Transcript: Promoting Attendance and Reducing Chronic Absenteeism | Renewed Focus on School Connectedness and Student Engagement

Rebeca Cerna:

Welcome, we’re going to be starting momentarily.

MUSIC:

(Music).

Rebeca Cerna:

Hello, and welcome. Welcome to today’s webinar. Today’s session is going to be on Promoting Attendance and Reducing Chronic Absenteeism: A Renewed Focus on School Connectedness and Student Engagement. My name is Rebeca Cerna. I’m a Senior Director of Safe and Supportive Schools and Communities at WestEd, and also the Director of the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center, an initiative of the California Department of Ed. Feel free in the chat as we’re getting started to share where you’re joining us from. We’d love to see where you’re joining us from.

I’m going to start us off with some Zoom virtual platform notes. So for audio help and captions, we have our Zoom host, Alex Breyer. WestEd Zoom host is after her name if you need to send her a direct message. Find the CC Closed Captions icon on the Zoom toolbar to look at captions. You can also select view full transcript to open the transcript on the side panel.

We appreciate everyone if you’re sharing in the chat where you’re joining us from. Everyone is going to be muted and videos will be off. We are going to be recording this session and it will be posted on CDE’s California Safe and Supportive School’s website. After it’s posted, everyone who registered and attended will receive an email notification that it has been posted. This session will be one hour and it will end at 11:00. If you would like to stay with us for an additional 30 minutes today for an informal discussion and for additional Q&A with the presenters, feel free to join us. We invite you to stay with us. And we also have a Q&A feature on the Zoom toolbar. If you have any questions, feel free to add your questions into the Q&A feature.

This webinar is being hosted by the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. We provide supports to schools and districts on topics related to safe, healthy, and supportive learning environments. We are going to launch a Zoom poll right now to see what topics might be of interest to you. This helps us plan future webinars that we’re going to be hosting as part of the Center, so if you could just take a couple of seconds to answer this Zoom poll, that would be helpful in planning future events. So I’m just going to pause a little bit while this is being filled out, and then Alex will close it after a good number of you have filled it out.

In the meantime, I am going to continue sharing what we are going to do during today’s session. We’re going to do grounding by providing an overview on attendance and chronic absenteeism. Our main highlight of today is Hawthorne School District. They are going to be sharing what they have been doing on their journey towards improving attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism. As I mentioned, the webinar portion will be about one hour, then we’re going to stay for an additional 30 minutes for informal discussion and question and answers.

Okay. And we have the resources from today’s session can be found on this Padlet. You could either use your phone to scan this QR code, or we also are putting the link in the chat and you’ll be able to see the resources from today’s session. This is also where the recording… We will also have a link to the recording here as well. I’m just going to pause for a couple of seconds while you are able to scan it or access it from the chat.

And with that, I’m going to introduce our first speaker. Our first presenter is Jenny Betz. Jenny is a Senior Program Associate at WestEd, and she has worked with schools and districts, county offices of ed, and various state agencies across the country. Jenny provides professional learning, coaching, and technical assistance. Jenny’s areas of expertise are school connectedness, youth development, school climate and culture, all of which impact attendance. And with that, I’m going to pass it to Jenny who’s going to get us started.

Jenny Betz:

Thanks, Rebeca. And hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. Oops, I think I might’ve clicked. Nope, yep. I clicked it too many times. There we go. Okay. Thanks for being here and for having me, of course.

Before we get to our awesome main presenter, let’s take a few minutes to frame today’s topic, promoting attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism through a renewed focus on school connectedness and school engagement. So first, chronic absenteeism. It can seem vague, but there’s actually a definition. Attendance Works, a great organization that you should know if you don’t already, says that chronic absenteeism is missing 10% or more school days in a school year so that averages out to about two to three days per month. And when we calculate chronic absenteeism, those two to three days per month, it’s about any absence, excused or unexcused, because regardless of the reason, it’s missed learning, missed connections, and missed social interactions. So many of those absences actually, especially for younger students, are actually excused. And it’s a huge issue, especially since COVID. More than one in four students across the country are chronically absent, and that is a lot of young people missing a lot of school.

So although chronic absenteeism is a problem across the nation, every district, every school, every family, and every student has a unique context. So what are some of the factors that impact attendance, not just chronic absenteeism, but attendance coming to school or not in your school community? Take a moment to share in the chat and let us know what are the things that impact your school community.

