Partner Spotlight: Portsmouth Public Schools
Background
Located in southeast Virginia, Portsmouth Public Schools serves approximately 13,000 students, with 24 schools and centers districtwide and around 2,100 staff members.
The district ended the 22-23 school year with a chronic absenteeism rate of 32%. However after partnering with EveryDay Labs to support their attendance improvement efforts, they achieved a 17% chronic absenteeism rate in 23-24!
The Challenge
Dr. Angela Flowers, Director of Student Services, was tasked with leading the charge for improving chronic absenteeism across the district. Twice as many students were chronically absent in the 22-23 school year than had been chronically absent prior to the pandemic (32% vs 16%.) To begin to address the high rates of chronic absenteeism in Portsmouth, Dr. Flowers knew that the team needed better ways to identify who was chronically absent, and a data system that they could easily navigate to inform their strategy. Existing tools didn’t allow the team to quickly pull the information they needed; they’d instead have to pull tediously long reports that still left it unclear whether a student was chronically absent. District staff were bogged down with getting teachers to submit attendance data and helping school-based teams pull the lengthy reports, leaving them with little time to support schools with family outreach like home visits, letters and phone calls home, and attend court visits. Work was inefficient and not as high impact as everyone would have liked.
Improving attendance is complex, and can’t be solved by pulling lengthy reports. Dr. Flowers knew that if attendance was to change across Portsmouth, their systems had to change too. Finding a platform that could give them visibility into attendance rates across different schools and a deeper dive into the students who were struggling with chronic absenteeism was the next step.
The Solution
Implementing the EveryDay Labs platform catapulted the Portsmouth team into more effective attendance work.
“When we started working with the software platform, it just made it easy for the attendance clerks and every school to become familiar with their frequent flyers who were absent and to be able to share that with the attendance task force teams,” shared Dr. Flowers.
With incredible amounts of time now freed from pulling through reports and sifting through data, schools had fast access to individualized reports that made it easy to see the students who needed to participate in attendance recovery and easily track their progress.
The collaborative and transparent features of the EveryDay Labs platform enabled holistic changes to make their team’s hard work more effective. District teams were rearranged around supporting specific attendance tasks like home visits and family meetings across multiple schools, and counselors incorporated attendance goals into their overall annual goals.
The district replaced attendance task force teams with MTSS teams for a more integrative approach to attendance. Schools now lead Tier I work while the district supports Tier II & III initiatives, and with more capacity, schools will soon be taking on more Tier II work. With the EveryDay Platform helping staff quickly identify students in each tier along with chronically absent students from the prior school year, teams have unlocked new strategies for proactive outreach that prevents more students from falling through the cracks.
Having access to the EveryDay Platform has not just streamlined the work for school and district teams, it has also helped inform broader strategic decisions. By gaining quick visibility into days when attendance dips, they’ve shifted their school calendar to move away from half days before vacation. They also updated their short-term suspension program to ensure that students were counted as present in school when suspended, instead of being penalized for an absence.
“It’s amazing how one platform could allow us to make those shifts,” said Dr. Flowers. “I knew I had a partner every step of the way. That is the best customer service that I think anyone in this role could have”
The Results
The Portsmouth team was successful in reducing chronic absenteeism by nearly half from 32% to 17% in a single year.
With data intelligence and collaborative tools serving as the foundation for their new attendance initiatives, the EveryDay Platform “has really changed the way we’re able to do our work,” emphasized Dr. Flowers.
Bringing in different team members and changing systems to improve attendance can feel like a daunting task.
Dr. Flowers loved that with the EveryDay Platform “I can train on how to use this in 10 or 15 minutes. When you have new clerks or new attendance task force team members or MTSS teams, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It’s already there functioning for you.”
Dr. Flowers continued, “It’s an investment, but the return on investment is well worth it. Because if you're going to hire more people to do the work, you're constantly paying every year for that person. But the benefits of this program can eliminate having to hire multiple people to do that work. And you just have to train the people that you have. So if you don't have a large team but really want to have an impact I will say that EveryDay Labs is a wonderful place to start.”