Last school year, nearly a quarter of public school students missed at least 18 days of school. That’s down from the peak of 28.5% of students missing at least 18 days in 2021–22, but it’s still more than 50% above prepandemic levels.
Chronically absent students are more likely to struggle academically, drop out of school and become involved with the justice system. Absenteeism also has long-term economic impacts on students, their families, and taxpayers.
The root causes of school absences fall into four categories: barriers such as chronic illness, aversion due to an unwelcoming school climate, disengagement due to a lack of engaging instruction and misconceptions such as the belief that missing school doesn’t affect learning.
Many schools use potentially ineffective strategies to address chronic absenteeism, such as attendance rewards or punitive measures, including truancy policies that refer parents and students to court after a certain number of absences. However, these strategies don’t address many of the complex and intertwined factors keeping students out of class: transportation challenges, caregiving responsibilities, housing instability, mental health crises and difficulties with navigating complex systems for basic services. When schools work with families to overcome these barriers, it brings multiple people in the system — the student, the family, and school staff — together to work toward a common goal.
[Related: Joy, partnership and play create belonging and increase attendance]
Given these realities, schools must support and collaborate with families to address chronic absenteeism and evaluate these strategies to ensure they work as intended.
Compass Care, an innovative family-centered program piloted by the Seneca Family of Agencies in partnership with Valor Collegiate Academies, demonstrates what a collaborative family approach to absenteeism can look like and its impact on families. Instead of treating absenteeism as misbehavior, this program recognizes and treats it as a symptom of underlying issues. Compass Care staff provide targeted support through 10-week cycles, serving 10-15 families at a time. Compass Care staff meet regularly with students and caregivers to set and help them achieve goals in key areas, such as attendance, grades, homework completion, behavior and mental health.
Courtesy of Jonathan Nakamoto
Jonathan Nakamoto
At Valor schools, the Compass Care staff have provided a variety of supports tailored to family needs, including accompanying caregivers to court appointments, assisting with benefit applications, connecting families to mental health services and helping families navigate school systems.
What anchors Compass Care’s approach is its focus on strengths-based programming. For example, its Tree of Life activity is a “strengths-based engagement tool that structures a conversation about the family’s values, hopes, strengths and life stories.” Another activity, “the Collaborative Helping Map,” focuses on “leveraging the family’s strengths and resources to address barriers and challenges and achieve their goals,” thereby making attendance and success possible and sustainable.
Language also makes a difference. WestEd’s evaluation of the program found that when Compass Care used deficit-based language when telling families that students were referred for chronic absenteeism, families were less receptive than when staff reframed the referral using strengths-based language as an opportunity for greater support more broadly.
To gather student perspectives about the impact of the program, WestEd conducted focus groups with students who shared that Compass Care improved their attendance, helped them feel less anxious about school, taught them how to advocate for themselves and improved their grades.
Courtesy of Ashley Boal
Ashley Boal
These results are promising, but we need more evidence. To determine where, how and for whom family-centered attendance programs work, and at what cost, states must invest in rigorous multisite evaluations of these programs to identify, replicate and scale what works. To address this need, WestEd is currently conducting a rigorous evaluation to determine whether outcomes differ between program participants and a matched comparison group of non-participating students.
Compass Care’s model is based on leveraging staff who can build trust with diverse communities, understand and coordinate community resources and maintain relationships during crises. Through these trusting relationships, Compass Care staff help identify assets and barriers to attendance, facilitate goal setting and support progress toward goals over the course of two to three months. This relational and strengths-based approach can be used by youth-serving organizations when working with students who are chronically absent or at risk of chronic absenteeism. Youth-serving organizations may play a particularly important role in addressing chronic absenteeism, given the limited funding and capacity schools and districts have to address the issue.
Implementing family-centered attendance programs takes time and is harder than doling out rewards to students for showing up to class.
But the real question isn’t whether family-centered support is difficult. The question is whether it’s worth doing difficult work to address barriers that keep kids and their families from thriving.
The investment is significant for a program like Compass Care and includes a dedicated staff member placed at the participating schools, but research from California shows that each chronically absent student costs the state $5,630. Similar costs are likely to exist across the country. With numbers like these, even small gains in reducing chronic absenteeism make supporting families a smart financial choice.
Families are the backbone of student success. When they have real support, students are more likely to show up, engage in learning and succeed in school and beyond.
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Jonathan Nakamoto, Ph.D., is a senior research associate at WestEd, where he leads studies evaluating the impact of educational interventions.
Ashley Boal, Ph.D., is a senior research associate at WestEd, where she leads studies to better understand programs and initiatives that support whole child well-being.