Transportation is our biggest factor here, yes. Thank you, Melody. Yeah. It’s often not, do we want to come to school, it’s how do I get there? Mental health and/or social anxiety, absolutely. Work, schedule, start time and end time, yes, especially for parents. How are they going to get their kids there? Illness, anxiety, transportation, newcomers for other countries. Yeah. Engagement, right? Immigration enforcement, being scared, mental health, immigration, emotions and violence, lack of student motivation, medically complex students, absolutely. And medical supports needed. And family dynamics, there’s so much, right? So much that potentially for each student and each family impacts whether or not a student is able to show up to school on any given day. Not to mention how engaged they are once they’re there, right? I went too many slides again.

Okay. Thank you all for sharing. That was a lot and it went really quick through the chat. The next question is, what do we do about it? There are all those things. All of them are different or unique. What are we going to do? There are a lot of evidence-based practices that help support attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism, and a large percentage of them are related to school connectedness and school engagement, which is why we’re talking about those today. We’ll hear today about some of them from our main speaker, Rudy, but they include things like building trust and strengthening partnerships between students, staff, families, and administrators, identifying and using multiple sources of data to understand the issues and monitor progress. What’s really going on? What should we do about it? And is it working?

Identifying the root causes of missing school like some of the things that you put in there. Is it a transportation issue? Is it a safety issue or a health issue or whatever? Leveraging those tiered supports to implement universal practices and targeted interventions and also using supportive approaches. We can’t punish our way out of this. And then of course, it’s improving systems and coordination of funding and all those kinds of things, which we know all of you are working on. And so many of those things actually Rudy’s going to talk about in terms of what really goes on in the real world, not just on a slide.

So all of that is great, right? There are a lot of things, but what does any of it really mean? So a great tool actually is that recently the California Department of Education and Attendance Works, talked about them a minute ago, and they have some things on our Padlet and the resources. So they work together to create the California Attendance Guide, and it came out in conjunction with the state’s goal of reducing chronic absenteeism by 50% in five years, and it started last year, so by 50% across the state by 2030. You can find the attendance guide in the Padlet as well, there’s lots of good stuff in there, and it really prioritizes three things.

So health, wellbeing, and safety, students attend school when they are physically and emotionally healthy, and when they feel safe and supported. Family engagement, students attend school when they and their families are actively engaged as partners, and that they’re doing that in advancing the learning, yes, and overcoming any barriers to getting to school or engaging in school. And then student connectedness. So students attend school when they feel connected to caring adults and peers, when they feel like someone cares about them, when they’re engaged in prosocial activities and feel a sense of belonging.

So for a sense of how we’re doing on these priorities, the health, wellbeing, and safety; family engagement; and student connectedness; we can take a look at data from the California Healthy Kids Survey. So from a random sample of grades 7, 9, and 11 from 2023 to 2025, and that’s about 300,000 students at 800 schools in California, the survey shows us that on average, 52% of students agreed or strongly agreed to questions about parental involvement, whether their parents are involved. On average, 55% of students agreed or strongly agreed to questions about school connectedness and whether they felt connected, whether they felt like someone cared about them. And 57% of 7th graders, 58% of 9th graders, and 62% of 11th graders reported feeling safe or very safe at school. So my question is, what do you notice about these numbers? When I see these numbers, I see a lot of good happening and I see a lot of room for growth.

So we know what chronic absenteeism is, why it’s important, how big of an issue it is, and where to find some guidance for addressing it, the Padlet, but what does any of it really look like in real life on the ground? So today we are lucky we get to learn from Rudy Salas as he shares how his district has been integrating evidence-based practices to address attendance and chronic absenteeism. Rudy’s the Director of Pupil Personnel Services for Hawthorne School District in Southern California. With 26 years in education, he served as a classroom teacher, English learner specialist, assistant principal, principal, and coordinator of curriculum and instruction. He’s committed to strengthening student connectedness and improving attendance outcomes. He’s pretty amazing, and it is my pleasure to introduce Rudy.

Rudy Salas:

Good morning, everyone. Rudy Salas with the Hawthorne School District. Thank you, Jenny, for the introduction. Thank you, Rebeca, for the invite to join today, and to be able to share the Hawthorne School District’s journey. As you said earlier, it is a journey, right? I’m also here to tell you that the needs of our students are probably very similar to the needs of your students at your school sites as the initial poll indicated, right?

