Reilly managed to reduce its chronic absenteeism rate in half to 25 percent in the past 2024-25 years. That is still high. One in four students lost more than 18 days of school a year. But, it’s better.
Hey, identifying 150 children who were almost to the threshold for chronic absenteeism, those who were lost between 18 and 35 days, hoping that thesis children were more active to attract school than those who were more disconnected. Reilly and a group of administrators and guidance counselors each of the 10 to 15 students and showed their families how much school they had lost and how low their qualifications were. His team asked: “What do you need for your child to come to school?”
The two most common answers: transport and food.
Many students lived just one mile away, too close to school to qualify for the bus service. However, the walk deterred many, especially if it was raining or snowing. Yellow buses often passed the houses of these children while carrying children who lived further, and Reilly convinced the district to add stops for chronic thesis absent children.
Ninety percent of their students come from families that are poor enough to qualify for the Federal Free Lunch or Reduced Lunch Program and 80 percent are Hispanics. Although many children were fed with breakfast and lunch at school, their families admitted that their children would be so hungry on the weekend that they did not want to wake up and come to school on Monday. Reilly associated with a food pantry and sent meat bags and home paste with students on Friday.
Individual attention also helped. At the beginning of each school day, Reilly and his team are recorded with their assigned students. The children who appear get five “green dollars” to spend on snacks and awards. The administrators call the houses of those who do not come to school. “If they didn’t do another phone, we would make a home visit,” Reilly said.
The most dramatic review was programming. Reilly discarded individual schedules for students and assigned four teachers to every 104 students. The children now move in pods of 26 who take all their classes together, turning through the same four teachers during the day. The classrooms are close to each other, creating a smaller community within the school.
“It’s about building relationships,” Reilly said. When students expect to see their classmates and teachers, he said, they are more motivated to come to school.
Researchers say that reservoir relationships are effective. Hedy Chang, Executive Director of Assistance Works, a non -profit organization that advises schools on how to boost assistance rates, said it is still a battle to persuade school leaders (and members of the school board) to make school and productive children who.
Reilly said his school now publishes the lowest chronic absenteeism of students and teachers in Providence. And he said that his school is the most performance intermediate school in the city and among the highest throughout the state in reading.
New York City: capturing butterflies
A group of secondary schools in New York City is adopting a more data -based approach, guided by New Visions, a consulting organization that supports 71 secondary schools in the city.
After some experimentation, New Visions staff saw a great improvement in assistance in a subgroup of students who were on the cusp or missing 10 percent of school days, but they had not yet crossed the chronic absenteeism threshold. These are students who can one day or two weeks or every two weeks, but they were relatively committed to school. Jonathan Green, a new Visions school improvement coach who heads this effort, calls the theme “Butterflies.” “They trained and left every week,” he said.
Green suggested that someone at school meet weekly with the thesis butterflies and show them assistance data, establish objectives for next week and explain how their assistance led to better grades. The intervention touches two to five minutes. “There were marked changes in assistance,” Green said.
New Visions built a website where school administrators could take two -page documents for each student so that the data, including monthly assistance and delay, appeared in an easy format to digest. Quick tok Place meetings for the duration of eight to 10 weeks in the final qualification period for the semester. “That’s when there is the greatest opportunity to convert those grades that fail in qualifications,” Green said. “We were finding these sweet points inside the school calendar to make this high-energy and high energy check-in high energy. It is not something that someone can easily climb in a school.”
The staff had to discover the bell schedule for each child and intercept them between classes. A successful one by maintaining his entire student prison under the chronic absenteeism threshold. Not everyone thought it was a good idea: some school administrators questioned why so much effort should go to students who are throwing chronic students instead of students in greater problems.
Dramatic results help answer that question. Among the Bronx schools that were offered as volunteers to participate in the butterfly intervention, chronic absenteeism rates fell 15 percentage points of 47 percent in 2021 to 32 percent in 2025, still high. But other secondary schools in Bronx in the new Visions network that did not attempt this butterfly intervention still had a chronic absenteeism rate or 46 percent.
