2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 277
C. Provide personalized early outreach. Perhaps the most critical strategy
is using the data to trigger early caring outreach to families
and students who are already missing too many days of school to
help the student return to school. Regular review of attendance
data will reveal which children are chronically absent. Once the
students at risk are identified, the outreach is best carried out by
an adult with a strong relationship with the family, but the person
who engages in the outreach can vary.
In New York City, for example, a corps of Success Mentors works
directly with chronically absent students. Each mentor is assigned
to chronically absent students identified by the school’s principal
and attendance team. If the students don’t turn up for school, the
mentor calls them to find out where they are. If a student is struggling
with class work or social dynamics, the mentor is there to
help. Mentors come from a variety of sources including national
service members, social work interns, school faculty, and even
seniors assigned to help incoming freshman.
Regardless of who conducts the outreach, the goal is for a caring
person to connect with a student and his or her family to encourage
good attendance and express concern when absences occur.
Outreach is essential for learning the barriers to attendance for an
individual student and what resources, such as food, health, shelter,
transportation or other resources, would help improve attendance.
D. Monitor attendance data and practice. Each school should have a
team in place that meets regularly to review the school’s attendance
data and coordinates efforts to reduce chronic absence. This
team could be devoted exclusively to attendance or include attendance
as one of other responsibilities and functions. Attendance
Works (2012) has created a school self-assessment to aid the team
engaged in this monitoring to examine current strengths and gaps
so they can determine what needs to occur to ensure these strategies
are fully in place so the desired progress can be achieved.
E. Develop programmatic responses to systemic barriers. As discussed
above, if large numbers of students are affected by chronic absence,
then it is likely that some type of systemic barrier or barriers are
at play. Once the barriers are identified, data can be used to garner
help in addressing the challenges, whether that involves establishing
uniform closets, improved access to health care, walking school
buses, tutoring, mentoring, or other types of activities.