2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 273
versity of Utah, for example, found that homeless students were
2.5 times more likely to be chronically absent. Among these homeless
students, some living conditions (like living in a shelter) were
associated with even higher absenteeism than others (such as living
with another family) (Spradlin 2012).
• Aversion. Sometimes poor attendance occurs when students avoid
going to school in response to, for example, bullying, an unhealthy
school climate, punitive unfair disciplinary practices, or ineffective
instruction. Analyzing chronic absence data by classroom can help
to reveal if the problem is schoolwide or concentrated in particular
classrooms. In some cases, the aversion isn’t just on the part of a
student. Poor attendance could reflect the fact that parents had a
negative experience with school and they have not been assured
that their child’s experience will be different.
What keeps a particular student or group of students from getting to
school or preschool will vary significantly by student, school, and community.
But keeping these three categories in mind can help identify the
biggest challenges for the largest numbers of students so appropriate
programmatic interventions can be put in place.
A key role that community or neighborhood initiatives can play is
helping schools and preschools to gather and analyze data so they have a
deeper understanding of local attendance barriers. The size and scale of
the chronic absenteeism problem can offer clues about the nature of the
attendance challenges. Students and families with the most severe levels
of absence often face multiple barriers to getting to class. If only a small
number of students are chronically absent, then issues are more likely to
be individual in nature. When chronic absence affects large numbers of
students in a particular school or neighborhood, it is often an indication
of more systemic challenges. Combining the data from schools with data
from other sectors, such as health, housing, and transportation, can shed
additional light on the root causes of the problem. Attendance Works
(2010b) has developed guidance for drawing on a combination of qualitative
and quantitative sources of information that can identify the factors
that contribute to chronic absence in schools.
Students and their families are especially critical sources of information
about barriers. Communities can solicit their insights through a variety of
techniques ranging from focus groups and surveys to looking for patterns
in data collected from families by case managers. The Baltimore Education