Attendance doesn’t break overnight; it fades when families feel unseen, unheard, or unsupported.
GUEST COLUMN | by Alex Meis, MPA
MATT COLE
The superintendent’s voice carried a familiar frustration: 9,400 students were chronically absent in her district. “We’re sending letters. We’re making calls. We’re doing everything we’re supposed to do,” she said. “And we’re still losing them.”
‘“We’re sending letters. We’re making calls. We’re doing everything we’re supposed to do,” she said. “And we’re still losing them.”’
After fifteen years working on chronic absenteeism—from studying policy and conducting research to building attendance tools used by districts nationwide—I’ve reached a clear conclusion: it isn’t an attendance problem. It’s a relationship problem.
During the 2023–24 school year, nearly 1 in 4 students nationwide—an estimated 9.4 million children—were chronically absent. While this marks progress from pandemic peaks, the scale of disconnection remains significant. The reality is that attendance rarely collapses all at once; it erodes when families feel unheard, unsupported, or uncertain about how school fits into their day-to-day lives.
Behind every data point is a human signal: a caregiver who never received a schedule change, a family navigating language barriers, or a parent who wants to engage but doesn’t feel invited. Chronic absenteeism is the proverbial canary in the coal mine—the first sign that a student’s sense of belonging is beginning to flicker.
Our goal shouldn’t just be to document these gaps, but to reconstruct systems designed to support scalable human connection. Infrastructure is often thought of as cold or mechanical, but in a school setting, it is the very thing that allows a sense of belonging to grow. How do we build structures rooted in empathy, just as we have with compliance? We do it by ensuring that every automated process—from a text message to a data report—starts with a human question: Does this make a family feel more connected?
The Relationship Imperative and the Fragmentation Paradox
In 2012, I began looking for a better way to help schools reach families—starting with a simple text message to say, “We missed you,” because those small moments of connection matter. I was younger then, perhaps a bit naive, but I had the grit of a New Yorker and an unwavering belief that kindness could cure chronic absenteeism. I’m grateful now that I had my “horse blinders” on, holding onto the idea that if we could just reach out a little more empathetically, we could change a student’s trajectory.
That curiosity led to co-founding an organization focused solely on K–12 attendance communications. The moments where a teacher said, “The parent I could never reach finally wrote back,” or a parent shared, “If only I had known sooner,” were, and still are, my ‘why.’ When we put tools in place that met families where they were, with a tone of understanding rather than accusation, the dynamic shifted. Students started coming back. Despite the temptation to build wider or broader, I stayed focused. Attendance was it for me. I knew that if we could solve this one piece of the puzzle, everything else in a student’s life had a better chance of falling into place.
‘Attendance was it for me. I knew that if we could solve this one piece of the puzzle, everything else in a student’s life had a better chance of falling into place.’
Well over a decade later, that insight still holds. Research consistently shows that family engagement is among the strongest predictors of student success. However, when our focus stays solely on documenting absences, we risk missing the chance to nurture the very connections that prevent them.
In practice, attendance work often feels fragmented and compulsory. After all, it is the law, and districts must maintain strict procedures. Balancing separate tools for automated calls, mailers, and intervention tracking creates a heavy lift for staff. There is also a false narrative that attendance data should be simple—that a student is either here or they’re not. Between funding formulas, state policies, truancy courts, and the intricacies of period-by-period scheduling, the reality is far more complex. In many districts, the role of an attendance clerk has shifted from student support to something more akin to an accountant, where the stakes of a single data entry are incredibly high.
I have seen firsthand how district leaders believe in the power of relationships but face systems that make them hard to scale. When disconnected tools are layered over essential outreach like home visits, even the most dedicated teams are stretched thin. Without a unified approach, these efforts become difficult to sustain and can unintentionally create gaps in how we support our families.
Empathy by Design
For K–12 leaders, chronic absenteeism acts as a compass. It points us toward the places where our connections with families need a little more care. The truth is, no child or family wakes up and decides they want to fail; they are simply navigating the hurdles in front of them. My mission has always been to help districts uncover those challenges a little faster, so no family has to wait for help.
I’ve seen progress accelerate when we stop viewing attendance as a separate problem to “fix” and start seeing it as a reflection of a connected system. This work doesn’t require perfection; it requires alignment. When districts invest in a unified, multilingual foundation, they make it easier for teams to coordinate clearly. In these spaces, attendance improves not because we’ve changed our expectations, but because we’ve made it easier for families to feel they truly belong.
‘This work doesn’t require perfection; it requires alignment.’
Many districts already lead with empathy in their daily interactions. The opportunity now is to extend that empathy into the systems themselves—ensuring that care, responsiveness, and trust are woven into the tools that support students from preschool through graduation. When that foundation is in place, the burden no longer rests solely on the shoulders of an individual educator; instead, the system itself reinforces the relationship at every touchpoint.
It’s never too late in the school year—or in your career—to rethink your approach to chronic absenteeism. While educators must follow the policies required of them, they also have the quiet power to change the tone of their outreach. When they prioritize the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what,’ they build the bridges that help every family feel they have a place in school communities.
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Alex Meis, MPA, is Senior Director of Product at ParentSquare, where she leads attendance innovation efforts supporting 22 million families nationwide. She previously co-founded a nationwide attendance improvement company and has published research on attendance interventions with Harvard’s Proving Ground and the Deputy Mayor for Education’s Office in Washington DC. Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.
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