2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 279
reports. Attendance Works offers a free Excel-based district and school
attendance tracking tool to help interested districts calculate which students
are chronically absent and generate charts on levels of chronic
absence, or at least determine what they might want to build into their
existing data dashboards and reports. 2
Capacity building. Building the skills and knowledge of school staff
and community partners to understand the nature of chronic absence
(including how it is different from truancy) and what are best practices to
ensuring daily attendance is essential. Analysis of local data can highlight
schools where chronic absence is a problem and how many children are
affected. Many school personnel don’t know the difference between chronic
absence and truancy or don’t recognize the importance of bolstering our
investments in prevention and early intervention before resorting to more
expensive legal intervention strategies. Consequently, districts and key community
stakeholders need to determine how they can best build capacity for
implementation. Often, this capacity building requires integrating a more
explicit focus on chronic absence into existing professional development.
Positive messaging. Data and staff expertise alone are not enough to
build the community’s understanding of the importance of attending
school regularly. The goal of positive messaging is to help parents and
students realize that daily attendance is key to reaching their dreams of a
successful future in school and in life. It is an intentional shift from using
the threat of fines or going to court to compel attendance to starting with
an emphasis on encouraging families to take advantage of the opportunity
for their children to learn in the classroom. Positive messaging takes
advantage of the possibility of creating change by debunking the myths
that get in the way of students going to school every day and drawing on
the hopes that all families carry for the next generation.
Fortunately, everyone in a community—from the superintendent and
the mayor to afterschool care providers or businesses and faith-based
organizations—can play a role in sending the message. Districts and
communities can produce parent flyers, public service announcements,
and other materials that convey why going to school every day matters.
They can also take advantage of back-to-school time to establish norms
of daily attendance that will lay the foundation for the remainder of the
school year. Together with America’s Promise, the Campaign for Grade
Level Reading, Civic Enterprise, and Points of Light, Attendance Works
is encouraging communities throughout the United States to make September
Attendance Awareness Month. 3