Blueprints for Success: Weaving Attendance Improvement into Your Strategic Plan

With competing priorities and the desire to make it all happen, fast, crafting a strategic plan demands big picture thinking, with most including goals around achievement and graduation, overlooking attendance improvement. 

And yet so much of success stems from showing up. It’s why our district partners Stan Wojton, Principal on Special Assignment at Niagara Falls City School District, NY and Paul Milford, Coordinator, Social Work Services at School District of Lee County, FL recently shared how attendance can be woven into a strategic plan or leveraged to directly support existing goals to ensure maximum impact. 

Read on for the conversation’s key takeaways and some bonus strategies for district and school leaders looking to make attendance a meaningful, sustainable priority and driver of student success.

Why Attendance Belongs in a Strategic Plan

For many districts, attendance has historically been tracked, monitored, and addressed only when it became a serious problem. But attendance isn’t a standalone metric. It’s a foundational condition for learning:

• Students who miss more than 10% of the year (research suggests that number may be even smaller) are more likely to struggle academically and drop out.
  
  
• Chronically absent students are often facing numerous barriers, including poverty, housing instability, or health challenges.
  
  
• Attendance affects funding, especially in ADA states, and accountability ratings in many others.

In Niagara Falls, despite significant investments in social-emotional supports, curriculum, and mental health services following COVID, many students simply weren’t showing up to benefit from those supports. Attendance rose to the top priority of the district’s comprehensive improvement plan, becoming a core metric discussed during biweekly Evolution meetings with principals and monthly MTSS meetings with counselors and social workers. 

The result? Attendance was brought into focus for everyone, not just the responsibility of a single department.

Carrying Out the Vision 

While it’s one thing to write something into a plan, how do you actually effectively execute on the goal?

Bringing Everyone Together & Assigning Clear Ownership

Stan shared how important it was to bring numerous stakeholders into the conversation, on board with prioritizing attendance, and clear on their roles. This included:

• The superintendent and assistant superintendent
• Central office cabinet members
• Building principals
• Counselors and social workers
• Teachers, parents, and other community stakeholders

By including these stakeholders from the start, implementation became easier and more authentic. When attendance goals showed up later in school-level plans, they weren’t seen as another top-down mandate. They were already understood, discussed, and owned.

Resource the Work with Tools that Bring Data to Life & Time Back to Your Team

Both districts highlighted a common challenge: staff spent too much time identifying students who needed support, and were left without enough time to actually support them. “I cannot emphasize enough how Everyday Labs has supported our district in identifying kids that need to be in school,” Stan shared. 

Effective attendance work requires access to clear and concise data, which is why the Niagara team leverages the EveryDay Platform and streamlined their attendance tracking systems by reducing the amount of attendance codes, and.

After introducing data and communications provided by EveryDay Labs, both districts found big benefits to attendance work, including:

• Identifying Tier 1, 2, and 3 students more efficiently:  At Niagara Falls, once schools saw how accessible and user-friendly the data was, teams embraced the prioritization of attendance even quicker than expected.
• Communicating with families earlier and more consistently: At Lee County, Paul shared “One of the foundational ways that Everyday Labs really helped us out was by having those conversations with the parents early enough so that parents understood, okay, attendance is important.”
• Spend less time on administrative tasks: After quickly identifying who needed support and outsourcing proactive communication to EveryDay Labs, Niagara staff were better able to provide targeted support to schools with various needs.
• Focus on understanding barriers and building relationships: “When you have a strategy in place and when you're able to engage families with the data during conversations early enough, they're able to make changes that genuinely impact their student’s trajectory in school,” added Paul. 

Alchemizing Resistance into Partnership

Even when attendance is universally acknowledged as important, resistance can still emerge, especially from district families.

Historically, many districts relied on attendance letters that were sent after students crossed chronic absenteeism thresholds. These messages often felt punitive, confusing, or overly alarmist to families.

But with better messaging plus clear, consistent communication, partnerships can emerge. When Niagara Falls shifted to more proactive outreach, contacting families earlier with a nudge letter, some families questioned why they were receiving communication at all.

But despite the initial bristle, that same nudge letter can turn into an authentic and productive conversation about the value of attending every day, and an understanding that it was sent from a place of genuine investment in a student’s success. Over time, families began to understand that early communication was about partnership and preventing more severe attendance challenges. 

Proactive outreach was also essential in Lee County. In addition to the nudge letters, the district convenes attendance review meetings after five unexcused absences. Parents (and often students) are central participants, meetings focus on barrier identification, and support plans are put in place before patterns worsen

Paul shared: “We've done about 12,000 of those meetings already today. So it's having a pretty big impact in the way that we do work. And it's keeping attendance as a central theme, even though it might not be explicitly stated in our strategic plan anymore.”

When Attendance Isn’t Explicitly in the Strategic Plan

“Whether it's explicitly stated in your strategic plan or not, we know attendance and academics go hand in hand,” Paul emphasized. Which is why attendance prioritization didn’t disappear just because it wasn’t named outright.

Before COVID, Lee County had attendance as one of three core strategic pillars, alongside behavior and classroom success. The district made strong gains—until the pandemic disruption and, later, Hurricane Ian.

After experiencing prolonged school closures, displaced families, and damaged campuses, the district re-centered its strategic priorities around family and community engagement.

Rather than abandoning attendance, leaders asked a different question: How does attendance support the goals we’re prioritizing now?

The answer was clear: engaged families are essential to student success—and improving attendance was a critical piece of the puzzle. 

Celebrate the Wins 

Both districts emphasized the power of celebration in sustaining momentum, and saw big attendance improvements in the 24-25 school year:

In Niagara Falls City, 68% of students improved their attendance rate after receiving an attendance nudge, and 15% of chronically absent students improved to non-chronically absent.

In Lee County, 53% of students improved their attendance rate after receiving an attendance nudge, and 19% of chronically absent students improved to non-chronically absent. Plus, 83% of at-risk students didn’t become chronically absent or improved their attendance because the district noticed early and reached out.

“Everyday Labs contributes to children coming in the school, staff morale when the children are there, ease of tracking, ease of use with the program and overall the bottom line of getting kids in the seats so that they receive the education that they deserve.” shared Stan.

These wins reinforce a critical truth: attendance improvement isn’t just about numbers. It’s about relationships and restoring students’ connection to school.

Advice for Attendance Champions

For leaders advocating to elevate attendance, the guidance was clear:

• “Don't get discouraged if your district doesn't explicitly state it as a priority because I assure you that the conversations can be had where you could easily tie it to whatever your district stated priorities are,” shared Paul. After all, academics, engagement, and whole-child support all depend on students being present.
• Know your scope of influence: whether you support one student or an entire district, meaningful action and change still counts.

Attendance doesn’t need to be a standalone initiative. When done well, it strengthens every other goal a district is working toward.

From snowy Western New York to sunny Southwest Florida, the message resonates: you can’t educate students who aren’t there. But when you support families early and intentionally, students come back.

Attendance isn’t just a metric. It’s a strategy, a partnership, and a promise to students that school is a place worth showing up to, every day.