Campaigning for improved attendance? Go a step deeper at the grade level.
School wide campaigns are a fantastic way to address attendance challenges, but just like expert instruction, a tailored approach can be necessary for real results. Creating grade specific campaigns can be an excellent way to narrow the focus a bit and a great place to start when creating target goals. It can also help promote cross collaboration between grade levels as you pull best practices from one grade level into another.
Getting Started
In your SIS or EveryDay Pro, filter student data at your school by grade level. Breaking down data in this way allows you to determine if there are any patterns or emerging trends among grade levels that you may want to dig deeper into.
Reflect on:
- Bright Spots: Which grade levels have relatively strong attendance?
- Exemplary Educators: How are teachers at these grades promoting attendance and/or creating welcoming classroom communities for their students?
- Room for Growth: Which grade levels have lower levels of attendance?
- Related Challenges: Are there any similarities between these struggling grade levels? What factors may be contributing to these attendance challenges?
- Timing: Were certain grade levels more substantially impacted by Covid-19/quarantining precautions? If that is the case, what are some things that you can do in order to better support those students?
Create Your Campaign
Once you’ve gone through this reflection, now it’s time to take what you learned and create a campaign that targets the challenges you unearthed within your analysis. Remember, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach when creating these campaigns. For example, if it was quarantine policy confusion, you may want to put extra efforts in communicating attendance policies this year. The new Back to School Toolkit is a great resource for supercharging your communications for a successful school year. The more specific you can be when crafting the purpose for your campaign, the better.
Looking for more tips on creating a powerful campaign? Check out this blog post highlighting the three critical components for launching a successful attendance campaign.