5 Tips for Building an Attendance Team
You and your colleagues know that attendance is important. Perhaps you already have an attendance team in place, or maybe you're in the midst of creating one this year to take your work to the next level. Wondering where to get started? Here are 5 tips to help you build or supercharge your existing powerhouse attendance team that will support your efforts to ensure more students have the opportunity to learn every day.
1. Diversify & Assign Clear Roles
While staffing may be a challenge, it’s always wise to have as many different stakeholders as possible on an attendance team. After all, attendance improvement should be a shared responsibility. Ideally, your team would include:
- At least one administrator
- At least one interventionist (counselor, social worker, etc)
- Several teachers (general & special education)
- School resource officer or campus security
- Attendance clerk
- One student representative (include for parts of meeting)
- One parent representative (include for parts of meeting)
Each of these team members should serve as a representative for a larger team. For example, the Vice Principal can be the administrator representative for the principal, school psychologists, and nursing staff, the social worker interventionist represents other counselors, paraprofessionals, and special education teachers, a 1st grade teacher represents K-2 teachers, and a 4th grade teacher represents 3-5 teachers.
Even if your team is small but mighty, having role clarity will be essential to your success. If possible, you should assign a team Chair or Co-Chairs, Recorder, Data Coordinator, and Liaisons. This will keep your team running smoothly and help with clear communication.
2. Set Meeting Logistics
How often will your team meet? What time, day, and location? Agree to these key logistics early on so that you fall into a regular meeting cadence that everyone will be accountable to. A bi-weekly cadence is recommended, with quarterly step back meetings throughout the year. Create your own standard meeting agenda or check out our dedicated attendance data platform EveryDay Pro, which offers numerous resources, including ready-to-go meeting agenda templates.
3. Create Meeting Norms
Setting up mutually agreed upon norms early on, such as work expectations (i.e. what responsibilities are involved while being a part of the team) and values (ex. Transparency, assuming best intent), will allow your team to maximize their time together and respectfully navigate challenges.
You may also want to norm on which data you’ll be tracking. During bi-weekly attendance meetings, you’ll want to watch ADA and chronic absenteeism rates by grade and/or teacher, and students falling within the at-risk, moderate chronic, and severe/extreme chronic absence tiers. Some metrics to focus on during quarterly attendance meetings include attendance rate by student subgroups/cohorts, daily attendance rate for the whole school, and patterns and trends from the prior year.
4. Reflect on current practices
Your quarterly step back meetings are a great time to reflect and consider ways to improve your systems. What are the different members of the team currently doing to help support attendance at your school/district? What are some questions you have about current practices? Where are you currently excelling, and what areas could be improved? Taking time to consider what is working well and what needs additional attention will help your team effectively grow and learn together.
5. Set goals
No one can achieve a goal that hasn’t been set! Don’t miss this exciting part of your attendance work—take the time to envision all of the great things you would like to accomplish, and what key metrics and evidence you’ll be looking for to know you are well on your way.