DCSD Attendance

This month, CDE joined 14 other states in a pledge to reduce the state's chronic absenteeism percentage by 50%. Fourteen states have taken up a challenge to significantly reduce the rate at which children miss a lot of school, responding to a recent call from a bipartisan coalition for states to prioritize school attendance.

Some of the states making the pledge, such as Nevada and New Mexico, have had among the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in recent years. Others signing on include Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.

More states have expressed interest and may join later this school year.

For DCSD, our baseline was set in the 21/22 school year with a 20.5% Chronic Absenteeism Rate. During 21/22, we had 13,000 students in the district who were considered chronically absent. In order to meet our goal by 26/27, we would need to reduce our CA percentage by 2.1% each year. This is definitely an achievable goal!

If you are interested in setting the same goal for your building, please check out the information below.

Copy 50% goal: https://tinyurl.com/yc7vr3n5 (This link will prompt you to Make a Copy to begin to fill in your data.)

Copy 50% goal: Attendance Works Spreadsheet Tool

District profile reports: https://www.cde.state.co.us/code/districtprofilereports

Step 1 to combat student absenteeism is to go deeper and understand the root cause(s) for their disengagement. We all know there are a variety of reasons why students disengage.

• Shadowing a Student LINK is one method. Several districts, schools, and programs used this tool to understand a student's perspective during the school day.

• Empathy Interviews LINK - is another way to learn more about the specifics that are affecting a student’s engagement

Strategy 1: Shadow a Student

Shadowing a Student- Video Several districts, schools, and programs used this tool to understand the perspective of a student during the school day.

• Follow a student when they arrive after an absence to gain insight into your systems

• Follow a student who is struggling to see where to increase support and keep them at school

• Who else can speak to this Tool?

• Prep - Create learning goals for your Shadow Day, choose a student, and start questioning your assumptions about school.

• Shadow -Spend the entire day shadowing your student, capturing your observations along the way.

• Reflect - Reflect on your observations, question, and draw connections to opportunities for action.

• Act - Based on your Shadow findings, create a hack or step for making changes in your system.

Strategy 2: Empathy Interviews

• Empathy Interview Toolkit: tool-empathy-interviews.pdf (learningforward.org)

• Our second Tool is to use Empathy Interviews to engage with chronically absent students. This came from a DPS staff member. You may have heard of these interviews or even be using them already. When done well, these interviews can help identify issues that need to be addressed by the system, unpack the root causes of a problem from a community perspective, and spark human-centered change.

• These interviews are an opportunity to gain insight beyond our attendance data and add a deeper understanding of the experiences and feelings of our students.

District IT has been working closely with Finalsite to update attendance information for families. Recently, Finalsite was able to include missed period information in their messaging to families. Secondary schools thank you for your patience as this took a little longer to correct.t.

Just to remind you, we have transitioned to using the Attendance Contact Log within Infinite Campus for attendance intervention documentation. Please share it with any attendance staff in your building.

• IC Generated Attendance Letters

• Elementary Care and Concern Letters

• Elementary Exhibit A

• Secondary Exhibit A

• Exhibit B; All Levels

Email: lmdelapena@dcsdk12.org
Website: DCSD Attendance
Location: 373 Inverness Parkway, Englewood, CO, USA
Phone: 303-387-9636