During this webinar, Hedy Chang of Attendance Works moderated a conversation with local leaders, representing five rural areas in Maine, Mississippi, and Oregon, as they shared how they have worked to build strong, trusting relationships with students and their families, helping to increase regular attendance before COVID-19 and strengthening engagement and support efforts during the pandemic.

Before the presentations, Miriam Shark, a senior consultant for the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (CGLR), shared rural sociologist Mil Duncan’s framework, which classifies rural communities as amenity rich, declining resource-dependent, chronically poor or amenity/decline. She explained that, given CGLR’s focus on community solutions, understanding the context of rural settings was critical to supporting children’s early school success.

Hedy Chang set the context for the conversation, explaining how chronic absence affects early school success. She shared that strong, trusting relationships with children and families help to increase attendance and described the key ingredients of a systemic approach to reducing chronic absenteeism.

Susan Lieberman of Count ME In!, Maine’s statewide attendance campaign, explained how she has been adapting attendance tools to work in the context of Maine communities. She explained how local leaders have established schoolwide teams focused on attendance strategies, analyzed data to identify areas of concerns and tailor responses, taken steps to build stronger and more positive relationships with families, and engages community partners to help families overcome barriers to attendance.

Angela Madigan , the principal of Waterboro Elementary School in southern Maine, offered an example of what those statewide efforts look like on the ground. Her school established a process for strengthening relationships between teachers and families, providing scripts with conversation starters for teachers so they can check in on students who have been absent and share positive news. The school also created attendance teams to identify students at risk of chronic absence and reached out to the families to address any barriers to attendance. As a result, the school has seen its chronic absenteeism rates fall from 9% in 2015 to 3.1% in 2019.

Ramona Halcomb of the Oregon Department of Education described how the Tribal Attendance Promising Practices (TAPP) program has helped the state’s tribal communities reduce chronic absence rates despite statewide increases. After 2014 data analysis revealed chronic absenteeism as a major issue in tribal communities, the state launched TAPP and empowered tribal communities to co-construct local efforts. Strategies that build trust with the community to counter the historic discrimination and oppression of education systems in tribal communities are key to those efforts. Schools used TAPP funding to ensure tribal languages are reflected in school signage, to host family-friendly events, to incorporate tribal history into professional development and to launch a marketing campaign that celebrates the educational success of tribal residents.

Erin Helgren of Children’s Institute provided an overview of the work underway in southern Oregon’s Yoncalla Valley. After conducting a community needs assessment in 2012, local leaders sought input from families on how best to strengthen connections with the schools and began organizing free, fun activities for families to do with their children such as community baby showers, play groups, family yoga classes and events at the local library. They also engaged local service providers that already had strong relationships with families. These efforts have helped increase community trust in the schools and contributed to incremental gains in student attendance.

Allison Crain of the Mississippi Department of Education shared the efforts taken in Oxford/Lafayette County, Mississippi, to increase student attendance. After data analysis revealed that chronic absenteeism is an issue in the community, education leaders launched an awareness campaign and shifted from a focus on truancy and punishment to one of engagement and prevention. They host Breakfast at the Bus Stop in areas with high absence rates to strengthen relationships with students and their families. They organize Prevention Picnics with families who were habitually absent to discuss and address the barriers they were facing. As a result of this shift in mindset in Oxford and communities across the state, chronic absenteeism in Mississippi has fallen from 17% to 13% last year.