The Hawthorne School District, 26 years here with the Hawthorne School District as first teaching assignment as a fourth grade teacher, and then now the Director of Pupil Personnel Services. I’m proud to be an employee here, proud to live in the city of Hawthorne. We’re in LA County just nestled probably south of the 105. If you’re in LA, you know about freeways, right? So we’re just south of the 105 and east of the 405 freeway. We’re probably, it’s a long walk, but not too much, not too far from SoFi Stadium as a point of reference.

We have seven elementary schools, three middle schools, and one dependent charter that I help support here in the Hawthorne School District. We’re a predominantly Hispanic Latino student population with African Americans comprised of about 20% and that’ll fluctuate back and forth. And we do have a growing population of Middle Eastern students that we’re tracking and we’re seeing. We’re high socioeconomically disadvantaged students, our English learners, and obviously our foster youth that everyone has on their campus.

Next slide. I’m here on two, as I stated earlier, two beliefs in the district, and I do have to highlight and bring up our Superintendent, Dr. Brian Markarian, because he’s the leader of our district, and he’s the one that set division and the direction along with the school board, specifically on two tenants, and believes is students are successful when they have a trusted adult on campus, and they have a sense of belonging. And we understand that today I’m going to be talking about how our systems in the Hawthorne School District support and build that sense of belonging and establish a trusting adult for students, right? We’re going to be talking about staff/site teams, the roles that we have.

Building a community, because we know that it takes a community to support the students’ needs. And in the community, we’re talking about community organizations that support the community, we’re talking about the individual students, we’re talking about the parents, right? We’re talking about the guardian, the siblings, and then our staff, right? Our classified staff, our certificated staff, and obviously our management, administrative staff, and district level staff.

And then we’re going to be talking about leading the work. At some point, you have to roll up your sleeves and do the work and hold individuals accountable, have conversations, and be that example for students, and all of this comes to a start with improving school culture. And our goal of improving the culture on our campuses and really taking a look at from the lens of multi-tier systems and support is how can we improve that school culture for that whole child. The graphic on the right side was my attempt to telling you that it is not linear. It goes left, it goes up and down, and it all really depends, and it’s driven by the needs of the students.

We’ll be specifically focusing on inputting of data, identifying data, tracking the data, monitoring your data for school culture and data attendance, building ownership, right? I often reference, if you’re in any of my PDs, if you’re in any of my meetings that I lead in the district, you’re going to probably hear this example over and over, and it’s a cookie jar. The cookie jar, when it comes to a school culture, when it comes to attendance, when it comes to suspensions, there’s a lot of hands in the cookie jar, but no one wants to take responsibility, so how do we build that sense of responsibility and ownership among the staff? And obviously, our work with LA County Office of Education and implementing PBIS and obviously the organization Capturing Kids’ Hearts to strengthen that sense of belonging and building our culture.

Leading inquiry, right? As the district administrator, I facilitate inquiry with our admin staff later today at one o’clock, I have a meeting with my site administrators, and guess what we’re going to be talking about? Attendance and chronic absenteeism, right? Leading that inquiry, conducting root cause analysis. How do we partner with Digital Promise to train our school teams, right? Attendance teams to conduct those root cause analysis and then being responsive, right? So if we know the data, we look at it, then what are the next steps in monitoring our next steps? Next slide.

Why school culture belongs at the center of MTSS. It’s MTSS by itself is telling us, you look at the whole child, and your decisions are based on data, right? So if we want to create in this journey a sense of belonging and safety where students engage and feel valued, we need to be looking at this, right? We need to build data confidence. That means that the classroom teacher and me at the district level are comfortable looking at data, talking about data, making decisions about data, making the determinations on whether, yes, the supports are working, the supports are not working, and how do we have to pivot to make sure that the individual students gets the right support?

And then we have staff coherence, right? When we start talking and calibrating ourselves, we as adults respond appropriately and consistently, whether that’s from room 22 to room 23, whether that’s one of our elementary schools to another elementary school, from elementary to middle school, middle school to high school, we’re looking at the data and we’re responding with common language, common routines, and common expectations. And then obviously our work with PBIS about tier responses, right? Making sure that we have supports that are for the individual, for the small group, and school-wide actions become more precise. Next slide.

