I'm writing this from a seat on the tarmac, just outside a city where I spent the last few days with district leaders, principals, and school attendance teams. Our work together was about three things: reclaiming the students we've lost, re-engaging the ones who are drifting, and retaining the ones who are hanging on by a thread.
The plane isn't moving yet, but my mind won't stop. Because in every room, I heard the same thing underneath the data: We're doing everything we know how to do, and it isn't working.
I believe them. And I believe it isn't working because we're still solving yesterday's problem with yesterday's tools.
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Absence is a message, not a mistake. Our job is to learn the language. |
Let's start with elementary families, because that's where so much of our frustration lands. We call them "resistant," "disengaged," "hard to reach." I'd invite you to try a different frame: many of these parents aren't reluctant. They're having a hard time.
Some of them never had one positive experience inside a school building. When the school calls, their body remembers every principal's office, every note sent home, every time they felt small. Why would they rush back into that room?
Others are simply carrying more than one person should. Two jobs, unpredictable shifts, a younger child at home, a housing situation that changes by the month. They love their child fiercely. They just don't have the margin, or the map, to navigate their own life demands and put school attendance at the top of the list every single morning.
Here's the part we miss: we're asking families to make a long-term, executive-functioning decision ("daily attendance now leads to reading by third grade, which leads to graduation") when their daily reality is survival. When the demand is get through today, a promise about June, or 2035, doesn't compete.
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You can't ask a family to plan for June when they're surviving Tuesday. |
That isn't a character flaw. It's a capacity problem. And capacity problems call for support, not consequences.
We rarely say it this plainly: missing school is a behavior. And like every behavior, it serves a function.
Too often, our attendance systems skip that truth entirely. A student misses school, a letter goes home, a robocall fires, a consequence follows. We penalize the behavior without ever asking what the behavior is communicating.
In our behavior work, we would never design an intervention without first asking what the behavior is doing for the student. Attendance deserves the same discipline. Every team should be asking two questions about every student who is missing school:
Research on school refusal, including Christopher Kearney's functional model, groups absence into four functions:
Same absence. Four different messages. Four different responses.
When we don't know the function, we guess. And when we guess, we mismatch. We send a truancy letter to a child who is terrified, and we offer a pizza party to a teenager who is working nights to keep the lights on.
So change the question. Stop asking "Why aren't they here?" Start asking "What is this absence getting them, or protecting them from, and what would make here worth it and safe?"
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Punishing a message doesn't make it stop. It just teaches people to stop talking to us. |
We talk a lot about what the pandemic changed. Learning loss. Mental health. Staffing. All real. But I think we often miss the thing it broke.
Try this reframe. Before 2020, why did so many of the very families we now struggle to engage send their children to school every day?
Not because of a research brief. Because that's what we did. At four or five years old, you went to kindergarten. It was a rite of passage. School was where you went for learning, yes, but also for food, for safety, for friendship, for structure. It was simply what happened.
Massachusetts passed the nation's first compulsory attendance law in 1852. For more than 160 years, going to school was woven into the rhythm of American life. Then, for the first time in our history, for the better part of two years, that rhythm stopped.
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The pandemic didn't just interrupt learning. It broke the habit of school. |
And not everyone came back. By some estimates, well over a million students never returned to public schools. Some came from families with the means to choose homeschooling, private school, or something else. Others came from families who were rarely seen, valued, or heard by schools in the first place.
Scholar Bettina Love, drawing on legal scholar Patricia Williams, calls this spirit murder: the slow, daily harm done to children who don't fit the box of expectation, through unexamined biases about poverty, race, language, gender, and zip code. For some of those families, the pandemic was the first time they were allowed to stop walking into a place that never truly wanted them. So they didn't walk back in.
Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism nationally nearly doubled after the pandemic. The families who did return often returned without the habit, and without much reason to rebuild it.
So here is our real question: How do we rebuild the habit, or build a new one, with the students and families who are struggling to come back?
If the habit is broken, we can't fix it with a letter. We have to rebuild it where habits are actually formed: in the daily experience of school.
That starts with dismantling our silos. In most schools, academics lives in one meeting, behavior in another, and attendance in a third. Three teams, three spreadsheets, three sets of interventions. But the student in all three conversations is the same child.
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One child. Not three files. |
A student who is struggling to read may be avoiding the class where it shows. A student whose behavior is escalating may be telling us they don't feel they belong. Their absence is often where those stories end up. When we treat well-being, belonging, and engagement as the foundation of Tier 1, we're not adding a program. We're addressing the root.
Tier 1 also has to connect with students' and families' lived experience. Many families can't see how school connects to the life they're living right now. "Education is important for your future" is abstract. "Your child is known here, safe here, fed here, and missed when they're gone" is concrete. Concrete wins.
So here's the question I'm asking every school team: What do we need to do differently, better, every day, in every classroom, so that at least 80% of all students, and 50% of our chronically absent students, feel meaningfully connected to school? Seen. Valued. Heard. Belonging.
That's the bar. Not perfect attendance. Connection. Because connection is what brings people back tomorrow.
