Bringing Students Back: How Community Schools Are Addressing Chronic Absenteeism

This blog is part of the Transforming Schools series, which shares effective practices and foundational research for educators, students, families, and policymakers who are reimagining schools as places where students are safe and can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.

Kids come to school when they feel they belong here.

Hang Nguyen, Principal, Lucille Roybal-Allard Elementary, Huntington Park, CA

In 2022, nearly 13.8 million students in the United States were classified as chronically absent, a number roughly equivalent to the populations of Massachusetts and Indiana combined. Chronically absent students are those who have missed 18 days of school or more. This isn’t a blip; rather, it’s part of a pandemic-related trend: Nationally, the number of chronically absent students jumped from 15% in 2018 to 28% in 2022. And, although schools saw a small decline in absenteeism in 2022–23, preliminary data collected from states as part of the Return to Learn Tracker indicate that more than 26% of students were still chronically absent last year.

This ongoing crisis is garnering bipartisan attention, with both policymakers and educators worried about the long-term impacts. Students who miss school frequently are more likely to fall behind academically, disengage socially, and, ultimately, drop out of school altogether. The equity implications are clear, as rates of chronic absenteeism have increased the most in districts and schools with high proportions of students from low-income families.

In addition to increased illnesses, students miss school for a wide range of reasons, including family and transportation challenges, an unwelcoming school environment, mental health challenges, disengagement and boredom, and lack of access to adequate supports and resources. Addressing these challenges piecemeal won’t bring students back to the classroom. Instead, schools need to adopt a comprehensive, nonpunitive approach to addressing these underlying issues. Our research suggests that community schools are often able to do this particularly well. A recent report from the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) elevates how community schools are positioned to tackle chronic absenteeism, drawing examples from four California schools that significantly reduced their rates postpandemic.

What the Research Says

A strong and growing research base shows the effectiveness of community schools on many key outcomes, including reducing chronic absenteeism and its underlying causes. Community schools’ holistic approach to academic achievement and student well-being has drawn increased federal and state support and funding, enabling widespread implementation of the strategy nationwide (see LPI’s Community Schools Forward page for more information and resources on community schools).

The four community schools highlighted in the LPI report—Buena Vista Horace Mann, Elk Hills Elementary, Helen Keller Elementary, and Lucille Roybal-Allard Elementary—employed preventive, proactive, and interventionist strategies focused on building trusting relationships, addressing behavioral issues with solution-oriented and nonpunitive actions, and continuously improving due to strong data collection and use.

Each school also had a community school coordinator on staff, who served as a bridge between the school, families, and partners, and was critical in reducing chronic absenteeism.

Though the featured schools represent varied geographic settings and offer different programmatic features, they drew on several common approaches that are instructive for any school seeking to reduce chronic absenteeism:

• Improving Family Engagement. Engaging families regularly at community events, greeting them at drop-off and dismissal, and reaching out with positive news are all ways these schools developed stronger, trusting relationships with families. “Trust is built through small actions over time. I think when [families and caregivers] identify the school as a safe, trusting place to send their kids, they’re more willing to come,” said Roybal-Allard Principal Hang Nguyen. These four schools were able to effectively work with families and improve attendance by using frequent communication, including phone calls and texts about unexcused absences, outreach campaigns focused on the importance of consistent attendance, and home visits to students with low attendance rates to connect them and their families with needed resources. 
• Increasing Student Connectedness and Relationship-Building. Seeking to reinvigorate students’ desire to be in school, the sites in this report offered a number of ways to engage students and facilitate friendships. These include advisory groups, mentorship programs, wellness days, and a wide range of extracurricular and enrichment activities that incorporate student interests. At Buena Vista Horace Mann, students in grades 6–8 participate in small advisory groups of 11 students and 1 teacher, four times per week. They spend this time in community circles developing social-emotional skills; forming relationships with peers; and building the muscles for communicating, listening, and discussion. This structured advisory time allows for relationships among students and with staff to develop and deepen.
• Systematically Tracking and Analyzing Data. Developing consistent systems for collecting, tracking, and analyzing attendance data helped school staff examine attendance patterns, identify students nearing or exceeding the chronic absenteeism threshold, and develop targeted supports and intervention strategies. On any given day, the Principal of Helen Keller, Yamiler Varela, can print out the attendance list and “break down case by case why students are missing [school] or what we suspect the issue is.” These data-informed insights enable school staff to have meaningful, solutions-oriented conversations with students and parents.
• Utilizing Tiered Systems of Support. Leveraging differentiated approaches helped all four schools meet individual and family needs and positively impact student attendance. The schools employed strategies such as Elk Hill’s raffle drawing, which is open to all students who miss no more than 1 day a month, and, at Roybal-Allard, planning fun schoolwide activities on typically low-attendance days. More targeted interventions at these sites included home visits and referrals to community resources for students and/or families who need more intensive support.
  
• Leveraging Partnerships. Partnerships with external organizations are critical to community schools’ ability to foster youth well-being and achievement. External organizations that provide housing support, before- and after-school programming, and mental health services are critical for addressing attendance-specific barriers. For example, Buena Vista Horace Mann (a part of the San Francisco Unified School District) partnered with the district, the city, and the county to create the “Stay Over Program” on the school campus to provide overnight shelter to any family in the district. The program helps mitigate the effects of homelessness and instability and improve the chance that a student will show up for school.
• Deploying Community School Coordinators. Given the range of challenges that can contribute to chronic absenteeism, efforts to increase attendance require school staff to identify why students are missing school and support families in overcoming barriers to attendance. This is time-intensive and skilled work. From data analysis to family engagement and partnership management, community school coordinators at each of these schools play a pivotal role—one that is essential to building cohesive systems that effectively address the unique needs of students and families and lead to increased attendance.

Community Schools: A Federally Funded Strategy to Fight Chronic Absenteeism

This May, the Biden-Harris administration hosted the Every Day Counts Summit, which featured bipartisan education leaders successfully tackling chronic absenteeism. The administration called on states, districts, and schools to “create a culture of attendance,” and provided a fact sheet filled with evidence-based solutions, including community schools. It outlined many strategies named in this report and central to community schools, including increasing effective communication with families, conducting home visits to find supportive solutions, making school more relevant and engaging, and meeting the basic needs of students and families. As the positive outcomes of community schools have become more apparent—due in part to the growing research base and the schools’ ability to be nimble and serve students and families effectively throughout the pandemic—the strategy has gained widespread investment at all levels, from districts and states to the federal government, which established the Full-Service Community Schools grant program in 2008. Community schools’ success in addressing chronic absenteeism is likely to continue to draw attention to the strategy. Policymakers and educators throughout the nation can learn from the California community schools featured here, which have made substantial progress in addressing the challenge of chronic absenteeism by prioritizing trusting relationships, addressing root causes of the problem, and developing nonpunitive interventions.