Raley managed to reduce her chronic absence percentage to half 25 percent in the last 2024-25 years. This is still high. One in four students missed more than 18 days at school a year. But it is better.
It began with the identification of 150 children who were just above the threshold for chronic absences, those who missed between 18 and 35 days, hoping that these children would be easier to lure at school than those who were more depicted. Riley and a group of administrators and orientation advisers took 10 to 15 students and showed their families how much school they missed and how low their grades were. His team asked, “What do you need to make your child coming to school?”
The two most common answers: transport and food.
Many students lived only at a mile, too close to school to qualify for a bus service. Still, the walk was deterrsing many, especially if it was raining or snowing. The yellow buses often passed through the homes of these children as they transported children who lived further, and Raley convinced the area to add stops for these chronic absent children.
Ninety percent of his students come from families who are poor enough to qualify for the federal program for free or reduced prices and 80 percent are Spanish. Although many children were fed breakfast and lunch at school, their families admitted that their children would get so hungry over the weekend that they did not want to wake up and come to school on Monday. Rayly partnered with a food closet and sends bags with home and pasta with students on Friday.
Individual attention also helped. At the beginning of each school day, Reilly and his team register with their appointed students. Children who show up receive five green dollars to spend on snacks and awards. Administrators call the homes of those who have not come to school. “If they didn’t answer the phone, we would have made a home visit,” Rayli said.
The most dramatic repair was planning. Ralely was scrambling individual schedules for students and appointed four teachers for every 104 students. The children are now moving in pods of 26, who take all their classes together, spinning through the same four teachers throughout the day. The classrooms are exactly one close to the other, creating a smaller community in the school.
“It’s all about building relationships,” Raley said. When students expect to see their classmates and teachers, he said that they were more motivated to come to school.
Researchers say promoting relationships is effective. Hedi Chang, CEO of WORKS, a non -profit organization that advises schools on how to increase the percentage of attendance, said it was still a battle to persuade the school managers (and the school council members).
Raylie said that his school is now publishing the lowest percentages of chronic absences of students and teachers in Providence. And he said that his school was the highest performance of high school in the city and among the highest in the whole country in reading.
New York: Grasp the butterflies
A high school cluster in New York takes a more balanced approach, led by new visions, a consulting organization that supports 71 city high schools.
Following some experiments, New Visions employees saw a strong improvement in attendance in a subgroup of students who were at the top of the missing 10 percent of school days but had not yet passed the chronic absentee threshold. These are students who can miss a day or two every week or every other week, but were relatively engaged in school. Jonathan Green, a new coach to improve the Visions School, who leads this effort, calls them “butterflies.” “They would walk and go out every week,” he said.
Green suggested someone at school meet a week with these butterflies and show them their attendance data, set goals for next week, and explain how their attendance leads to better grades. The intervention took two to five minutes. “There were noticeable changes to attendance,” Green said.
The new visions have built a website where school administrators can print documents on two pages for each student, so that the data, including the monthly visit and delay, appear in an easy -to -wash format. The quick meetings took place for eight to 10 weeks during the last semester ranking period. “Then there is the biggest opportunity to turn these potentially unsuccessful ratings into passing evaluations,” Green said. “We found these sweet spots in the school calendar to make this very high resource, a high -energy intense weekly register. This is not something that anyone can easily scathing in school.”
The staff had to come up with the bell’s graph for every child and cross them between the classes. One managed to keep his entire case from students under the chronic threshold of absences. Not everyone thought it was a good idea: some school administrators wondered why so much effort should enter students who have not yet been chronically absent, not students in bigger problems.
Dramatic results help to answer this question. Among the Bronx schools, who voluntarily participate in the butterfly intervention, chronic absence rates dropped by 15 percentage points of 47 percent in 2021 to 32 percent in 2025, still high. But other Bronx high schools in the new Visions network, who have not tried this butterfly intervention, still have a chronic degree of absences of 46 percent.
Green said this decision would not work for other high school students. Some have problems organizing their learning time, he said, and they need more intensive help from teachers. “Two to five minutes, the check will not help them,” Green said.
Indianapolis: cookies and sauce
The leader of the Indiana Charter School told me that he uses a system of awards and penalties that reduces the chronic percentage of absences among his kindergarten through eighth graders from 64 percent in 2021-22 to 10 percent in 2024-25.
Jordan Habait, Chief Operations Officer of Adelate Schools, said he used federal funds for the school and lunch school program to create a Coffee at a restaurant in the style of a bag madeS “A fun fact: in home cookies and engraved days we saw the lowest squeezing speeds,” he said.
Researchers recommend avoiding punishment because this does not return students to school. However, Habab has strictly adhered to the state legislation, which requires schools to report 10 absences to the State Department of Children’s Services and to submit a report to the District Prosecutor. Hababe told me that his school represents the fifth of the references to the district prosecutor’s office.
The school created an automated warning system after five absences, not to wait for the critical 10-day loss. And Hababe said he had sent the safety and attendance employee to the van to hold “real conversations with families, not to be buried in documents”. Meanwhile, the students who appeared received a steady flow of awards, from cabinets decorations to T -shirts.
Parents’ education was also important. During the mandatory family orientations, the school illustrates how a regular visit matters even for young children. “We have shared what a child can miss during a three-day section in a unit in the Charlotte Network-telling how easily a student can leave with a completely different understanding of the book,” said Hababi. “This helped to shift the prospects and give the question an emergency.”
Kansas City: Candy and Notes
The Kansas City school leaders, Kansas, have shared some tips that worked for them during the Webinar earlier this month hosts attendance. One of the elementary school reduced its chronic absences of 55 percent in 2021 to 38 percent in 2024, appointing all 300 adult students in the building, encouraging them to build an “authentic” connection. The teachers received a list of ideas, but they were free to do what looked natural. A teacher left candy and notes on the desks of their students. Previsionals, proudly set her note, who said she was a “genius” at the front door of her house. “The smiles that the children have on their faces are incredible,” says Zaneta Bols, director of Silver City Primary School.
When students miss school, Bols said that teachers try to take an “not accused approach” so that families are more likely to reveal what is happening. This helps the school to direct them to other community agencies for help.
Albukerke: A shining example is regrouped
The Alamos Primary School in Albukerke, New Mexico, was once a brilliant example of a school that persuaded more families to send their children to class. Chronic absences fell to 1 in 4 students in 2018 when Hachinger’s report writes about the schoolS
But Alamosa was not immunized by the jump of absences that was struck by schools across the country. Chronic absences are directed to 64 percent of students during the school year 2021-22, when Covid variants are still circulating. And it remained shockingly high, with 38 percent of students missing more than 10 percent of the school year 2024-25 accurately corresponds to the increase of 50 percent of chronic absences across the country since 2019.
“We were on a roll. Then life happened,” said Daphne Steder, a headmaster of Albukerke public schools at a coordinated school for a school that works to reduce absences.
Stoder said Alamosa and other schools in Albukerke have made some successful changes to how they are dealing with the problem. But the volume of absences remains captivating. “There are so many children who have needs,” Starder said. “We need more staff on board.”
Studder said attendance interventions were “too enchanted” and focused more on the “whole child”. It encourages schools to integrate attendance efforts with other initiatives to strengthen academic achievements and improve students’ behavior. “Students are hungry, they are regulated, they have no sand,” Stoder said, and all these problems contribute to absences. But she also admits that some students have more difficult needs and it is not clear who in the system can handle them.
Her largest advice on schools is to focus on relationships. “The connections are all moving,” Stander said. “One of the main consequences of the pandemic was the isolation. If I have a sense of belonging, I am more likely to come to school.”
