The Cohasset Compass
Ever Onward ~ Moving Our Schools Into the Future
December 5, 2025
Dear Cohasset Public Schools Community,
Attendance in school matters. School and classroom learning experiences are designed to capitalize on interactions between and among teachers and students. When a student is not in class, they miss the intentional learning experience the teacher has designed for them. The adage "we can't teach an empty seat" is real and, increasing student attendance is a priority for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and to our schools and district.
As we head into a season where our schools historically see increased student dismissals and absences, especially on Fridays and Mondays, we want to emphasize that routinely missing 2 to 5 hours of school every Friday for 10 weeks could result in a child missing between 20 - 50 hours of instruction. This has the potential to result in 3 to 9 days of learning for that child in only two and a half months. This, by DESE standards, could qualify as chronic absenteeism.
When children are routinely out of the classroom, they and their contributions to the learning and social interactions are missed in their community. Routine dismissals and absences also make it difficult for our teachers to plan lessons that are meaningful and impactful for the remaining students and to catch students up once they return. Research tells us that:
- "Students who were more frequently absent in any year of elementary school demonstrated lower academic, executive function, and socioemotional outcomes" (Ansari & Gottfried, 2021).
- "A one-day increase in absences in a given grade in a given school decreases math scores by 0.02 standard deviations (Goodman, 2014), and
- “Students with moderate to chronic absenteeism start the next year significantly behind academically (King et al., 2019).
Recently, staff attendance has also been in the news because it, along with student attendance, is a DESE priority. Though school districts have always reported staff attendance data to DESE as part of our year end reports, this is the first time DESE has released staff attendance data publicly by district.
For this report, DESE defined an absence as missing more than half of the workday for a reason that falls outside of paid school vacation time or district-approved professional development activities - this means they counted sick days, bereavement, school business days, and long term leaves like parental leaves, medical leaves, etc. The data DESE released was aggregated; they will not be publishing individual data.
Our data regarding staff attendance (see photo below) is excellent. If you look at our data compared to both the state data and other local districts, our staff attendance rates are the highest of our neighboring communities. This, in my opinion, reiterates the professionalism, dedication, and care our teachers bring to their work each and every day. Given that, we are asking for your continued partnership to help us ensure that our teachers aren't teaching to empty seats, even on Fridays during the winter.
Ever Onward,
Sarah
