Five Moves That Reduced Our Chronic Absenteeism

Improving student attendance in Pflugerville, Texas

At one of our school district’s annual principals’ meetings that focused on student attendance, I asked campus leaders to paint a picture of chronic absenteeism at their schools. Not just average daily attendance but chronic absenteeism.

That question started the journey. Most leaders could speak to average daily attendance and understood its impact. Still, we could not yet talk easily about the students behind the chronic absenteeism rate, grade-level patterns or quiet drift before students crossed a formal threshold. We do that kind of analysis all the time with academics. Attendance needed the same visibility.

That meeting shaped how I approached the work with each of our 33 traditional campuses. I could not ask leaders to own a problem they could not see. The first move was putting usable information in their hands and building routines around it.

We have started to see the pattern pay off. By 2024–25, we saw campus-level drops at elementary schools such as Ruth Barron and River Oaks, which reduced their chronic absenteeism numbers by 9.1 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively.