DCSD Attendance

December 2024

In DCSD, chronic absenteeism affects 10,285 students, resulting in an average absenteeism rate of 16.39% across all grades. Grade 12 continues to exhibit the highest absenteeism rate at 30%, while elementary grades typically show lower rates.

Attendance Dashboard in collaboration with CDE

CDE has introduced a new goal-setting tool to help plan and monitor the state's aim to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50%. With this dashboard, you can view attendance data at the state, district, and school levels, adjust the goals you want to set, and track progress over the past two years. CDE hopes this dashboard will assist you in setting and tracking your own attendance goals. Resources and tools to support your work with the dashboard will be available in early 2025, but in the meantime, please feel free to explore!

Promising Practices to Improve Attendance

As you develop and refine strategies for improving attendance, we want to share some helpful resources and invite your contributions to our collective efforts.

A Practical Guide to Strategies

The EdResearch for Action guidebook offers research-based, practical strategies for improving attendance. For example:

Two studies in Pennsylvania found that text messaging programs enabling two-way communication with families improved attendance. (See page 6 of the guidebook!)

Frameworks for Best Practices with Attendance

CDE Suggests:

Practices to grow awareness about attendance
Strategies or practices that help build strong conditions for learning
Practices that fit into a tiered or multi-level system of support, including:

Prevention practices that welcome and engage all students (Tier 1)
Early intervention practices that support students showing signs of chronic absence (Tier 2)
Intensive support practices for students needing individual attention (Tier 3)

The strongest practices often align with Attendance Works' "Key Ingredients": they build capacity, use data effectively, engage positively with students and families, leverage partnerships, ensure equitable resources, and recognize that attendance is everyone's responsibility.

10+ Consective Day Absences

The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) requires districts to indicate when a student has been absent for 10 or more consecutive days, which is considered an instance of mobility.

State board rule 1-CCR-301-1 states, “Districts and the institute shall indicate an instance of mobility for a student after ten consecutive days of excused or unexcused absence.” This is done by end-dating an enrollment record on the student’s last day of attendance with the applicable exit code. Upon the student’s return, a school may then create a new enrollment record with a school entry type matching the used exit code and the start date as the first date the student is physically in the building.

There has been a strong uptick in the number of students who have been absent for 10 or more consecutive days. Please refer to this list for more information. Please follow these processes and procedures for unknown and known absences.