For years, Arvin Union School District had attendance under control: our chronic absenteeism rate hovered around 9%, we knew our families, we knew our kids.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. By 2021, our chronic absenteeism rate rose above 24%. One in four students were missing enough school to put their learning and their future at risk.
Like many districts, we tried incentives, attendance campaigns, raffles, and special events. They helped some students, but they didn’t answer a harder question: what happens when the prizes end?
Here is something I think a lot of us in district leadership know but do not always say out loud. When you are managing attendance at scale, it can be hard to personalize family engagement, so you end up defaulting to mass messaging.
You think you are connecting with families in ways your time allows. But families feel it when the school does not actually know their child and no personal connection has been built.
‘We’re so glad you’re here’
The shift that improved this connection started with a question we asked ourselves honestly: What do students and families actually experience when they walk through our doors?
The answer was uncomfortable. A student arriving late might hear the same message several times, from the front office, a campus supervisor, and finally the classroom teacher. By the time they sat down, they felt like the problem, and their families often felt it too.
So, we made a decision that cost us nothing. We started changing what students heard: transitioning from “you’re late again” to “we’re so glad you’re here.”
That sounds simple, but it takes real work to make it stick. We reinforced it in every leadership meeting. Every person in the building must respond with welcome, not judgment.
But culture alone does not move a chronic absenteeism rate from 24% to 8%. Attendance isn’t just a monitoring problem anymore; it’s an improvement problem. That requires knowing who needs help, and why.
That is why attendance became everyone’s responsibility. Student success staff identified early warning signs, attendance clerks coordinated outreach, family advocates connected with vulnerable families, and nurses and social workers stepped in when health or personal challenges became barriers.
Some of the barriers surprised us. Some families didn’t have alarm clocks, so we provided them. Others faced transportation or custody challenges we weren’t aware of.
We also discovered that many families thought TK students could take “mental health days” like preschoolers. Once we understood that, the fix was a conversation, not a campaign.
We also started using attendance data differently. Calendar reports revealed consistently higher rates of absences on Mondays and Fridays. We built targeted outreach campaigns around those days, calling families directly so showing up feels noticed and appreciated.
Additionally, we expanded independent study for students absent due to illness or family emergencies. Within those parameters, our team quickly identified eligible students and recovered thousands of attendance days that otherwise would’ve been lost.
Attendance is a question of belonging
Two years into this work, something happened that stuck with me. We asked our student advisory committee what we could do to support the kids who struggled most to get to school. One student said: “Just don’t forget about them.”
That student captured something we sometimes lose sight of: attendance is a question of belonging. Students come because their friends are there, a teacher knows their name, and someone is genuinely glad to see them. When we made our schools feel like places worth showing up to, families and students responded.
Today, our attendance rate is about 96%, chronic absenteeism has dropped by more than 50% year over year, and every school in our district has improved. Bear Mountain Elementary cut its chronic rate by 71%, and our middle school dropped from 22.5% to under 12%.
I’m proud of those numbers, but I’m prouder of what they represent: families who picked up the phone when we called, students who walked in late, heard “we’re glad you’re here,” and came back the next day, and a team of people across every role who decided every absence was worth understanding, not just counting.
Chronic absenteeism is solvable. Districts across the country are seeing the same kind of progress. It takes data and people who know what to do with it. But it starts with a decision any district can make right now: make sure every child who walks through your door, whenever they arrive, knows you care and their presence matters.
