Educational Leadership with Principal JL
Principal JL is an educational leader who explores various topics facing educational leaders today! The Mission of this podcast is to inform and inspire other Educational Leaders on how to be their best for their Schools by honing their skills and talents so they may impact their teachers, staff members, students, parents/guardians, and community members positively for their School District! Come with a Growth Mindset as we journey through Educational Leadership!
Educational Leadership with Principal JL
Episode 8: Reducing Chronic Absenteeism in Schools!
Unlock transformative strategies to tackle chronic absenteeism in schools, particularly within socioeconomically challenged communities. Inspired by a successful attendance policy from other schools and infused with our own insights and experiences as a principal, we’ve crafted a pathway to creating a thriving school culture. Learn how PBIS systems and transformational leadership can pull your community together, and discover the intricacies of our multi-tiered support system, which has elevated our daily average attendance rate by over three percent. We address potential hurdles like staff commitment and emphasize the indispensable role in-person learning plays in student success and belonging.
Dive into the nuts and bolts of our attendance policy and tier system, where assistant principals and committees assess absences with care and precision. From personalized outreach by an attendance coordinator to community liaisons removing barriers and the impactful STARS program, our comprehensive approach ensures every student receives the support they need. As we wrap up, explore the world of inspirational leadership across social media and embrace our mantra of 1% daily improvement. Join us on this journey, engage with us, and let's strive together for constant progress.
Episode 8: Reducing Chronic Absenteeism Show Notes!
1). Chronic Absenteeism Power Point
2). MTSS Chronic Absenteeism Pyramid
Let's Get Social and Connect by following Principal JL by clicking on these Links: Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, Threads, X, and Substack
Email: the.principal.jl@gmail.com
Episode 8, reducing Chronic Absenteeism in your School. Going live today. I was wanting to try this live stream out and so I wanted to see what you guys' thoughts are, but also I wanted to talk to you about some things that I am doing currently as a principal. Just to give you some backstory, I'm in my third year in the principal at the building I'm at right now and I think one of the things that we worked through over the last two and a half years to three years now is attendance, and so we looked at a lot of different things and really we kind of stumbled upon something. Really, my assistant principal at an administrative conference and my superintendent they saw the same Basically breakout session and they brought it to me and they're like, hey, this might be our answer. So we took it to our school improvement team and we started working on okay, what does this look like at our school? Could we take what this school was doing and implement it, how it looked, and make it basically our own? So basically, on top of that, I also finished my EDS, my educational specialist in K-12 leadership, and so at the time, I was looking at chronic absenteeism it better in our school and, being a building principal, you know it's kind of awesome to see how everybody worked together to kind of get to where we are today. And so today I kind of wanted to share you guys the why we made it made attendance policy change kind of some research behind it but also how it's going as well, because the results that I'm looking at are very positive and I'm not sure how it's going to translate throughout the rest of the year, but I think we are trending in the right direction when it comes to chronic absenteeism and making the attendance in our building better. And to give you some background on that, we just believe that when kids are in school they learn better. Yes, you can go online and learn online and do all that stuff, but actually being a part of an online or a in-school education where you have your teachers, your classmates and everybody within the building collaborating together, you just get a more solid education. But there's also a sense of belonging that kids get when they're in a building setting and they do when they're sitting at home trying to do it online. Not to say that's bad, just saying it's not as good as in-person learning. So we really believe that and we really wanted to take back what the essence of schooling is and really come down to having an accountability piece for attendance, not just for ourselves but for everybody involved. So I'm going to go ahead and share you guys the PowerPoint that I put together for my capstone class to kind of give you some background on kind of what we're working through.
Principal JL:So we're looking here at the multi-tier system for to reduce chronic absenteeism and so basically we're trying to figure out it's not known how to reduce the chronic absenteeism of students at a high school in South Central Nebraska. That's where I currently live. I'm not going to name the school by my name, but you know there we are. So some of our data showed chronic absenteeism rates to be very high. Just to let you guys know, we're about 64-65% free and reduced chronic absenteeism rate. Not free and reduced. We are 65% free and reduced population. So we're dealing with a lot of social economic students in our building and so we kind of saw this as a hey, this is a problem, how do we fix that?
Principal JL:So what is chronic apathyism? In Nebraska it defines chronic apathyism to missing 10% of a child's time at membership. It counts for all the absences uh, excused and unexcused, and suspensions and all that. So it puts it all together. So if a kid shows up for 180-day school year and they miss more than 18 days, they'll be considered chronic absent. If a kid shows up for 80 days, they miss more than eight and they're chronically absent. So that kind of gives you an idea. It depends on the enrollment while they're in school.
Principal JL:So, knowing that we go, what're some things we've got to think about? Here's some possible solutions. When it comes to it, there's the positive school culture aspect. Positive perceptions of school climate are associated with lower chronic absenteeism rates. So how do you create a positive school culture? We have a PBIS system in place, but we also wanted to utilize that with transformational leadership. That's kind of a leadership style that I'm going with on this is how do I empower other people to help the change? And, of course, we talked about a multi-tiered support for chronic absenteeism. So we developed a multi-dimensional tiered support system, which I'll show later. But this is all backed by research. These are things that you could possibly do to help reduce chronic absenteeism in your schools.
