How to Improve School Funding and Attendance with Student and Parent Engagement

If your school district is losing funding due to attendance-based enrollment calculations, re-engaging students and parents is key

Research indicates that students who miss 10% of the school year—about 18 days in most districts, or two days per month—suffer negative effects on their academic performance.¹ While chronic absenteeism is a complex issue influenced by social determinants and systemic obstacles, the impact of such absenteeism includes poorer student outcomes, such as students being:

• Less likely to graduate
• Less prepared for college and career
• More likely to experience social and emotional challenges

Schools and districts may also endure consequences from poor student attendance if their funding is tied to their average daily attendance (ADA), a metric some local and state governments use to determine the amount of funds allocated to education. When students are absent and the ADA lowers, districts lose funding. When students attend school and the ADA rises, funding rises, too. Schools and districts are incentivized to improve attendance rates, but the challenge is finding ways to get students back to class.

School absenteeism is influenced by various social determinants and intersects with issues of equity and access. Researchers often categorize the reasons for truancy into four groups:

1. Student-specific factors
2. Family-specific factors
3. School-specific factors
4. Community-specific factors.²

Younger students tend to fall into the first two groups, while teens are more frequently associated with the last two.

Helping more kids make it to school each day is a critical goal for districts everywhere, and research shows that building a school culture that engages students and parents has a dramatic impact on student attendance. Strategies to improve attendance include: 

• Overcoming language barriers. For families whose primary language is not English, communication from schools can be burdensome to translate. Paducah Public Schools in Kentucky used SMS messaging as well as emails and voice calls to help overcome language barriers and ensure the timely delivery of information. With PowerSchool Communication + Attend, the Paducah school system was able to translate its messages into more than 80 languages, ensuring equitable access to information among all families and boosting the rate of reply by 450% in the first year of implementation.  
• Creating relationships between the teacher and the home. In New York, Hamilton Grange Middle School struggled to maintain contact with families who were impacted by inconsistent housing and internet access. With the onset of the pandemic, they needed a central lifeline that would connect them with students’ parents to check in about schoolwork, wellness, and more. Principal Benjamin Lev said, “One of the things we would not have been able to do with the efficiency that we were able to because of PowerSchool Communication was our device distribution. We gave out approximately 250 laptops in the school over two days, and that was all organized via Communication messaging. When I said that [the solution] had allowed our communication to grow exponentially, it’s because parents were receiving text messages that they then spoke to other parents about. They would say, ‘Hey, I’m getting these texts from the school, did you receive it as well?’ That actually catalyzed other parents to get in touch with the school.’”    
• Using real-time attendance data to report absences to families. At John Adams High School in New York, students had a habit of cutting their afternoon classes because they knew their teacher would likely be too busy and constrained for time to report the absence to their parents or guardians. When the administration got serious about improving attendance, they began using PowerSchool Attendance Intervention to send automated text messages that immediately notify families about a student’s absence. Since implementing their attendance solution, the school has seen steady increases in their attendance rate, graduation rate, and college readiness index.  

In six states–California, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas—school funding is based on ADA. The ADA is calculated by subtracting the daily average number of absent students from the number of enrolled students. A student who attends school every day is calculated as one ADA. Therefore, schools are incentivized to reach out to families whose students are often absent to implement support systems and transparent communication that will help the student get to school more regularly.  

Just like the communities we partner with, PowerSchool is committed to helping more kids make it to school each day—and the initial results from our 2017–2018 impact study tell us there’s reason to be excited: districts using PowerSchool Attendance Intervention and PowerSchool Communication to track attendance and engage families average a 2% increase in average daily attendance (ADA) in their first year—and that translates to a serious budget boost. Tarek Alamarie, Assistant Principal of Guidance, Data, and Small Learning Communities at John Adams High School in New York, says, “We implemented [PowerSchool Communication] in 2016, and if you look at our data, that’s exactly when you see an increase in attendance rate, increase in graduation rate, decrease in chronic absenteeism, and an increase in state exam scores, so there’s definitely a correlation between family engagement and student achievement. No doubt about it.”