So systems, specifically, how do you build systems? Because attendance and school culture, there’s a lot of data points, right? There’s a lot of data points that you have to have a system to manage that, whether you’re going to be tracking attendance, the tardies, chronic absenteeism. If you’re doing office referrals, minor incidents, major incidents. How do you gather an input student voice? Are you going to have focus groups, right? Are you going to conduct interviews? Is it going to be a survey? Walkthroughs, right? Every Thursday, we call what we have a sacred time, basically as district administrators, I’m walking classrooms and I’m walking school sites with school administrators with a focus, right? I’m coming on as a school culture focus, right? Ed services department’s coming on with more of an instructional focus, right? So we make sure that we get to the school sites every week, at least. That is the minimum that I’m walking classrooms, I’m usually walking classrooms at least two to three times a week, specifically to support the school sites.

Our TFIs, and then our logs, our lesson logs, looking at the summaries of observations to try to establish patterns. And we use that to track, right? We use that information. So if you’re going to gather the data, then you have to track it, you have to look at it to segregate it. Are you looking at it by grade level of establishing some trends, student groups by school site, right? Are you providing interventions? Do you have rosters of the students that are assigned to interventions, but do you have attendance rosters? Because if you assign a student intervention, but the student is not showing up, then that intervention cannot be determined whether it’s effective or not, right? Because the student needs to be present, right? And what supports do we have logged to make a determination on whether that support is working or not working?

What common look fors, right? Having conversations with site administrators, having conversations with classroom teachers about the look fors, or do you have a dashboard that’s consistently tracking your data? And that is the anchor of where everyone is looking at the data and then making informed decisions, or is everyone looking at a different data source and then coming to a conclusion?

And then our biggest thing, I think, and it started last year and this year it grew is our attendance plans. Every school site has an attendance plans that documents actions, identifies owners of the actions, establishes timelines, and more importantly, the desired outcomes that the school site would like to address and to have based on the supports and actions that they implement for the school year.

And once you track, you obviously have to monitor so how often are you specifically talking, looking at the data, having conversations, comparing your outcomes? Are you asking what is working? What is not working? And for who is this action working for? What needs to change, and who is having success and who is not having success are critical questions that once you analyze the data.

And then obviously, if you have the, input the data, you’ve tracked it and you address the questions, then what’s the next step? How do we respond in a cohesive place where we’re building trust, where we’re building the sense of belonging, right? Where we want students to come to school, where we are partners, and we’re not necessarily responding in a punitive fashion, right? We’re more responding from a supportive stance. Next slide, please.

We’re going to have a poll. I’m very interested to see, does your school site have an attendance team, right? Does your school site have an attendance plan? And then more importantly, who is part of the attendance team of the school site attendance team? So if you can go ahead and take some time to answer the poll questions.

I know Alex will show some of the results as soon as we get some responses. All right, good to see. Right. There’s about 77% of individuals that attended today have an attendance team rights. If you don’t, then obviously my recommendation is what you take care of or what data you monitor is critical, right? It’s what’s going to improve. So if you do not have an attendance team, then I think that has been, for our journey, for our success in addressing attendance, chronic absenteeism in school culture, our attendance teams have been critical in establishing ownership and establishing responsibility of addressing that. And I go back to the example of the cookie jar and where there’s many hands in the cookie jar.

Does the school site have an attendance plan, right? 54%, right? So the attendance plan is going to be critical because that identifies your actions. What as a school level, right? And you can take that attendance plan and have individual classroom actions. And then even at some of our school sites, we have grade level actions, right? Because sometimes the attendance, the need is specifically at a grade level and sometimes it’s down to a specific classroom that needs that support. I can tell you that in my elementary schools, my classrooms that need attendance support are my TK and kinder classrooms. For whatever reason, across our elementaries, it’s going to be TK and NK.

And then the next one is who’s part of your attendance team? Okay. So glad to see that there’s an administrators, obviously office staff, right? Specifically office staff in our specific situation is the individual that’s in charge of the attendance component. Some school sites have them as attendance clerks. We actually have them as secretaries, right? Teachers are going to be very important, right? Specifically when you’re trying to establish that sense of ownership across the classrooms, counselors, and then support staff additional.

