January Attendance Tips: All About Tier 2

It’s a fresh new year, but perhaps some of your same attendance challenges persist. And while we often associate the new year with resolutions, perhaps it’s even more powerful to reflect on the past few months and set intentions for the rest of the school year. In this month’s professional learning webinar for EveryDay Labs partners, resident attendance experts Emily Orngard and Cindy Welling shared how attendance champions can strategically reflect, adjust, and act for high impact attendance work.  

Take Time to Step Back and Reflect

With plenty of data from the first part of the year, now is a great time to pause, analyze data, and refine plans in a quarterly step-back meeting. These meetings bring your attendance team together to focus on analyzing long-term data, reflect on the system of intervention at each tier (what’s working and what’s not?), and create long term goals. This could look like reviewing daily attendance rates from last year to determine when to launch an attendance campaign around the spring. 

Wondering where to begin with data analysis? 

You may want to leverage an attendance data dashboard to surface recurring attendance issues, such as low attendance on Fridays and around the holidays. Additionally, identifying specific student cohorts with high chronic absence rates, such as kindergarteners and high school students, can help you further focus your future campaigns. 

Then, based on your findings, take some time to, ahem, step back and reflect on your attendance team’s goals. Do they still feel like the right ones? Should new goals be set for the last half of the year? And finally, do the current roles, routines, and decision-making timelines still feel right for your attendance team as we head into spring?  

Turning Data into Action

January is a great time to look specifically at Tier 2 students, especially those missing 10-15% of school. With the right support, these students can often be swiftly put back on track for better attendance. If that feels like too large of a swath of students, you can dive deeper and look at actionable patterns and trends that your dashboard may have surfaced, including worsening attendance, and organize campaigns based on your findings. This may ultimately shape up to be a targeted campaign that addresses specific dip days you noticed, along with targeted initiatives for the high need student cohorts you may have seen in your data analysis.  

Looking for more support in executing targeted campaigns? This blog post is a great place to start. 

We’re also here to help all aspects of your attendance improvement plan! Reach out anytime. 

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