Principal JL:When it comes down to it, there are some things that could hinder the implementation of this. So if you don't have a school positive culture, that's gonna hinder it. If your leadership is direct or authoritarian, if you're just bossing people around, it's not gonna work very well, because you need a collaborative environment, not having a PBIS system or process, something that deal with positive behavior supports. So those are things that are important Teachers, staff members not being committed to the process, people not understanding the process. Does the principal work collaboratively with other members? Does everybody work collaboratively together? Do they value the MTSS process and the validity of the process? So this is kind of where we're at, you know, with some things that could hinder the process of chronic absenteeism.
Principal JL:So our attendance policy basically here states that you know school is important, being in school is the best way to learn and so if you don't come to school there's going to be some consequences. Of course we know it's legal. We know it's a legal thing you need to be in school until you're age of 18. Here in Nebraska you have to be 19 if you want to drop out, but that's another ball of wax. But we're looking at it as unexcused absences per period, per class, per semester, per period per class, per semester. So if you miss eight or more periods per class, so if you miss one class eight times, you can lose half credit. And the reason why we don't have credit is because if we lose full credit, then where are you going to have the kid go. I'm learning in a school that we have a lot about a thousand students, so we can't just be shipping kids out of classes once they lose credit. So we go to half credit and so what we do is, with that half credit loss, there's an actually appeals process that they can work through to try to gain that full credit back. So we actually have a tiered system in place which I'll show later on. That I'm just giving you an overview.
Principal JL:There are some special circumstances Now. These must be pre-planned. They have to hold some sort of unique educational opportunity for the kids. These are things that we take case by case. A parent or a student wants to submit what a special circumstance is. They submit it to their assistant principal. They bring it to their assistant principal, they bring it to the attendance committee. We look at it and we make a decision yes, this will count as a special circumstances or no. And then we give them feedback of why and, yes, it is or isn't. And so we kind of look at these unexcused absences as kind of like days you take off from work. So you can take up to eight days off from work before you get penalized or before you know you lose something. So that's kind of the same process here with the attendance policy, but we have supports before we get to that eight. So we're trying to keep people from, you know, becoming truant and things like that.
Principal JL:When it comes down to it, there's an appeals process. They get an appeals packet that goes out with the eight-day letter and I'll give you guys an example of what those eight-day letters look like. But at the same time, the process is something that they have to go through and they need to, you know, submit that paperwork and it goes by per class, so you can get more than one of these appeals. If you get one class one week or two weeks later, you can get another class, some. A lot of times these classes kind of bunch up together with that. So that's kind of the appeals process. So we have this, a layered support system, and so that's kind of kind of where we're at with that.
Principal JL:So what does this tier system look like? So I'm going to go ahead and open up with that, missing less than four days of class. And so with that level, we basically have an attendance coordinator. We call it our paper route. They go around and go hey, we missed you yesterday. You know what can we do to help to make sure in school. And so we really work with that child to help them understand. You know being in school is important, we miss them, we want them here and then if there's something that we can do to help them understand you know being in school is important, we miss them, we want them here, and then if there's something that we can do to help them provide support, that's what we're there for. So that's our tier level.
Principal JL:One system is where we have our attendance coordinator really reach out and make those connections with those kids. Our tier two is more targeted, where we're looking at anybody between four to seven and excused absences. So this is where they start getting on the radar. We have a community liaison in our building that will connect with these families and try to help them remove barriers and what can we do to help them. So, looking at all the different resources within the community and their school to help those families, make sure they get a plan so their child is in school and they are where they need to be, and this kind of gives us the tip off to our other, our third. We kind of kind of monitor these things week by week, so we have some different supports there that are targeted.
Principal JL:If you get down here to tier three, that's more intensive, that's when we start referring people to our STARS program. Our STARS program here is a program that is by the county here in our community, and so they work closely with the county attorney and they make recommendations for filing for truancy based off the things that they try to do with the family. So what we're trying to do when we hit Tier 3 is hey, you've missed eight or more days of class in a certain period. We really need you to really show up to school, do the right things, and how can we help you do that? And when we get to that part, that's where we bring in our community you know stars person what kind of works, and they call families. They give us reports out how things are going on and sometimes families are just not willing to work, so they get referred up to the county attorney for truancy and we're really trying really hard to keep from going to truancy mode, but we do go to truancy a lot of times and so what we've figured out is within the last first semester.
Principal JL:Here almost we're almost done with the first semester. But what I do is I look at our daily average attendance rate, because the daily average attendance rate actually has a direct correlation with our chronic aptheism and so if we looked at our chronic apathyism, our daily average attendance rate, the current daily average attendance rate is actually up compared to where we were the exact time last year. So we basically went through the whole process. We communicated our new attendance policy. People are understanding it. Of course, we've filled in calls and made sure people understood it better. My assistant principal has done a great job of really staying on top of where we are in the process with every kid, and that's not easy to do, but they've done a nice job with that.