The one challenge that I have maybe for next year for our, as we grow and we’re doing the attendance team and the attendance plan for the third year is going to be to add that student voice, right? Either a student voice or a parent voice to our attendance team is our goal that I’m going to be establishing for our schools next year.

And then so what are the roles specifically because you may have a team, but if you don’t have clear roles, clear expectation as far as, hey, teachers at the beginning of the year sign up, there’s first meeting, there’s tons of committees that you have to sign up, you select one, select two, depending on what your school site customs are. And you sign up for a committee and sometimes it meets, sometimes it doesn’t meet. This is a committee that needs to meet on a monthly basis minimum, right? So it has to meet, and depending on the need of the school site, we have to increase the frequency, right?

I can tell you that we are currently meeting biweekly with three school sites whose attendance numbers are not showing the improvement that we want. We increase and we support and we participate. We’re talking to those three school sites every two weeks on attendance. Our expectation is that our site administrators are looking at that chronic absenteeism. We have a dashboard and they’re looking at that daily. They’re looking at that daily to figure out exactly are we up, are we down? Which students are now chronic? Which students are in the bubble of becoming on that road to becoming chronic absenteeism? And then which students are obviously attending and having good attendance.

So as the administrator, you’re the leader. But you also have, as the leader, you can’t do everything. As a site administrator, I rely heavily on my deans, relied heavily on my counselors, the social workers, psychologists, and our BCBAs to specifically support maybe because we know that attendance usually is paired up with another need that the student has. Whether that be medical, whether that be behavior, whether SEL or mental health. Those are all paired up. We normally do not see an attendance concern for a student in isolation by themselves.

And then obviously the teacher. We have found in our journey that if we want our parents to, or we want them to act on something to change, that the number one person to deliver the message, to request that change or deliver that information, that they’re going to pick up the phone call, that they’re going to respond to the text, that they’re going to reply to the email, that they’re going to show up to a conference is when our classroom teachers deliver the message. Whether that’s information about the number of absences that the student has had accumulated for the week, for the month, for the year, whether, hey, we need to have a SARC meeting or we need to have attendance conference, or we just need you to come in because we have some supports that we want to discuss, whether those be on campus or our community resources. Our most effective individual staff member has been the teacher.

Second to that has been the office staff. And then if the student does have a one-on-one or there’s that individual student that works closely with the student, then it’s those. That’s our response. That’s how we have identified when we looked at it as far as when do parents act on what we’re asking them to do. That has been our method of communication. And then obviously making sure that we have students and families input.

We’ve partnered, we’re actually fortunate to partner with Digital Promise. We are a lead of innovative schools, which is a national coalition of forward-thinking educational leaders. The network connects about over 150 leaders across 34 states to promote equity innovation through collaboration. The purpose is to network, of the networks to bring innovative leaders to tackle complex educational challenges. And we specifically partner with Digital Promise to train and conduct our root cause analysis this school year for our attendance team.

We had a series of webinars and in person sessions, and the biggest aha that we had as a collective team was when we specifically had our interviews, our stakeholder interviews. As a team, we hypothesized, we looked at the data, had conversations, established goals, but one of the key components that was missing was the voice of the student and the voice of the parent or guardian, the caregiver. Site teams were charged with the responsibility of interviewing teachers, interviewing administrators, classified staff, students, and parents/guardians, and specifically addressing what are the reasons why students are absent. And that information was then compiled to specifically address and identify needs that maybe we weren’t thinking of, right? Getting that voice from the students and from the family members. Next slide.

And then another partner that we have obviously to address school culture is Capturing Kids’ Hearts. We’ve been partners with LA County Office of Education Positive Behavior and Interventions, but one of the things that we were looking at and identifying is that difficulty making connections, right? Students to student connections, student to staff connections, and then staff to student connections. So Capturing Kids’ Hearts works at improving your school culture. When staff creates an environment that’s consistent and they facilitate activities with the purpose of creating a sense of connection, a sense of belonging and accountability.

And Capturing Kids’ Hearts has… They refer to the EXCEL pathway. E is for engage. That’s where students are greeted at the doors. There’s eye contact. They’re welcome into the classroom. We explore where we have an opportunity to listen to their personal, emotional, and academic needs.

The exploring piece, normally we start every classroom with good things. So what are some good things happening? Whether that be on campus, whether that be off campus, at home, personal, right? But just that allows our teachers to get to know the student a little bit better.

