter: the student’s aunt. She and the student’s mom came in together to meet with us, in person, and It was the first time that the student’s mom had ever been to our school.
That one visit didn’t end when the meeting did. It became the start of an ongoing relationship with that parent that has continued well past our first conversation. What started as a text about attendance became something priceless: a family who knows that they are welcomed partners at our school.
See how TalkingPoints makes this easy: Messages are translated into 150+ languages with human-backed, K-12 contextualized translation, so families receive not just words but meaning they can trust and act on.
Text Gets You in the Door. People Keep You There.
That’s the thread running through all three of these approaches. Texting is the entry point. It’s what makes a family reachable in the first place, but the in-person connection, the aunt sitting beside her sister, the mom walking into the building for the first time, that’s where the real power lives.
Building relationships with every family will always be a huge task with a lot of steps, but every single one of those steps starts with the same question: can you actually reach families authentically? When we get that right, everything else becomes possible.
Rachel Edoho-Eket is an award-winning elementary school principal, TEDx speaker, and best-selling author known for her advocacy in public education. Read more of her writing at racheledohoeket.com.
Dr. Edoho-Eket’s district, Howard County in Maryland, is one of the many that learned quickly: reach is only the first step in family engagement and reducing absenteeism. If your district is looking for outcomes in attendance, family engagement, and academics that start with real reach, see how TalkingPoints can help.
More for Attendance Awareness Month
- Go deeper on what’s driving attendance research right now, and what it means for your school or district. Watch the recording of our Sept. 17 webinar, hosted by District Administration.
- Explore the Attendance Works Attendance Awareness Month campaign, sponsored by TalkingPoints.
- Watch the recording of the third webinar in the 2026 Attendance Awareness Campaign series, hosted with Attendance Works, the Institute for Educational Leadership, TalkingPoints, and other campaign partners, themed Your Presence Matters!
- Follow along all month with new posts here on the blog.
Want to learn more about our Attendance Improvement solution? Schedule a demo.
