As district leaders confront persistently high levels of absenteeism, they’ve put more thought into planning school calendars, strategically scheduling long weekends, staff workdays, holiday breaks, and spirit weeks to minimize dips in attendance throughout the year. And while not a silver bullet, leaders say such efforts can be part of an overall strategy to keep more students in school more of the time.
Here are six tips for planning school calendars with attendance in mind.
1. Consider adding more long weekends
It may seem like an oxymoron to give students more days off in hopes of building stronger attendance habits, but some districts are trying it. The aim is to address a frequent complaint since the COVID pandemic: Parents are far more lax about absenteeism than they used to be, leading more families to skip school for outings like a family reunion or a trip to Disney World.
So some districts have peppered a few extra days off around breaks or in stretches of the calendar with fewer holidays. If everyone has the day off, teachers can keep students on the same page in their lessons. Random, unexcused absences from individual students make that much harder, putting pressure on teachers to supply missing assignments.
The Pasco County, Fla., district took such an approach, adding four-day weekends called “mini breaks” to its calendar in October, February, and April.
“We can encourage our students and families to take their mini-trips or vacations on those long weekends instead of taking off instructional days,” an official said during a school board meeting covered by local news station WSTP. “So we’re going to try and market that to our families as, ‘Here are some mini-breaks throughout the year so that if you want to take some time off, let’s do it then and not miss school.’”
2. Be mindful of holidays—and the days before and after
Consider offering days off on days when you might expect high levels of absences. For example, add Friday as a day off if New Year’s Day falls on a Thursday.
In Palm Beach County, Fla., for example, schools are off the whole week of Thanksgiving.
“When Thanksgiving break is shorter, administrators argued that student attendance falls, teacher attendance, too,” the Palm Beach Post reported. “There is also the argument that a shortened week isn’t often academically productive. Finally, some argued that the boon of a week off at Thanksgiving was a good teacher-recruiting tool.”
And be sure your calendar aligns with the diversity of your enrollment. Districts with changing demographics, such as growing Asian American and Jewish populations, have opted to give students the day off on holidays like Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, Lunar New Year, and Rosh Hashanah.
Leaders say recognizing the holidays helps offset absences from observant students and helps to build a sense of trust and belonging among their families, which is linked to stronger attendance and engagement.
“We can’t honor all holidays because we’d be going to school year-round,” Todd Bauer, the superintendent of the North Penn district in Pennsylvania, told Education Week recently. North Penn added Diwali to its calendar in 2021. “We can’t be all things to all people, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to cultivate a community and culture where everyone feels like they are cared for.”
3. Use staff-development days strategically
Consider shifting staff-development days to times when student engagement and attendance might be low, say the day after Halloween.
North Penn schools managed to avoid additional instructional interruptions by scheduling two of its eight staff-development days on newly recognized holidays.
4. Consider “no testing” days
Some districts set aside days in their calendars when they advise against or prohibit teachers from scheduling tests or major assignments. Those days may be holidays or the weekend after homecoming. The aim is to build calendars around students’ natural engagement patterns and to mitigate the effects of low engagement.
5. Get creative to encourage attendance
Students’ don’t always have a single, identifiable reason for skipping school, researchers say. Instead, many have a scale in their heads that weighs reasons to stay home against what they’d miss by being absent.
School leaders can add activities to the “what they’d miss” side of the scale by strategically scheduling spirit days, assemblies, and creative activities on days when attendance and engagement might otherwise be low. For example, some principals throw a pumpkin off the roof the Monday after Halloween. And many districts plan pajama days near the end of the school year and 100th-day-of-school celebrations in the middle to give students more reasons to show up.
Engaging lessons can also help ease students back into routines after breaks. At one school, teachers used the chocolate students had collected trick-or-treating as a jumping-off point for a long-term, multidisciplinary learning project that incorporated concepts ranging from world politics, economics, and geography to literature, data collection, and botany, as this Education Week opinion piece describes.
“Just after Halloween, they dug into their trick-or-treat bags to collect baseline data on the most common types of chocolate candy bars—the makers and the ingredients,” wrote former teacher Jessica Wood. “Sixth graders were surprised to notice the same manufacturers over and over (Mars, Nestle, Kraft) and that the common ingredient (along with sugar) was cacao. Who were these manufacturers? Where were they getting their ingredients? Students’ questions were many, and we had fully ignited their interest.”
The teachers used stories and artifacts they’d collected on a grant-funded trip to West Africa, where much of the world’s chocolate originates, to teach about cacao farming, candy manufacturing, and West African culture.
6. Design attendance messaging around the calendar
Districts should adapt planning, events, and messaging about attendance for different times in the school year, experts recommend.
Attendance Works, a national organization that promotes attendance strategies, offers planning calendars for school and district attendance teams to plan for messaging about important information like when to stay home during cold and flu season, how to address school anxiety at the beginning of the year, and how to discuss absences during parent-teacher conferences.
The planning calendars account for whole-school strategies, such as planning end-of-year traditions to boost attendance, and targeted interventions for students who need more support, such as coaching about transitions to middle school or high school at the end of the year.