Green said this solution would work for other high school students. Some have problems organizing their study time, he said, and need more intensive help from teachers. “The records of two to five minutes will not help them,” Green said.
Indianapolis: cookies and sauce
The leader of an Autonomous School in Indiana told me that he used a system of rewards and punishments that reduced the chronic absenteeism rate among his garden of infants to eighth grade of 64 percent in 2021-22 to 10 percent in 2024-25.
Jordan Habayeb, director of Operations of the Schools onwards, said he used federal funds for the breakfast and school lunch program to create a Restaurant -style cafeteria made from time to time. “Curious fact: in the days of homemade cookies and sauce, we saw the lowest evening rates,” he said.
Researchers who recommend avoiding punishment because they do not bring students back to school. But Habayeb said that state law is strictly adhered to the schools denounced 10 absences to the State Children’s Services Department and that they present a report before the County Prosecutor. Habayeb told me that his school represented a fifth of absenteeism references to the county prosecutor.
The school created an automated warning system after five absences instead of waiting for the critical loss of 10 days. And Habayeb said he sent the security and assistance officer in a van to have “real conversations with families instead of being buried in paperwork.” Meanwhile, the student who appeared received a constant flow of rewards, from box decorations to t -shirts.
The education of the parents was also important. Duration mandatory family orientations, the school illustrated how regular assistance is important for young children. “We share what a child could lose the duration of a three -day stretch on a unit on the website” of Charlotte, pressing with the ease with which a student could have an understanding of the book in a very different way, “said Habayb.” This helped change the perspectives and brought urgency to the subject. “
Kansas City: sweets and notes
School leaders in Kansas City, Kansas, shared some tips that have worked for them by turning a web seminar earlier this month organized by assistance works. A primary school reduced its chronic absenteeism of 55 percent in 2021 to 38 percent in 2024 assigning the 300 students to an adult in the building, encouraging them to build an “authentic” relationship. The teachers received a list of ideas, but were free to do what seemed natural. A teacher left sweets and notes on the desks of his assigned students. A presenter proudly hit his note, who said he was a “genius”, on the front next to his house. “The smiles that children have on their faces are incredible,” said Zaneta Boles, director of Silver City Elementary School.
When students lose school, Boles said educators try to adopt a “approach that is not baming” so that families are more likely to disseminate what is happening. That helps school to other community agencies to obtain help.
Albuquerque: A brilliant example goes again
The primary school of Alamosa in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was once a brilliant example of a school that persuaded more families to send their children to class. Chronic absenteeism fell as low as 1 in 4 students in 2018, Whenen The Hecatinger report wrote about school.
But Alamosa does not have an immune leg to the increase in absenteeism that has affected schools throughout the country. Chronic absenteeism increased to 64 percent of the student’s duration in the 2021-22 school year, when Covid variants were still circulating. And it was still surprisingly high, since 38 percent of students were missing more than 10 percent of the 2024-25 school that coincides with the exact year the 50 percent increase in chronic absenteeism throughout the country since 2019.
“We were on a streak. Then life happened,” said Daphne Strader, director of coordinated school health of the public schools of Albuquerque, “who works to reduce absenteeism.
Strader said that Alamosa and other Albuquerque schools have made some successful changes in how they are addressing the problem. But the volume of absenteeism remains an overlap. “There are so many children who have needs,” Starder said. “We need more personnel on board.”
Strader said that assistance interventions had been “too isolated” and are focusing more on the “whole child.” She is encouraging schools to integrate assistance efforts with other initiatives to boost academic performance and improve student behavior. “Students are hungry, they are unregulated, they have no sand,” Strader said, and all these problems are contributing to absenteeism. But it also recognizes that some students have more serious needs, and it is not clear who in the system can address them.
His biggest advice for schools is to focus on relationships. “Relationships drive everything,” Strader said. “One of the main consequences of pandemic was isolation. If I feel a sense of belonging, you are more likely to come to school.”
