A Practical Approach to Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance - Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies in play

A Practical Approach to

Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

Part 6 of a 6-part Blog

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies in play

Evaluation is the natural follow-up to all programs and districts must periodically evaluate if their awareness campaigns and interventions are converting into attendance improvement or if there is an adjustment needed to their strategies.

This evaluation should be done at all the district levels; site, subgroup, race, grade, and eventually at an individual student level to identify where the impact is the greatest and to fully understand where additional adjustments are required.

Efficient and effective evaluation is directly linked to the availability of Real-time Data. If the district has equipped their team with an integrated system (like RaaWee K12 TDPS) that automatically mines the data for them without spending their time running complex queries, then evaluating the effectiveness and adjusting the course accordingly becomes extremely quick and easy and the district can make the appropriate corrections and changes necessary for success more rapidly.

A Practical Approach to Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance - Ensuring that Pupils with Attendance Problems are identified and helped early

A Practical Approach to

Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

Part 5 of a 6-part Blog

Ensuring that Pupils with Attendance Problems are identified and helped early

Quite simply, early identification is of the utmost importance - from the earliest grades, early in each school year and early in a newly developing pattern.

This element refers back to Identifying Patterns in Grade Level and Subgroups - Part 3 of this Series - where automation of the interventions plans and documenting tools in a centralized and integrated system brings the required efficiencies and success in the overall process.

Automation ensures the immediate identification of students with and by attendance challenges and builds accountability across different levels to make sure that the students are helped early in the year to help change their behavior and attitude towards attendance.

Join us next week for the final installment of this 6-part series.

A Practical Approach to Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance - Identifying and Addressing Factors contributing to Chronic Absenteeism and Habitual Truancy

A Practical Approach to

Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

Part 4 of a 6-part Blog

Identifying and Addressing Factors contributing to Chronic Absenteeism and Habitual Truancy

Understanding why students are frequently absent is just as important as knowing they are absent. Tracking reasons for the absences and understanding the individualized circumstances of each student is equally important. If we just focused on student absences and provide them a generalized support, it may not change a student’s attitude towards attendance. However, understanding each of their situations individually and connecting them with the support they need along with the follow-ups to ensure interventions are working will help in building a positive attitude towards attendance. Having the tools to Follow-up is important and should not be ignored. Student support officers should close the loop and ensure that the support provided has worked for the student. This can only be effectively managed with minimal time and effort spent by district staff with the help of an integrated collaboration platform like RaaWee K12 TDPS. The factors contributing to absences can easily be linked to the interventions provided to the student in TDPS.

A Practical Approach to Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance - Identifying Patterns in Grade Level and Subgroups

A Practical Approach to

Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

Part 3 of a 6-part Blog  

Identifying Patterns in Grade Level and Subgroups and Responding in accordance:

After implementing approaches for Awareness & Rewards, each district must have a plan of interventions for those students who would be doing absences. Interventions are the second Tier of defense in the battle against chronic absenteeism and truancy. These must be very precise and demand quick execution. The plan of interventions should be based on the district’s local demographics and resources. One size does not fit all – in a similar way, one strategy or interventions plan that may have worked for one school district may not bring the same positive results elsewhere. Therefore, it is important to thoughtfully create an intervention plan based on the district’s demographics and internal resources. Then the district must automate to ensure its successful execution in ONE integrated system. Most districts rely on multiple non-integrated systems when it comes to implementing their attendance tracking and interventions management. Use of Student Information System (SIS) in conjunction with manual Excel and Word-based processes is very common. We believe that this is where major leaks occur, and the delays are common in fulfilling interventions and accomplishing success for the district’s attendance improvement strategies and plans. A fully integrated and specialized attendance tracking and interventions management system (like RaaWee K12 TDPS) is recommended to be considered as an enabler and facilitator to any plan. With an integrated system, students with attendance challenges in any grade and subgroups are immediately identified and quickly attended as per their individualized circumstances.

 “Automation of an interventions plan is essential to successful execution and achieving the                     desire attendance improvement result”

   Habitual chronic absenteeism can be stopped, and truancy can be reduced by providing timely intervention tools to stakeholders on the front-line. Attendance Clerks, Assistant Principals, Child Welfare & Attendance Officers, Truancy Officers, Social Workers can produce better results by utilizing a proven cost and time-saving program like RaaWee K12 TDPS.

    

A Practical Approach to Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance - Raising Awareness about the Effects of Absenteeism

A Practical Approach to

Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

Part 2 of a 6-part Blog

Raising Awareness about the Effects of Absenteeism:

When it comes to creating awareness about the importance of attendance, School Districts must look at their message and mission like marketers. Experienced marketing companies follow these steps to create awareness about their product or service

• 
  Identify the Target Audience that can benefit from their product or service
• 
  Reach & Engage the targeted audience using ads, social media, print media, and other digital means.
• 
  Sponsor Events and Prizes to engage (create stakes for the targeted audience – everyone could gain for their participation)
• 
  Create, track and measure data points
• 
  Consistently repeating the first four steps ensures success

Applying the above steps to the District’s Attendance Awareness Campaigns will get far better results than the typical once or twice a year awareness campaign. Let’s map the above steps and see what a district could do along those lines.

