Attendance tracking program helps combat chronic absenteeism

ONTARIO — For Chris Miller, the principal of Ontario Middle School, attendance has been one of his job’s biggest duties — and challenges — for the better part of 11 years. 

One of the biggest challenges Miller faced were attendance tracking programs that didn’t offer an easy way to see when students were reaching concerning amounts of absences.

Instead, that data was being tracked manually. At times, children fell through the cracks. When they reached a benchmark where parents needed notification, it could take a couple weeks to get a letter to them. That meant absences had an opportunity to snowball further.

“I found the process that exists for attendance to be extremely time-consuming and not a lot of return for your time,” Miller said. 

At the end of the day, that process doesn’t work to help students and families fix attendance issues, Miller said. 

Instead, Miller felt communication needed to be earlier, easier and much more constant in order to meaningfully address attendance challenges before students reach the point where they are considered chronically absent. 

Students cross that threshold when they miss 10% of the school year — the equivalent of 13 days. 

So, Miller decided to do something to make the process of tracking student attendance data and communicating with families easier.

A new software

In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Miller started work with an IT specialist to build a spreadsheet where student attendance indicators could be tracked. It went from a spreadsheet, to a software platform, and that’s when Miller “realized [he] had something kind of cool.” 

The software Miller created evolved into a program called AttendanceK12.

When House Bill 410 passed in 2016, it redefined habitual truancy, excessive absence and chronic absenteeism. It also required districts to amend and adopt new policies for communicating with students missing too much school.

AttendanceK12 offers schools the ability to easily see which students have reached which thresholds under that legislation. 

It also offers customizable abilities, so schools can set their own parameters and reach out to parents earlier. 

The program makes it easy to get in touch with parents, too. Secretaries can automatically send out a letter via email to parents when their children have missed a certain number of hours, which districts have the ability to set for their own needs. 

Miller said Ontario began using that program in 2021, right after COVID. In the 2021-2022 school year, Ontario’s chronic absenteeism rate stood at 6.1%. That was over 20 points below the state’s rate for the same year. 

Its rate is up for 2022-2023, at just over 10%, but remains below the state’s rate by more than 15%.

The program was also piloted in Shelby City Schools and Madison Local Schools. Both districts saw drops in their chronic absenteeism rates after its implementation, Miller said.

Daily use

According to Tyanne Brophy, the district’s attendance counselor, Ashland City Schools brought the tool onboard in the 2022-2023 school year.  

Brophy, along with multiple secretaries in the district, attribute the addition of AttendanceK12 to helping fuel a nearly 14-point drop in their school district’s chronic absenteeism rate between the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. 

Mary Houser, the student services secretary at Edison Elementary School, has worked with student attendance since 2004.

To be compliant with HB 410, Houser said, secretaries like her needed the ability to track when students hit a certain threshold of days missed. But the attendance program the district was using couldn’t do that.

That tracking had to happen manually, which Houser said put a burden on secretaries. The district started looking into other options when it found AttendanceK12. 

“That has been a godsend,” Houser said. “[It has the ability to] throw those thresholds in and we get notified as secretaries. We have the ability then to send out a letter or email correspondence, and at those points, it gives parents a heads up.” 

Heather Green, a secretary at Ashland High School, agreed with Houser. 

She said AttendanceK12 offers a better idea of where students are at. That means the district can communicate better with families, rather than dedicating time and resources to simply tracking attendance information.

‘A people business’

This year, Miller’s tool has expanded its reach by bringing on a small marketing team. Now, 45 districts across the state use AttendanceK12 to track their attendance and make sure they’re complying with state requirements. 

It costs a district a $2.70 per-student rate to purchase AttendanceK12. Miller added the technology is built-to-scale, so it could be used in all 765 school districts across the state. 

That’s his goal: to help as many schools as possible get kids back in school on a daily basis.

Still, in Miller’s estimation, software is only part of the solution to chronic absenteeism. It only works as well as the people using it. 

By making it easier to track absences and comply with state law, the technology frees up more time for secretaries, attendance counselors and administrators to communicate with parents sooner.

Ideally, with the software on board, families are reached before students accrue a critical mass of absences. 

“It frees the time up within the district to reallocate [and] to maybe remove the obstacles that exist for families, to have those conversations and just constantly communicate,” Miller said. 

“I think those are important pieces. We weren’t communicating consistently with people about where they were, so they never knew they had a problem. That’s on us.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part two of a three-part Solutions Journalism series, “Learning Lost,” focused on a nearly 14-point drop in Ashland City Schools’ chronic absenteeism rate between the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. Part one ran on March 18. Part three will run on March 20 and focuses on the people making a difference at Ashland City Schools.