2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 281
school, district, grade, and neighborhood and, if appropriate, by
school feeder patterns.
2. Ensure attendance data are included in longitudinal data systems
that promote sharing and tracking of outcomes across agencies.
3. Triangulate chronic absence data with data on health, social, economic,
and other community conditions that could shed light on
key attendance barriers facing students overall as well as those in
certain neighborhoods or particular ethnic, linguistic, or economically
vulnerable populations.
4. Educate local stakeholders about how they can share data on
attendance while respecting concerns about confidentiality.
Explain how confidentiality does not need to be a barrier, especially
for looking at data at a systems level—though confidentiality
should be ensured when an individual intervention is
needed.
5. Convene key stakeholders to help interpret the data and identify
the resources that can be leveraged to overcome barriers to
attendance.
6. Encourage the use of chronic absence as a common measure to
be addressed and monitored across multiple local initiatives, from
Promise Neighborhoods to local grade-level reading campaigns.
7. Include chronic absence in the evaluations of local programs and
publicize the results in order to expand knowledge of what interventions
help to improve attendance and for which populations of
students.
Conclusion
Chronic absence is not created or solved by schools alone. This essay has
suggested practical ways for schools, districts, communities, and neighborhood
initiatives to tackle this issue. Whatever the level, the strategies
begin with understanding the size and nature of the problem through
education and other contextual data at various levels: the individual student,
the school, the neighborhood, and districtwide. By pairing the analysis
with proven interventions, communities can create the conditions that
will ensure a next generation of children has an equal opportunity to
learn and succeed.