From Compliance to Invitation

How school systems in Oregon are gaining ground on the attendance battle by focusing on individual student relationships

When 13 Oregon school districts agreed in January 2024 to confront chronic absenteeism together, they shared a daunting starting point. In 2023-24, one in three Oregon students was chronically absent, missing at least 10 percent of the school year and giving the state one of the nation’s highest absentee rates.

The participating districts ranged from Burnt River, a ranching community of 65 students near Oregon’s eastern border with Idaho, to Beaverton, the state’s second-largest district with nearly 37,000 in the suburbs west of Portland. What they shared was a budget problem: A statewide fiscal squeeze left few able to add the nurses, social workers or family liaisons that research identifies as effective measures.

And yet 12 of the districts moved the numbers, posting reductions in chronic absence that ran from 4.2 to 10.6 percent in the first year.

They did it not by purchasing a program but by changing a culture. Their experience, documented in a study for the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators and AASA, carries a message: The most powerful attendance interventions are not policies or purchases. They are relationships that are within reach of districts of every size and circumstance.