We can't talk honestly about attendance without talking about trauma and mental health. For many of our students, and many of their parents, this is the root cause hiding underneath the data.
For students, trauma puts the nervous system on high alert. A crowded hallway, a raised voice, a surprise test, or a peer conflict can register as danger. Avoiding school isn't laziness or defiance. It's the survival brain doing exactly what it was built to do: protect. Anxiety, depression, and grief often show up first as Sunday-night stomachaches, morning meltdowns, or a trip to the nurse that ends with a call home.
For parents, the weight is just as real. Caregivers carry their own trauma, depression, anxiety, and grief. A parent struggling with depression may not be able to get out of bed, let alone get three children out the door by 7:45. A parent whose own school memories are painful may, without meaning to, protect their child from the same place. And some children stay home because they're worried about the parent. They're keeping watch.
This is why punitive responses so often backfire. For a child or family living with trauma, a threatening letter or a cold meeting confirms what they already believe: school is not safe for people like us.
Our most intensive supports have to be trauma-informed: built on safety, predictability, choice, collaboration, and relationship. The question shifts from "What's wrong with this family?" to "What happened to this family, and what do they need to feel safe coming back?"
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A dysregulated nervous system can't be consequenced back into the classroom. It has to be co-regulated back in. |
Our targeted and intensive supports have to reflect the students and families we actually serve. Not the ones we wish we had. Not the ones we used to have. The ones who are here, or not here, right now.
That means a few shifts:
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Meet families where they are, not where our systems wish they were. |
We spend enormous energy trying to get students back. Then, too often, we fumble the moment they walk through the door. A student returns after a week away and hears, "Where have you been?" They're handed a stack of missing work and a zero. They're called out in front of the class. We just confirmed every reason they had for staying home.
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The day they come back is the day we either win them back or lose them again. |
Every school needs a clear, warm, and consistent re-entry process, especially for students returning from extended absences, and not only for students returning from suspension:
Re-entry isn't an administrative step. It's an intervention. For a student who has been avoiding school, the first day back is either proof that school is safe or proof that it isn't.
None of these are magic. All of them are human. And each has research or strong practice evidence behind it.
Tier 1: For every student and family
1. Intentional daily connection. Greet every student by name at the door: eye to eye, name to name, hand to hand. Research on positive greetings at the door shows gains in on-task engagement. It costs nothing, and it tells a child, every morning, you were expected.
2. Warm, personalized family communication. Replace robocalls and truancy letters with personal, non-judgmental messages that show families how many days their child has missed. A large randomized trial of personalized mailers reduced chronic absence by roughly 10 percent. Lead with "We missed your child," not "Your child is in violation."
3. Belonging built into the day. Proactive circles, advisory, and class community-building give every student a reason to show up that has nothing to do with a test.
Tier 2: For students who are frequently absent or at risk
4. Anchor Adults. Every frequently absent student is paired with one Anchor Adult: a steady presence who keeps them grounded when everything else is shifting.5. Relational home visits. Voluntary, pre-scheduled visits focused on hopes and dreams, not problems. Research on the Parent Teacher Home Visits model found students whose families received a visit were less likely to be chronically absent. For a family that has only ever heard bad news from school, a visit about their child's strengths can change everything.
Tier 3: For students who are chronically absent and need more
6. Trauma-informed, function-based attendance plans. Identify what the absence is getting the student or helping them escape, then build the plan around that function, with the family at the table. Plans prioritize safety and predictability: a trusted adult at arrival, a safe space to regulate, a modified schedule when needed, and a gradual, supported return rather than an all-or-nothing demand.
7. Mental health and wraparound supports for students and caregivers. Connect students to school-based counseling and mental health services. For school-related anxiety and avoidance, cognitive-behavioral approaches have some of the strongest evidence for supporting a successful return. And remember the parents: link caregivers to support for their own mental health, grief, housing, and basic needs through community partners. When we stabilize the family, we stabilize attendance.
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Evidence tells us what works. Relationships are how it works. |
None of this work should be done alone. At CharacterStrong, we partner with districts and school teams to turn these ideas into daily practice, and to build the adult systems that make them last. Our supports include:
But the most important resource isn't a document. It's the adults in your building, equipped with clarity, competence, and consistency to show up for kids every day.
The plane is finally moving. And I keep thinking about a mom I heard about this week. The school didn't call her about her daughter's absences. It called to say her daughter had made someone laugh in class that morning. She cried on the phone. No one from a school had ever called her with good news.
Her daughter hasn't missed a day since.
That's the work. Not louder consequences. Deeper connection. Not "Why aren't you here?" but "We missed you, and we're so glad you're back."
So as you head into tomorrow, I'd ask you to hold three questions:
We can't go back to the way school used to be. Honestly, for too many of our families, we shouldn't. But we can build something better: a school that students and families choose, because it chose them first.
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Chronic absence is the symptom. Chronic belonging is the cure. |
Dr. Darian Jones is the Senior Director of MTSS and Implementation Science at CharacterStrong.