Author: Mallary Swartz, PhD
Last month, I joined nearly 60 researchers, state and district leaders, and intermediary organizations in New York for a two-day convening focused on turning attendance research into action. The convening was held at Overdeck Family Foundation’s offices and sponsored and led by Attendance Works.
Since the pandemic, chronic absenteeism has often been treated as a logistics problem, framed around access, and punitive enforcement. Can a family get a child to school? What are the consequences if they don’t? As a result, many interventions have focused on transportation fixes, attendance letters, incentive programs, and truancy measures.
At the Attendance Works Convening, researchers, practitioners, leaders, and other experts from across the country spent two days discussing this frame and largely kept coming back to a different question and approach: What if attendance isn’t primarily a logistics problem? What if it’s a relationship problem that happens to show up as a logistics problem?
That reframe changes a lot about what strategies a district should use to combat chronic absenteeism and boost attendance.
Key takeaways
- School climate, relationships, and a sense of belonging are emerging as some of the strongest levers for attendance.
- Post-pandemic absenteeism isn’t just the old problem at a bigger scale. Families and students are navigating a different set of concerns and challenges that drive absenteeism: from caution around illness, to disengagement, to whether showing up to school feels worth it.
- There is no silver bullet to solving attendance challenges and chronic absenteeism. The strongest results come from combining strategies and being intentional about implementation.
- Existing attendance strategies don’t always account for geography, and rural and urban districts may need different approaches.
- Specific subpopulations require tailored strategies and there is still a lot to learn.
- Treating attendance as a trajectory instead of a simple chronic or not-chronic label could lead to more effective strategies and better results.
School climate, relationships, and a sense of belonging
School climate and social-emotional support have always been part of the attendance conversation, but newer, post-pandemic research is showing that link more clearly and more consistently than before. This was a common discussion thread throughout the two-day convening.
Access still matters and enforcement still has a place, but the emotional experience of school, including whether a student feels seen and like they belong and whether families feel like partners instead of problems to manage, matters just as much as structural issues and fixes.
This is consistent with what we at TalkingPoints have believed for a long time: relationships are the foundation everything else gets built on. That’s the whole logic behind two-way, responsive communication between schools and families. What stood out at the convening wasn’t a new discovery so much as researchers working independently, converging on, and lifting up the same growing body of evidence.
Families and students are navigating a new set of concerns
Focusing heavily on logistics to combat chronic absenteeism assumes that students are missing school today for the same reasons they missed it before the pandemic, just more often. Discussions at the convening challenged this notion. While transportation challenges of course still exist, other absence reasons have emerged as prominent. For example, many families are more cautious about sending a mildly sick student to school. Students say they feel less connected to the adults around them, and some are not aware or not convinced that daily attendance matters. Mental health struggles are an ongoing barrier for a meaningful number of students, as well. Therefore, trust, awareness, and capacity are all playing bigger roles than they used to in solving attendance problems.
This raises important questions for districts: What are the root causes for their current attendance challenges? Are their current strategies built around old drivers of absenteeism or do they reflect the current reality? Understanding root causes can help districts choose strategies that are tailored to the specific concerns their students and families are navigating.
There’s no silver bullet and intentional implementation matters
If you ask a room full of attendance researchers what works, you are unlikely to get one answer. However, the researchers, leaders, and practitioners at the convening agreed that better results are found at districts and schools that have attendance teams, usable data, and multiple supports and strategies working together at the same time. In addition, implementation quality is just as important as the strategies themselves. Intentionality and best practices drive the success of any attendance intervention. This is part of why the relationship reframe matters.
A logistics problem can sometimes be simple to solve. For example, if a student can’t get to school because the bus doesn’t run their route, the route can often be fixed. In contrast, a relationship problem is not as straightforward, but rather it takes sustained, intentional, combined effort and solid implementation of a variety of strategies (e.g., mental health supports, two-way communication, and flexible meeting times and settings).
Geography matters
Geography matters more than existing attendance strategies account for, and rural and urban districts may need different approaches. Rural students, on average, miss more school than students in cities. But the academic penalty for missing school appears to be larger in cities than in rural communities. Researchers are still exploring why, but they pointed to protective factors that may exist more often in tight-knit rural communities, like more adults keeping track of the same kids, that could be softening the impact even when absences are higher.
That’s a useful reminder that a rural district and an urban district dealing with “the same” attendance number may still be dealing with different drivers, shaped by different health, transportation, and community factors. A strategy built around one context may not work in another.
Different student groups need different strategies too
Similarly, a few other populations came up as needing more deliberate attention and in some cases, different interventions. For example, kindergarten has among the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any grade, and preschool participation appears connected to stronger attendance well beyond that first year. Immigrant and multilingual families were another area of focus. Immigration enforcement activity is linked to reduced attendance, and language-access family engagement and community schools were named as promising responses. Finally, many questions persist about what actually works for improving high schoolers’ attendance. Some research has pointed to the effectiveness and promise of leaning harder into academic relevance, respect, and career pathways for older students, many of whom are juggling jobs and family responsibilities most younger students aren’t. Other research suggests that the same climate and relationship levers driving gains elsewhere still apply here, too. There is still a lot more to learn.
Patterns are likely more useful than labels
Treating attendance as a trajectory instead of a simple chronic or not-chronic label might be better for results. For example, a student who is chronically absent, but improving looks very different from one who is chronically absent and getting worse, even though both often get flagged the exact same way. Understanding trajectories, where students have come from, where they are, and where they are going should be taken into account in any attendance strategy that’s implemented. This goes back to the power of relationships.
Family engagement is key
Family engagement has been linked to better attendance for a couple of decades¹, and how schools communicate with parents matters. Short, accessible text messages about a student’s absences are linked to lower chronic absenteeism². Proactive, positive communication is linked to better attendance. TalkingPoints is built on this same body of research. It’s why we built an attendance platform around two-way, multilingual family communication in the first place, on the belief that strong parent-school partnerships are the most effective lever for improving attendance. And in fact, our research consistently shows that using TalkingPoints is associated with increased attendance rates and reduced absenteeism³.
Hearing researchers from across the country agree on the importance of relationships, and back it with real evidence was a good confirmation that the field is heading in a direction we’ve believed in for a long time.
If chronic absenteeism really is more of a relationship problem than a logistics problem, the districts making progress won’t be the ones with the cleverest attendance letter. They’ll be the ones that treated family-school partnerships and trust as infrastructure, and built for it on purpose.
More for attendance awareness month
- Go deeper on what’s driving attendance research right now, and what it means for your school or district. Register now for our Sept. 17 webinar, hosted by District Administration.
- Explore the Attendance Works Attendance Awareness Month campaign, sponsored by TalkingPoints.
- Join Attendance Works, the Institute for Educational Leadership, TalkingPoints, and other campaign partners for the third webinar in the 2026 Attendance Awareness Campaign series, with the theme: 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.
¹Sheldon & Epstein, 2004; Sheldon, 2007. ²Robinson et al., 2018; Rogers & Feller, 2018; Smythe-Leistico, 2018. ³Park et al., 2022; Tan et al., 2024.