1) Target Audience for your Awareness Campaign: Students & Parents, Teachers and District Operational Support staff from the Superintendent to the bus drivers, local businesses, social service partners, etc.

2) Reach & Engage: Run monthly or bi-monthly awareness campaigns communicating the positive and/or negative effects of attending school regularly. Be consistent and remind all stakeholders about the importance of good attendance and how your district offers help. To engage students effectively, districts must reach out to them as per their specialized circumstances and demographics. And just like a marketer, try to understand the categories in your audience and be able to connect with them on their level.

These days everyone has a cell phone with the capability to receive Text. Districts capable of using Text and Email to run awareness campaigns and communicate with parents is the new frontier. They must frequently publish the advantages of attending school regularly and the disadvantages of not doing so. Using texts, social media, emails and digital mediums can be a
preferable medium for schools as they cost much less and provide a wider and more targeted reach compared to any print and mail campaigns.

Local Community Business can also be approached through each city’s Chamber of Commerce and offered to have their businesses recognized and promoted in District’s monthly attendance awareness campaigns using their business names, brand logos, etc. in each campaign reaching parents.

3) Incentives, Recognition, and Competition also create Awareness:

Incentives 

Offer incentives for students as well as for the campus staff who are at the front-line in making your engagement strategies work. Some school districts offer weekly and monthly prizes for students who maintain perfect attendance. Some offer incentives to the site administrators for improving the attendance of their students. Each District can come up with their own incentive plans.

Recognition 

Recognize and celebrate success, it is as important as offering tangible incentives. Some districts give Good Attendance Certificates to students every month, and some award certificates four to six times a year. Students and their families are presented with these Certificates at assembly times, making parents and students proud while encouraging others to join the league.

Competition

Grand Rapids SD in Michigan came up with a very powerful program called “Strive for less than 5”. They run this challenge each semester and have seen some dramatic improvements in their attendance culture. This type of competition also highlights the importance of attendance, provides an opportunity for the schools to keep students and parents engaged. Such campaigns highlight the importance of attendance to parents and its direct link to student’s performance at school.

4) Act per Data: 

Data happens, whatever we do, and school districts must explore if they have a connection mechanism to capture the real-time data as it constantly transforms each and every day. 

What does our data tell us and what do we do with it? It is essential to constantly keep an eye on the results of our strategies and adjust our campaigns by what the data is saying. Therefore, it is essential to have access to real-time actionable data all the time every day.

5) Repeat Frequently:

Running attendance awareness campaigns once or twice a year may not create the desired level of awareness about the importance of attending school every day. Imagine a product company that only reminds you of their product only a couple of times a year. What is the likelihood of their success compared to a company that consistently repeats the same message for you every other day? For example, everyone knows Coke, but Coke does not stop their awareness campaigns. We see their ads and incentives consistently across every possible medium. Everyone already knows Coke! Why therefore would they need to make people aware of who they are? It is because they realize that people’s memory is short and there is a constant flow of new market opportunities in growing populations with potential customers every day. In the same way, school districts have new parents and students every year and having the ability to send a consistent message or reminder about the effects of positive attendance, support school offers, or the adverse effects of frequent absences are essential to consistently communicate the importance to students and parents.

RaaWee K12 Truancy & Dropout Prevention System (TDPS) provides all the necessary tools that help schools with setting up regular attendance awareness campaigns, tracking incentives and their rewards efficiently and cost-effectively.

We encourage Attendance Awareness Campaign idea contributions or success stories. And join us next week as we explore - How to Identify and respond to grade level or pupil subgroup patterns of chronic absenteeism or truancy?

A Practical Approach to Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

A Practical Approach to

Achieving a Culture of Positive Attendance

Part I of a 6-part Blog - Intro

RaaWee K12 has a mission to deliver solutions, tools & best practices for five essential elements for attendance successes:

How to Raise awareness about the effects of chronic absenteeism, truancy and other challenges associated with poor attendance?

How to Identify and respond to grade level or pupil subgroup patterns of chronic absenteeism or truancy?

How to Identify and address factors contributing to chronic absenteeism and habitual truancy, including suspension and expulsion?

How to Ensure that pupils with attendance problems are identified as early as possible to provide applicable support services and

interventions?

How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of our Strategies?

At RaaWee K12 we believe that these are extremely relevant questions for introducing and creating a culture of Positive Attendance. California Department of Education has incorporated these in their Ed Code and made managing the above an essential responsibility for Attendance Supervisors in California. This systemic approach will help address absenteeism challenges for School Districts.

In this blog, we will summarize what have we learned and the solutions we have been creating since we began supporting schools with absenteeism prevention challenges.

Experts, Researchers and Practitioners all agree that attendance improvement challenges can be effectively addressed with a systematic approach by school districts. A halfhearted, disintegrated, piece-meal approach sometimes will work here and there. And in any given year, attendance may improve, only to find that the next year it drops again. Despite the hard work and dedication from the team, the results are not sustainable due to the disintegrated tools available to them. We believe that to achieve sustained good attendance results year after year, districts will have to approach this challenge more holistically. 

Join us for this six-part weekly blog as we take a deep dive into each of the above questions with a holistic approach, best practices and successes from our experience working with school districts in Texas, California, Ohio and Washington.