5 Takeaways from the CGCS Annual Fall Conference
The Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) Annual Fall Conference brought together educators and leaders from urban districts across the nation to discuss pressing challenges and innovative solutions. Like much of the rest of the country, CGCS districts are facing elevated levels of chronic absenteeism. Below are 5 actionable takeaways for attendance, shared by CGCS districts and compiled by our team at EveryDay Labs.
- Forge community partnerships
Many of the challenges families are facing when it comes to attendance cannot be solved by schools alone. Looking forward, schools can take on the role of being a hub for community services. Take, for example, transportation, a common barrier among CGCS districts. In most urban districts, solving transportation challenges requires partnership with the local public transit authority. Or, consider health needs, which have required partnerships with telemedicine service. In other cases, the task of completing home visits sits with non-school agencies, and close partnerships between the district and those agencies are critical for making sure that the families that need support are getting it.
- Review policies through a new lens
During the Chronic Absence Task Force meeting, Newark Public Schools Superintendent, Roger León, detailed the steps his district undertook to review and align policies with their attendance goals. A big revelation for Newark was realizing that their policies were inadvertently encouraging bad attendance. For example, under policy, at 18 absences students could be retained. Many families saw that to mean that up to 17 absences were ok. They’ve since removed that language.
They’ve also made changes such as personally reaching out to students after the first absence instead of waiting until absences accumulate, making preschool mandatory to start good habits early, and removing suspension as a punishment for absences.
One of the most significant shifts was setting their attendance policy to consider a student absent until the next time they are in school and tying co-curricular participation eligibility to attendance. This meant that absent students couldn’t participate, which had a particularly strong impact on Friday attendance where students who were absent would be ineligible for participation until Monday.
- Create school level accountability for attendance
Another shift described by León was adding attendance to the principal leadership framework. This way the district could set high standards and hold leaders accountable for working to meet them. They did this by selecting two students with poor attendance, at random, from each school and reviewing what steps the school took to improve attendance for those students.
- Dig into family needs
Cleveland Metro Superintendent, Warren Morgan, kicked off his time as superintendent with “Listen and Learn” sessions with the community and consistently heard about attendance and engagement challenges. Through partnership with EveryDay Labs, the district was able to start leading facilitated data reviews to find areas of need for systemic supports. And, according to Morgan, the district finds the EveryDay Labs platform “very helpful because at the school level it allows staff to tier out students, see who’s on the cusp of chronic absenteeism, and work to support them.” Identifying individual students is critical for cultivating relationships that allow staff to identify the root causes of absenteeism.
- Tell the story of the work you’re doing
Over in Kentucky, the Communications team at Jefferson County Public Schools launched their own initiative to improve attendance, including calls, home visits, texts with updates on attendance, and telehealth services to help mitigate health barriers to attendance. Not shying away from celebrating the importance of attendance, the team was sure to share their initiatives in newsletter reminders, emblazon attendance information on all school websites, and engage the media through telling stories about specific students and having reporters join home visit ride alongs. If you’re interested in learning more about this work, join an upcoming webinar.
For school leaders skeptical of prioritizing attendance, Superintendents Morgan and León had a clear message: attendance is the path to academic achievement. Both districts have found themselves finally meeting state standards after significant investment in attendance, and both attributed this achievement, in large part, to their attendance improvement efforts and the downstream effects on achievement.
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