School Understanding Contributing Factors to Absenteeism

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Understanding the Factors Contributing to Chronic Absence in Your School(Revised December 2010)

Once you have been able to collect data on the prevalence of chronic absence for your school (and ideally district-wide), itis important to unpackand understandthe factors that lead children to miss school for extended periods of time.These factors can vary across schools, communities and groups of families. Developing a more informed picture of thestory behind the statistics on prevalence is a critical step in developing effective interventions.

The strategies described below will help you to identify what is occurring in your school and community. The attachedmatrix also offers a framework for using these activities to answer key questions about factors that contribute to chronic

absence, as well as what assets might be engaged to improve school attendance.

1. Examine data on chronic absence.Review and reflect upon your school and district data on chronic absence. Some issues to discuss include:

a. Does the level of chronic absence affect a significant proportion of the student population (10% or more)? Is ithigher or lower than the rest of the school district? (High levels throughout a district suggest the existence of systemic challenges

related to school policy, practice or environmental conditions and/or relevant community-wide social, health or economic issues.)

b. Does the level of chronic absence differ among specific students and their families? By grade level? Ethnicity?Language background? Special education status? English Language Learner status? Neighborhood of residence?

2. Obtain background information on basic school and community conditions.Key sources of information include an interview with the principal, a review of any school or district or stateattendance policies, school data (available on the Internet through the school district, state department of education,

or other Web sites such as GreatSchools.Net), and community data (e.g. census data on family economics, structure,educational levels, language and ethnic background, data on child care supply and demand, police statistics on crime,child welfare data, public and school health data).

3. Contact families when students are absent.When children and youth are absent, especially for an extended period of time, contact their families to show concernabout their childs well-being. Begin to learn about the challenges families face in terms of having their child attendschool regularly. Track information and analyze it for common patterns. If possible, consider conducting a

confidential data match with public agency records to find out how many families are also involved in services such aschild welfare, public assistance, food stamps and the criminal justice system.

4. Conduct school success focus/discussion groups.


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education, as well as general education). Existing parent advisory committees may be helpful resources for parentoutreach. Rather than limiting the discussions to barriers to attendance, it may be more helpful to frame the issues

around academic success in order to look at the overall situation.

Through careful facilitation, a focus group of older youth may also provide invaluable insight into the underlyingcauses of attendance and truancy patterns. Again to be successful, it is critical that the staff or consultants designingand facilitating the process are experienced and can create a trusting environment so that youth feel comfortable andcan be candid.

Focus groups can be used to identify strengths, as well as barriers, to promoting regular school attendance and school

success.

5. Develop parentand studentsurveys.Consider developing a survey to solicit input from an even broader array of parents and students about theirexperiences with the school, including the issue of regular school attendance. Find skilled professionals familiar withsurvey design who can work with teams of parents from different backgrounds to help develop, disseminate andcollect surveys and to interpret the results. If your school serves sizable numbers of families who speak languagesother than English, find resources to help translate the questions culturally as well as linguistically. Student surveys

should also be carefully designed and procedures should be put into place to safeguard confidentiality in order toelicit candid responses.

For more information aboutimproving attendance and

reducing chronic absence go towww. AttendanceWorks.org.

Reprinting of this document ispermitted.


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School Understanding Contributing Factors to Absenteeism

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