When administrators in New York’s Hudson City school district set out on a yearlong journey to better understand why students were missing school and how the district could boost attendance, some thought they had a good grasp on the barriers families faced in making sure their children showed up every day.
But once the work—which focused heavily on family engagement and feedback through surveys and conversations—began, there were several surprises.
Some families in the 1,600-student district south of Albany didn’t send their children to school when it was rainy. In some cultures, administrators learned, it’s believed that if a child’s head gets wet in the rain, they will catch a cold. Some didn’t understand the bus schedule and didn’t know how to ask for help. Others didn’t have transportation, and walked long distances pushing their young children in strollers, sometimes in the freezing cold.
None of these revelations would have come to light without intentional outreach to families in the Hudson community, said Mark Brenneman, the principal of Montgomery C. Smith Elementary School in the district, who helped lead the family engagement efforts. And many problems had a relatively simple solution.
The district worked with the local health department and school nurses to share tips about keeping kids healthy in bad weather. It clarified its bus routes online and with individual families. And the district partnered with other community organizations to provide backup transportation to families who weren’t eligible for bus services, but needed help getting their children to school.
“I think one thing we realized quickly was to be very wary of the unverified assumptions about what’s going on with our families,” Brenneman said. “Because as much as I think we do know, once we started to interview the kids and talk to parents, there were some more than eye-opening moments about the stresses and what was actually going on.”
The result of district leaders’ hard work to address the many different root causes of absences: Chronic absenteeism across the district—defined as students missing at least 10% of school days for any reason—was down 12 percentage points through the start of June compared to the year prior, he said.
Absenteeism affects all students
In July 2024, the Hudson district joined 16 other school districts from across the country in an inaugural cohort that aimed to try a new approach to reducing chronic absenteeism by enlisting the help of students, parents, and community members in crafting an absence-fighting strategy. The cohort was an initiative of the Center for Inclusive Innovation at the nonprofit Digital Promise.
The group started its work at a time when districts across the country have been battling increased absenteeism following the onset of the pandemic.
More than 1 in 4 students nationwide were chronically absent during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and Attendance Works. Those figures represented a marked increase over pre-pandemic levels.
Chronic absences have profound impacts on students who miss classes, hurting their grades, connectedness to their peers and school community, and chances of completing high school. When absences reach high levels, the churn makes it harder for teachers to set classroom norms and teach, and harder for students to learn—even those who do show up every day.
Each district involved in the cohort spent about six months in an “intensive engagement process,” said Kimberly Smith, chief inclusive innovation officer at Digital Promise. The process included workshops with other participating district leaders, community forums, and small group activities with families from various backgrounds to solicit feedback about what might stand in the way of students attending school every day.
The idea is that the people closest to the problem—students and their families—could offer important insights into the unique barriers that keep students in their communities from attending class, and help the community feel a sense of ownership over the issue so it’s not strictly a school district problem.
Engagement, review led to policy changes in Hudson
In Hudson, district leaders solicited feedback largely through a survey with about five different, curated, open-ended questions for each of its three schools based on its absenteeism rates, demographics, and other factors, Brenneman said.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there about attendance, but a lot of the work is granular, boots on the ground, and individualized,” he said. “It’s brick by brick, because there is no holistic silver bullet. If there was, everyone would be using it.”
Through conversations with families and thorough, routine reviews of schools’ absenteeism data, district leaders were also able to identify some areas for policy changes, Brenneman said. For example, the data showed that absences spiked on the afternoons in which there was a morning event, like an elementary choir concert open to families or the public.
Families would take their children out of school to go celebrate after, he said, and then kids would miss half of an instructional day.
Now, district policy says concerts and similar events should be held in the afternoon.
Brenneman’s school piloted the use of “family success plans,” in which parents of chronically absent students met with a school leader to have one-on-one conversations about why their child was absent and how the school could help.
It was set up to be “supportive and inviting,” rather than punitive or a “gotcha” moment, he said. During those meetings, administrators could share more personalized data and information about the family’s child—like one student who was among the top readers in their school in 1st grade but by 3rd grade had fallen behind, largely because they were frequently late to class and missing important instruction.
“We’ve come to recognize that improving attendance, it’s not just enforcing rules, but it’s about creating supportive environments for our students,” Hudson Superintendent Juliette Pennyman said. “What we have done in creating this proactive mindset is created a system where we can now continue to use the tools and the strategies that we have to continue to build on our progress.”
