Dive Brief:
- In Grand Rapids, MI, district official Mel Atkins has spearheaded a comprehensive campaign using data to solve an ongoing struggle with chronic truancy and absenteeism.
- His approach, called "Challenge 5," aims to reduce student absences to just five per year through public awareness campaigns, billboards and an online "Parent University" that explains the negative impacts of absenteeism.
- In the last three years, the program has seen 3,600 students improve their attendance rate, NPR reports.
Dive Insight:
A federal push is also now underway to stem absenteeism in U.S schools, and President Barack Obama's administration has urged districts to be proactive about the problem instead of punitive and reactive. The federal outreach campaign, "Every Student, Every Day: A National Initiative to Address and Eliminate Chronic Absenteeism," notes that around 5 to 7.5 million students are chronically absent annually. California Attorney General Kamala Harris has also made a push to solve the problem with an outreach campaign that includes a free online toolkit aimed at parents and school leaders, created with help from The Ad Council and The California Endowment.
Truancy and multiple absences have been shown to impact student performance, and districts should take the problem seriously. Many times, parents are unaware of how absences impact their child's learning. "If a child misses 10% or more of kindergarten and first grade, only 17% of those kids are reading at grade level by the end of third grade," Jill E. Habig, special counsel to Harris, previously told Education Dive.