And then we communicate. That’s usually where we deliver the content, that’s the meet of the lesson where we’re delivering content.

And then we empower. Our goal with empowering is to provide multiple opportunities for students’ voice, for roles within the classroom, and then opportunities for them to lead.

And then we launch. The launch piece is the closing piece of the lesson or the timeframe if you’re talking about elementary schools. And we always try to end with a reflection, an affirmation, right? Or some forward momentum, something that moves us forward to allow us for the community to grow and has a role for the student that students are a part of the classroom and they’re a part of the school. Next slide.

So leading the work, facilitate conversations, monitor data, respond to the student needs. And I want to pause here specifically because we couldn’t do this alone. We rely heavily on our community, on our partnerships, on our strategic partnerships to help us address and support students in the development of a positive school culture and a sense of belonging. And part of that, obviously, as I mentioned, was Digital Promise. Our work with our PBIS department from the Los Angeles County Office of Education to help us specifically address our tier ones and tier two systems and supports under our MTSS programming, our partnerships with the Venice Family Clinic. We as a district or our community schools, we’ve been able to open two clinics at two elementary schools to address the medical needs, because we identify that as a need in our community, access to health. Our partnership with our Hawthorne Police Department, they run Hawthorne Police Department, good neighbor games.

So they come on campus during lunchtime to facilitate sports tournaments. So they ran a basketball tournament, they ran a soccer futsal tournament, and they’ll also be running next fall a flag football tournament, specifically to build connections to ensure that, hey, that sense of belonging, sense of safety is not just on campus, but also in the community as well. And then obviously our social, emotional and mental health supports with Richstone Family Center and our New Star Family Justice Center to provide that social, emotional, mental health, and conflict mediation support. It’s critical that you have these partners because you’re not going to be able to do it all.

As a school site, you’re going to have limitations of staff, you’re going to have limitations of funding, you’re going to have limitations of activities, right? Of time, and so these partnerships are critical. And I wanted to highlight those specifically here because if you’re leading the work, you have to notice the trends. What are your subgroups’ needs? What are your classroom needs? What are the experiences? What are the needs? And then you got to have an inquiry mindset, right? What is attendance, referrals, our SEL screeners, our student voice telling us, right? And then conduct a root cause analysis. That’s why I recommend at least once a month, but the reality of it is if you have higher needs, you should be meeting more frequently to address the needs of the students.

And then the act piece, right? What are some of the things that activities and supports that you can implement school-wide? Which ones require a small group or which ones require individualized responses to make it appropriate? And then what evidence are you looking at to make a determination that the support is working? Next slide.

Poll question here in the chat, does your school district track attendance data? Not just does it input, does it track it, right? And then the other question is, how often do you review and engage staff about your attendance data? If we can show the results of the poll here. So just about 90% of you guys say, yes, we’re tracking the data, right? How often, right? And how often to me, there’s no right or wrong. As I said earlier, our goal is to meet monthly, to discuss attendance data right, but we also know that some school sites need additional support. We’re on a biweekly, every two weeks, we’re meeting to discuss their individual data regarding that. Okay? Thank you.

So in the chat, what data visualization does your district use? And by data visualization, how do you convert the Excel sheet over to bar graphs? What images is your district using? If you can go ahead and put that in the chat, please. Some of you guys may not use data visualization, right? Some of you guys may get the data, that Excel sheet, and then you’re converting that on your own to a data table or some type of bar graph, line graph overall. Are you looking at data over a period? Are you looking over just a week, a month? We’ve got spreadsheets, we’re looking at areas, right? Analytics, in house power, yearly trends by class, percentage of chronic absenteeism. Does your school site have a student list? Do you identify the students? Does your data identify students, individual students by school sites, by grade levels, right? Are you able to track the student groups?

So you’re creating greater graph, and the reason I wanted specifically to talk about this is that we do this at the district level. There is one central location where the data visualization is created and we’re all looking at the same data source, right? We’re not adding additional work, we’re not adding additional steps for our school sites to convert that data, write that Excel sheet with a ton of numbers on it. We do that for them to facilitate and expedite the conversations at the school site team levels, and so that they can be concerned about monitoring, is identifying supports, actions, and then making a determination on whether those supports or actions are working. How do you communicate the importance of attendance to staff? How does it trickle down? How does that message go from the district level all the way down to the staff member, to the classroom teacher on attendance?