Principal JL:So we have seen some data that shows that this is working. So if we look at our data, at the exact same time a year ago our daily average attendance rate was around 86%. You know, 86% was our daily average attendance rate a year ago at this time. Right now we're at 89. Two percent, after a semester of implementing this new attendance policy. What that's telling me is we're up over three percent of a daily average attendance for the exact same amount of schooling at the exact same time from a year ago. This trend has actually increased. So it's actually a smaller gap at the beginning, but then, as the semester has gone on, our daily average attendance rate actually has kind of stayed steady and then, because of last year, kept dropping and dropping. This year it's staying steady, which that's where we're getting our gap and being over 3% higher in our daily average attendance rate and being over 3% higher in our daily average attendance rate. Now, I'm not going to know exactly how it impacts the chronic absenteeism until the end of the year, but right now we are getting less people being submitted for currency. We have less papers going out for those type of things, which is a positive sign.
Principal JL:Talking with my staff, they feel like kids are in school more often. They know they have less kids missing from class, which we actually have, kids that you know that were sitting on the fence going. Hey, I don't really have to go to class because as long as I'm passing, I'm passing. So here's a story we had a student that was told by their sibling hey, you don't need to go to class, as long as you pass your class, you're going to get the credit. Well, with this new attendance policy because we require kids to be in class to receive credit that has basically blown up that narrative to where now you know you have to be in class to receive the credit. You can't just skip and pass all your classes because you just didn't show up and you can get all the grades. Now it's like you have to show up, be present to get those credits as well. So this student talked about how they missed 46 days of school last year and still passed all their classes. Well, now they've only missed maybe one day this semester because they know if they miss too much school that they are going to actually not be able to get the credit. So that has been a really good deterrent for some of those kids. Now, does it work for everybody? No, we're going to still have our chronic aptitude kids, but our biggest goal was to try to get the kids off the fence and into class and into school, and so that's kind of where we're at with it right now. And so that's our tier system.
Principal JL:And, like I said, we actually send out letters, and I'm going to give you an example of what those letters are. So this is our four-day letter. This is just a you know, have our school logo up here but this is basically what it says. You know, hey, your kid's been gone this many days for this class. These are things you need to do to clear up those absences. And then, at the bottom, we'll actually run a report to where it shows them exactly what classes they missed and which ones they need to make up on. So that's just kind of a example of what that letter would look like. That's what our letter looks like, but that's an example of what a letter would look like. That's what our letter looks like, but that's an example of what a letter would look like. And then, coming back to it, we have an eight-day letter as well, and this eight-day letter basically shows hey, you've missed more than eight days in this class. These are the classes.
Principal JL:Here's the appeals packet, and the appeals packet is basically a step by step procedure that they go through. They submit it back to their assistant principals. The assistant principals gets with those staff members and say, ok, this is the kid's situation. They actually have to write a letter of clarity of why they're missing. You know what and you know what. What's the what's the circumstances that are keeping them from school. And then we make a determination on can we create an education plan for that child so they can receive full credit?
Principal JL:And I'm telling you, our staff does a really good job of working with these kids and I don't think we've denied one appeal yet, but I would say most of the time we are. We have denied some opportunities, but a lot of the kids that the parents that know like, hey, there's, there's no good excuse. They don't even fill out the appeals packet, but we encourage them to because we want to try to help everybody. But before they get up here we had all these levels of intervention, before we even get to the appeals packet, and so that's the really great part about this. So, just coming back around full circle, this is just one way that we're trying to battle the chronic absenteeism and to increase daily average attendance in our building, and it may not be working for everybody, but at the same time it's definitely something that's worked for us and that we need to continue on with what we got. And so, basically, the data that we're showing is very positive. It's going in the right direction.
Principal JL:I'm telling you, we are sending out less unexcused robocalls than we were last year at this time. At this time that number was really jumping um, and so just seeing those things come to fruition, um, it's been really fun, really awesome to see um. So, when it comes down to it, you know it, it takes a collaborative effort. Like I can't do what I do as a building principal by myself. I have everybody underneath me, everybody that works together collaborating to make this. And then also I have great leadership at the district office. They kind of just let me do my thing and we work together. They know we're going to collaborate and so they understand we are doing our best to try to make things better at our building. So that is what I wanted to share with you guys today, and thank you guys for taking the time to watch this, my first live stream.
Principal JL:I'm actually going to create a show notes for this for my podcast, once I figure out how to do that. I've never done from YouTube to a podcast setting, so I'm going to try to get that all figured out. I will have a lot of this information basically embedded in the show notes of my podcast. So if you haven't subscribed to my podcast, there's a time to do that. You can go to basically any podcast.
Principal JL:Just find educational leadership, with principal JL, JL stands for my name, but at the same time, I have a Facebook page. If you wanted to follow on Facebook as well. I also have a Tik TOK page, but I try to put out some, you know, some content that's more like inspirational at times, um, but also we'll, we'll, uh, promote my uh podcast as well there. And then, of course, my X page as well. Um, I have that. Some people call it Twitter, call it X, I don't care what you call it, just another social media platform. So, thank you guys for taking the time to listen to this podcast and I will see you guys, and what we always like to say around our where we're at is to remember to always be 1% better. You guys, have a great day and God bless.
