Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more of school days, is a critical issue that has huge implications for student success. It can lead to lower academic achievement, increased dropout rates, and wider achievement gaps.
Chronic absenteeism is often a symptom of other challenges, such as health issues, family challenges, or disengagement. Students who are chronically absent are often on average facing 5 barriers to attendance. To effectively address these challenges at scale, MTSS can be a powerful tool, helping students get back on track and improving their attendance.
Addressing this problem requires understanding the underlying causes, leveraging data and analytics to inform a smart strategy, and implementing multifaceted approaches to get students back on track.
Understanding the Reasons Behind Absenteeism
To tackle chronic absenteeism, it's crucial to understand why students miss school. Some of the most common barriers include illness, disconnection, family responsibilities, or transportation.
When addressing chronic absenteeism, conducting surveys with students and families to understand the root causes of absenteeism within your student population and leveraging barrier assessments can be a great way to home in on what students need most. Once the barrier to attendance is understood, educators can better implement outreach and interventions to get students back on track.
Leveraging an MTSS Framework for Better Attendance
Having clear and accurate data is an important requirement for an effective MTSS. Access to a dedicated MTSS platform that automatically identifies the amount of students in every tier will help you gain a full understanding of where students are attendance-wise and inform the type of interventions you may need to implement.
By using MTSS, schools can provide students who are chronically absent with the support they need to succeed. Let’s dive into some more specific examples of supports and interventions to improve student attendance, based on where they fall within the framework.
Tier 1: Universal Prevention
Tier 1 Universal Supports are provided to all students, designed to create a thriving school climate and promote positive behaviors and attendance. Having strong strategies in place to support all students is essential to ensure that fewer students fall through the cracks and into a more severe tier. This prevents time- and resource-heavy Tier 3 supports from becoming the primary focus when preventative measures no longer suffice.
Here are some examples:
- Attendance awareness campaigns: Many families believe that students can miss as many days as necessary, as long as they’ve excused the absence. Raising awareness around why every day matters, and communicating the impact of attendance on academic, social, and career success helps everyone feel invested and committed to keeping attendance on track. You can even download this mini-poster and hang it up to help communicate the importance of attendance. Additionally, setting clear attendance expectations and communicating them to students and families will help clarify any mixed messages around expectations.
- EveryDay Labs Attendance Solution: The proven effective attendance intervention tracks attendance data districtwide and sends mail and text nudges on your behalf to families of students who are or at risk of becoming chronically absent. This proactive, preventative solution keeps families informed of their students’ actual attendance and how it compares to other students in their class. Additionally, it connects families to district and community resources to help them overcome barriers to attendance like transportation, wellness, and housing.
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- Positive school climate: Creating a welcoming and inclusive school environment can make students more likely to attend regularly, and adding in attendance recognition programs can help keep students and families motivated and acknowledged for their efforts.
- Early identification: Getting ahead of attendance challenges early is essential to keeping your MTSS pyramid sustainable. A data dashboard like the EveryDay Labs Platform identifies attendance patterns and trends quickly to help you address absenteeism challenges promptly, at the earliest signs of chronic absenteeism.
- Positive Messaging: Emphasize the importance of attendance and celebrate when students are on a roll with strong attendance.
- Incentives: Leverage competitions and use rewards carefully to motivate attendance. Avoid perfect attendance awards, which can accidentally be de-motivating.
- Attendance Teams: Setting up dedicated Attendance Teams with clear goals can help you pull it all off. Here are 5 tips to help you get started.
Tier 2: Early Intervention
As chronic absenteeism worsens to missing 10-19% of school days, educators should offer more targeted interventions, including:
- Personalized early outreach: The EveryDay Labs Platform's evidence-based attendance communications are not only an effective way to get ahead of attendance challenges, but it also plugs into Tier 2 interventions by providing personalized mail and text nudges that encourage both long-term and short-term positive changes.
- Mentoring and counseling: Pairing students with mentors or counselors who provide guidance, support, and a safe space for discussing attendance issues can have a huge impact. For example, pairing high-needs students with a caring mentor through the Success Mentors program in NYC Public Schools had such a profound impact in reducing absenteeism that it was scaled to a national level.
- Family engagement: Working closely with families to understand and address the root cause of absenteeism is essential to getting students back on track. But connecting families to resources can be time-intensive work for already busy educators. EveryDay Labs has a dedicated Family Support Team and Family Support Bot that connects families to district & community resources on your behalf, allowing families to access the tools they need to mitigate and overcome barriers to attendance.
- Individualized attendance plans: To help mitigate and address barriers to attendance and get students back in school, developing highly individualized plans that provide additional academic support, enrichment, and connections to social-emotional resources can also be helpful.
Tier 3: Intensive Intervention
For students with severe or persistent absenteeism, the third tier of MTSS provides intensive support, including:
- Home visits: A practice that is increasingly adopted by districts across the country, home visits help you connect with hard-to-reach families and build positive relationships. Here are 11 tips for a great home visit before you head out to make those critical, in-person connections.
- Wraparound services: Students with severe absenteeism are likely dealing with numerous barriers to attendance and may need extra support from community agencies, social workers, and other services that can provide the holistic support they need to address more complex challenges. An MTSS dashboard can help you connect the dots across these services and your own outreach with the ability to track notes and ongoing interventions.
- Re-entry support: For students who have been absent for an extended period, welcoming them back with intentional support helps ensure a smooth transition back to school and encourages them to continue attending every day.
Monitoring Progress
As interventions and supports are implemented throughout the year, be sure to continuously monitor student progress. Has their attendance improved? Maybe it’s time for a special recognition or a high five. Has attendance worsened? Perhaps ramping up interventions can be useful. Regularly review attendance data to ensure that your interventions are having a positive impact, and reflect and adjust as needed to maximize their effectiveness.
Looking for an MTSS platform to support your efforts? Here are five tips to guide your search.