Okay. I see that there’s Tableau, school status. So how are you communicating the importance of attendance to staff? If you can input that in the chat. As a needs to know basis in the newsletters too for parents, connecting the loss of ADA tied to absences and communicating that to staff and program, identifying, connecting the absences, the SEO needs, right? I see shout-outs in the morning message, right? Class challenges, independent studies, right? Weekly meetings as grade levels, monthly meetings at the school sites, the monthly newsletters, right? Coffee with the principal presentations, that’s something that our school sites do, yes. And then send district wide state of attendance, email with performance updates by month. Flyers, FAQs, right, communicating those, school site councils, and then our [inaudible 00:45:54].

It’s very, very important. One of the ways that we communicate to staff, right? Obviously staff, while we have a site team that addresses attendance teams, right? Every staff member is invited to it. So if you didn’t sign up, you can also attend, right? To students, we have classroom student conferences where teachers have conferences with the students regarding their attendance, right? So it’s something we have classroom challenges that compete, right? Some of us, my school sites have mascots, so they either have a plush stuffed animal of their mascot, a trophy or something, and that, depending on the school site, that classroom, the individual that has the lowest chronic absenteeism, the individual, the classroom that has the highest attendance rate gets that award and then that award travels across the classrooms, right? That’s how we communicate to staff.

And then in families and caregivers, I want to remember that we’ve had our most success delivering the importance of attendance to our families and our caregivers when the message is delivered by the classroom teacher. So it’s not what the message says, but in this case, it’s the individual delivering the message, right? Because the reality is if I get a call from the principal, I’m going to hear it because of the role. If I get a call from the classroom teacher, I’m going to listen to it, I’m going to have a conversation with my student about it, and then I’m going to act on what they’re asking me to do so that’s just our reality that we have here in Hawthorne. Next slide.

And then obviously, you got to keep the pulse, or what I’ll be talking about is leading the work. As a site administrator, as a district administrator, as stated earlier, at one o’clock, I’m meeting with my site administrators to specifically, once again, have a pulse on attendance and school culture. So obviously, if you’re working at a school site leader, if you’re a support staff or district leader, when do students feel most connected? Having those interviews, having those conversations and least connected during the day, having those audits, right? Where do routines break down? Is it at arrival, transitions, lunch, dismissal or class when you’re talking about?

Do students feel known by at least one caring adult? Are students told we missed you? Because being told you were missed on a day that you were absent and then coming back changes your outlook. And are barriers related to transportation, as I was identified earlier, conflict, is there conflict, right? Specifically our New Star Family Justice Center, our partnership, they do our conflict mediations, they do our training of our support staff and conflict mediation to address that so that conflicts between students get deescalated and not escalated. And because we know that if we do not address them, they normally end up with a fight. And then once you have a fight, then as a district or as a school site administrator, you have to make that determination, is this something that now I have to suspend or can I address this? We try to address it before it reaches that point with other means of corrections, which is conflict mediation.

Anxiety, right? Are there some SEL mental health needs of the individual students? And we’re constantly working at building activities for students and for parents to develop a sense of belonging. And what would make attending school and participating feel more possible tomorrow? We’re constantly asking ourselves as what activities, what lessons, how is this lesson engaged? A part of our ed services department, their initiative is UDL, Universal Design for Learning, right? Designing lessons that are designed specifically to engage students in their preferred learning modalities. So parallel to the work that I’m doing under my department, the ed services are engaging in implementing UDL across the district to support learning for the students. Next slide.

And then use trends to respond at the right level, and this is PBIS, right? Making sure that you have tier one, tier two, tier three supports, and we’re grateful to partner with LA County Office of Education, PBIS department, to help us specifically establish our tier ones, tier two, tier three supports, right? When you’re talking about the individual, those needs are individualized. Some group sessions, right? We’ve done a lot of work with our MTSS implementation of establishing tier two supports, right? Group supports to help students. And then school-wide, what are the common things across the school and across the district that we expect to implement school-wide to support, right? Because we know that when tier one, tier two are in place, it minimizes the need for referrals to tier three supports of students. Next slide.

