Time to read: 5 minutes
September is Attendance Awareness Month, and for us at TalkingPoints, it’s always felt like more than a calendar observance. It’s a chance to spend an entire month on something we believe in every single day: families are the most underutilized lever districts have for improving student outcomes, and attendance is one of the clearest places that belief plays out. Here’s a look back at how we spent the month, who we partnered with, and what we learned along the way.
The Missing Piece in Attendance Improvement (Webinar with District Administration)
We kicked things off by co-hosting a webinar with District Administration, “The Missing Piece in Attendance Improvement: Stronger Family Partnerships,” moderated by Kate Pechacek of Open Doors Ed. Our panel, Dr. Shane McKay of East Central ISD, Dr. Anne Marie Vaughn of Pocono Mountain West Junior High, our own Dr. Mallary Swartz, and Dani Dyess, our Principal Product Manager of Attendance, dug into what we’re calling the “attendance effort gap”: districts have spent six straight years increasing their attendance efforts, but improvement hasn’t kept pace. The conversation was clear on why: effort isn’t the problem. Understanding the root causes behind absences, through real family relationships, is the piece too many strategies still miss. [Watch the recording]
Partnering with Attendance Works
TalkingPoints also sponsored this year’s Attendance Works’ 2026 Attendance Awareness Campaign, themed “Your Presence Matters!” We were also proud to sponsor the fourth and final webinar in their four-part series, “Ensure Support All Year Long,” co-hosted with the Institute for Educational Leadership. The webinar capped off a campaign-long conversation on building cultures of belonging and consistent attendance, closing with a focus on how districts can carry that support forward well beyond September.
[Watch the recording]
Four Weeks, Four Stories About What Actually Works
Alongside the webinar and our Attendance Works partnership, we published a new post each week digging into a different piece of the attendance puzzle:
The Belonging Window You Can’t Afford to Miss: 5 Ways to Build Strong Attendance Early This Year opened the month with the data behind why September matters so much: nearly half of students who miss just two to four days early in the school year go on to become chronically absent. From there, we shared five practical ways schools can build the family partnerships that prevent that pattern before it starts.
Straight From the Experts: The Latest Thinking on What Actually Moves Attendance took readers inside Attendance Works’ Research to Action Convening, where nearly 60 researchers, district leaders, and practitioners converged on the same reframe we’ve believed in for years: chronic absenteeism isn’t primarily a logistics problem. It’s a relationship problem that happens to show up as a logistics one.
From Attendance to Opportunity: How ECISD Is Strengthening Family Engagement put that reframe into action with a real district case study. East Central ISD in San Antonio increased attendance from 91.55% to 93.1% over two years, generating nearly 32,000 additional instructional days and an estimated $1.25 million in annual funding, by rebuilding how the district communicated with families.
3 Ways We Built Family Relationships That Reduced Absenteeism closed out the series with a personal, on-the-ground perspective from Dr. Rachel Edoho-Eket, principal of Waterloo Elementary School. Her post traced how something as small as a two-day check-in text, sent in a family’s home language, can turn into an in-person relationship, and even a family’s first-ever visit to the building.
Recognized for the Work
None of this happens in a vacuum, it reflects work our team has been building toward for a long time. This September, that work was recognized when TalkingPoints Attendance Improvement was named a 2026 Best for Back to School Award of Excellence winner by Tech & Learning. The judges wrote:
“This communication tool for schools and parents is SMS first, which removes a technology barrier some parents have. With translations into 150+ languages, this is accessible for just about any parent to receive notifications and have two-way communication about their students.”
It’s a meaningful nod to the same idea running through everything we shared this month: attendance gets better when families are treated as partners.
The Work Continues
Attendance Awareness Month may be ending, but the work behind it doesn’t stop when the calendar turns. If your district is ready to build the kind of family partnerships that move attendance, we’d love to talk.
