Schools’ progress in fighting chronic absenteeism has slowed over the past few years, remaining stubbornly higher than pre-pandemic absence rates.
But a new analysis shows that progress has been steady for a group of school districts around the country that implemented a low-lift, low-cost change in how and when they communicate with parents about their children’s missed days.
The intervention: early, frequent, and positive interactions with families of kids at risk of becoming chronically absent—typically missing 10% of school days. Those connections, made in the first 60 days of the school year, help families and schools work together to establish early in the year that being at school is important and to address barriers to getting students to class consistently.
“There’s not ever going to be one single solution to chronic absenteeism, but what feels clear to me is that we’re seeing really predictable patterns,” said Kara Stern, the director of education for SchoolStatus, the K-12 communications company that conducted the analysis and issued the report.
“We’re seeing that we can tell by a certain point in the school year—early in the school year—who’s going to be chronically absent and that if parents get a personal outreach in the first month of the school year, that they stay more engaged for the entire year, and that cuts down on absences.”
The schools involved in the study (146 districts in eight states enrolling more than 1 million students) had a chronic absenteeism rate for the first half of this school year that was about 3 percentage points better than the most recent national average.
Through the first 90 days of the past three school years—from 2023-24 to the current academic year—chronic absenteeism has dropped from 22.4% to about 19% across participating districts. That’s a 3.46-percentage-point improvement, representing 27,000 fewer chronically absent students, the report says.
(SchoolStatus says these schools aren’t a nationally representative sample; they’re schools that use the company’s attendance-management software. But their absence rates in the SchoolStatus system are higher than they are in state reports, according to the report, because partial-day absences were counted as full-day absences.)
For context, data from 39 states and the District of Columbia collected and analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute show that, overall, chronic absenteeism nationally peaked at 29% in 2021-22 (for the entire school year, not just the first 90 days) and has gradually decreased since then, to 26% in 2022-23 and about 23% in the 2024-25 school year, with progress slowing particularly in the last two years.
The increases in attendance were consistent across grades, with the biggest gains in pre-K and kindergarten. Students from low-income families improved their attendance rates in the past two school years nearly twice as fast as their peers from higher-income families, the report says.
Students from low-income families missed 0.7 fewer school days on average through the first 90 days of the 2025-26 school year compared with the same time period in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the report.
Before the three-year study period began, students from low-income families missed about 1.45 more days than their peers in the first 90 days. Now, they miss about one more day than their peers, the report says.
“That, for me, has been the most powerful piece of this data,” Stern said. “The students who were missing the most school—the students who were at highest risk—are showing the strongest gains.”
The results add to a growing body of evidence that supports the idea that the timing of when schools reach out to families about students’ absences matters, along with what they say when they do.
A separate report by SchoolStatus in November found that families were most likely to engage with and respond to messages about absences when the school sent them around 8 a.m. and between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays. During those windows, parents who responded did so within 11 minutes on average, that report said; parents responded 73% of the time.
The morning window is when parents are preparing their children for school and getting ready for the day, and are more likely to be on their phones. In the afternoon, parents might be picking up their children from school, waiting for the school bus to drop kids off, or getting ready to head home from work, it said.
Messages with specific and action-oriented language are more engaging, Stern said. For example, a message noting that a child had missed four days this month was better received than one that said, “We’ve noticed some absences.”
Additionally, direct offers of help—like, “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns”—outperformed those with lengthy explanations of the district’s attendance policy, the November report said.
Early communication planted a seed for responsiveness later on
The March SchoolStatus report found that families were more responsive to schools’ communications throughout the entire year when their first interaction happened early in the school year—before the start of school or within the first few weeks of classes.
The communications—whether emails, text messages, or other forms of outreach—should be welcoming and personalized, and don’t have to have anything to do with a child’s attendance, the report says. Establishing connections between parents and the classroom early can help prevent longer-term problems and make families more receptive to conversations later in the school year, according to the report.
“Families are receiving information in their home languages from the very beginning of the year about why it’s so important to attend school, so that first interaction is a positive one instead of a punitive one,” Stern said. “They’re illustrating to them that it matters to your child’s success.”
In the 2025-26 school year, about 200,000 students in the 146 participating districts were flagged as at risk for becoming chronically absent 60 days into the school year, based on attendance trends through the first few weeks of classes.
Those students’ families were notified, and school leaders reached out to answer questions, problem-solve, and remind them of the importance of their children attending class every day.
Flagging students who were at risk by Thanksgiving “gives districts the rest of the first semester to act instead of playing catch-up midway through the year,” the report says.
“If you let it get to April or May before you’re doing something about their absences, you’re in an entrenched situation that you’re really not going to be able to turn around,” Stern added. “In November, there’s a whole lot of opportunity.”