And then this is just, I just wanted to provide an activity, right? Give you an example of what’s one thing that this can be individualized, this can be a small group or school-wide, right? And we did special delivery. These are postcards that on the backside, teachers write a personalized message, whether that be to address behavior, whether that be to address school, whether, “Hey, the student has missed two days, we miss you.”

Those are personalized and delivered. Every school site has a postcard, and basically it’s a message. And the intent and purpose, specifically, I know that if my son or my daughter gets mail, I’m usually the one that picks up the mail from the mailbox. And if there’s something addressed to my son or my daughters, I normally open it because they’re underage and I read the message. So you’re really delivering the message to the parent on the importance of attendance, if that’s your message, and then you’re also delivering the message to the student, right? This is an activity that we’ve engaged several times on this and we have found it to be positive and actually implementing and improving individual’s attendance. Next slide.

So what next, right? Mr. Salas, you talked about school culture, you talked about a sense of belonging, you talked about trusting adults, you talked about your partnerships with capturing kids’ hearts, PBIS implementation or MTSS. What next? I mean, at week one, you got to have an action plan, right? If you’re going to start it now or if you’re going to start at the beginning of the year, obviously confirm your site team, establish norms, name that data source that you’ll review consistently. So identify that common data source that you will be looking at, whether that’s at your school level, across multiple schools or across the district. Make sure that you have a cadence to pull attendance, right?

To look at referrals, your SEL data for implementation data and identify trends and bright spots, right? Do not forget to do good things. You need to take those small wins and just to reinforce to your team, to the school staff that you may not be where you want to be, but you’re headed in the right direction. You need to celebrate the small wins.

If you can, I really, really high recommendation on conducting student focus groups, right? Individual interviews. If you have the manpower, do individual interviews. If you do not have the manpower, then do maybe some focus groups to really test your assumptions as far as why students are not showing up to school. You may realize that, hey, there’s some additional needs that this household has to provide that’s beyond the classroom teacher, and that’s where you elicit maybe your social workers, your district staff to support that, the staff that you have in place to support those type of needs.

And then identify school-wide actions. One school-wide actions, one small group response, and then the metric for your next review. What gets measured and discussed with care is more likely to improve. And obviously, we know that attendance, specifically chronic absenteeism, is something that we need to measure. It’s something that we need to discuss in order to improve. Next slide.

That’s my two cents into what our journey of the Hawthorne School District. Hopefully you found it informative. Hopefully you found some negligence, maybe some ideas that you’re not utilizing in your school district at your school site in your classroom. I am obviously, and we’ll be sharing resources specifically in the Padlet. I’ll be sharing our template of our attendance site plan specifically, but if you have questions, if you have, “Hey, I need a little bit more information on this topic that you discussed,” obviously, I’m an email away. I obviously want to thank WestEd for inviting me to share my and the Hawthorne School District journey with you guys. Have a great day.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Rudy. That was a lot of great, rich information to share on what you’ve done at your district and what you’ve done in terms of partnering, how you’ve used data. Thanks for sharing the prompts on one of the slides that you had for focus groups and interviews. There was a lot of great nuggets on your slides about the roles that different people might play on Teams.

And on this last slide that you had, you had something about finding that practical rhythm. And so it’s so important to have how do you embed this process in the work? So if folks before, I know some of you might have to leave at the hour mark, but if there’s one key takeaway that you can share in the chat, please do so.

We are going to be transitioning into a Q&A portion, so if you can share a key takeaway, we also have a brief poll on a feedback poll. So if you’re able to answer these three questions very quickly about the session, that would be very helpful for us so that we can also report back on how helpful the session was. So if you could just share response to that poll, we would appreciate it and we will keep that up for a couple more seconds.

We do want to let folks know about some other upcoming events that the California Stronger Connections TA Center is going to be hosting. We have a wellness mini session that is going to be hosted on May 13th, and that is going to be led by San Bernardino County Office of Education. And on May 21st, we have a webinar on creating supportive conditions for staff wellbeing. That is going to be led by Orange County Department of Ed and a principal from a high school in San Juan Capistrano, and you could register for those using the QR code, and we also will drop the link in the chat of where you’re able to do that. Oops, I went in the wrong direction.

And for those of you who have to hop off, we thank you for joining us. And for those of you who are able to stay on, we were able to gather some of the questions that you shared in the Q&A, and so we will be going through some of those questions as well.