September is Attendance Awareness Month. What will you do to celebrate?

September. School is back in session and people are getting back into their routines. But a new school year also offers a chance to develop some new routines. Since September is also Attendance Awareness Month, we at CSLX started thinking about what new routines community school teams might develop to support attendance and, more importantly, belongingness. 

There are a few things that community school people know about attendance. First of all, if you’re not centering your efforts to improve attendance on belongingness, then you’re not really working on improving attendance. What do we mean by “belongingness?” Stanford researcher Geoffrey Cohen (2022) proposes the following definition: “Belonging is the feeling that we’re part of a larger group that values, respects, and cares for us—and to which we feel we have something to contribute.” In other words, if you aren’t doing work to create a school culture centered on valuing, respecting, caring for and supporting students, then you aren’t going to be able to make much progress on attendance. Want to know more? This blog by our Director of Coaching and Client Engagement, Ali Metzler, shares how taking a community school approach to growing belonging and strengthening engagement can improve attendance. 

Second, improving attendance is also a function of collecting, analyzing and using data in strategic and expansive ways. Numbers only tell part of the story. In order to really understand what’s behind the numbers, you have to ask questions of the data and of people. What do students have to say about attendance? What are the barriers families cite? What are different interest holders saying about improving attendance? Only when we look at the quantitative and the qualitative data – the numbers and the stories – will we be able to really understand what drives and what hinders attendance, and develop successful strategies to create a culture of belongingness. Dr. James Bridgeforth walks through ways to develop a curiosity mindset around data here. 

Last, improving attendance is about solutions that have longevity, not short-term fixes. Focus on strategies that are sustainable and can grow over time, and that yield lasting changes that become part of your school culture. 

So, ready to celebrate Attendance Awareness Month? Start by listening to students and families, and setting aside assumptions. Invest in building trust and relationships so that you get a complete picture of why students are coming to school – and why not. Take an attitude of curiosity. And reframe improving attendance from a “them” activity to an “all of us” activity.