Using Data Proactively to Attend to Declining Enrollment and Chronic Absenteeism

Improve student success and operational funding with the right enrollment and attendance tool

Since 2020, public school enrollment has declined, with a loss of at least 1.2 million students due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, chronic absenteeism for students returning to school is rising dramatically. Some districts have seen absentee rates as high as 40%. 

The combination of falling enrollment and fewer students in class creates a number of issues: 

• It’s difficult for teachers to do their jobs effectively 
• District funding can be severely impacted 
• Chronic absenteeism can lead to poor academic performance and dropouts

Plus, student dropouts negatively affect enrollment for the following year, making schools work even harder to attract new students.

A complete end-to-end enrollment and attendance suite of edtech products can help address these issues. PowerSchool’s unified products provide enrollment analytics, enrollment management, and data-driven attendance interventions to help your district proactively work on declining enrollment, ensure secure, accurate student data, and improve chronic absenteeism.

Address Declining Enrollment with Predictive Enrollment Analytics 

Even pre-pandemic, student enrollment was already in decline throughout the U.S. public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen—leaving districts to answer, “Which school do we need to close next?”

“There’s no more difficult action by the governing board than to close a school,” says Alvaro Meza, Assistant Superintendent/CBO at Gilroy Unified School District, CA. He adds that when in that situation, “you want to have a strategic partner that has done this before.”

Determining which school (or schools) to close can be a long, challenging process—and even more complicated if you don’t have all the data you need. PowerSchool Predictive Enrollment Analytics provides a combination of K-12 data analytics and enrollment forecasting tools that support leaders with actionable insights to inform those tough decisions. These tools allow you to look at different data together, including current enrollment, enrollment projections, new residential developments, school boundaries, school capacity, facility conditions, and more, to ensure your decisions are sound.

“Predictive Enrollment Analytics has really powerful tools to help you make that painful decision and analyze which school makes the most sense to close,” says Meza. “The decision to close a campus was spot on. We couldn’t have picked a better situation to land on.” 

Nobody likes the idea of closing a school. But with Predictive Enrollment Analytics, you can better prepare for declining enrollment and ensure you do what’s best for your district and students.

Ensure Accurate Student Data with Online Enrollment  

Once you’ve finalized which schools will stay open, determined boundaries, and allocated resources, it’s time to make sure you get your students accurately enrolled into your district. PowerSchool offers two online enrollment management solutions that make the process easier for families, increase student safety, cut costs, and save time: PowerSchool Enrollment and PowerSchool Enrollment Express.

Online enrollment streamlines the challenging process for both families and staff. With an intuitive interface, families can complete the enrollment or annual information update process 100% online, right from home, at work, or anywhere.

“Online enrollment was a huge time saver for families. We have a large farm community where there are five-plus students presiding in any home. Before pre-registration with paper packs, families had to write down all of this same information for each and every one of their students,” says Denise DeJuliannie, Technology Director at Eden Valley-Watkins Schools District, MN.

Our online enrollment solutions help improve student safety by collecting health plan information, including plans for students with asthma, allergies, diabetes, and more, ensuring critical data is available in emergencies.

“Our nurses love that they get the information so quickly and that they can go into Enrollment themselves and pull those forms,” explains Kim Byrne, PowerSchool Administrator at Teton County School District #1, WY. “Before, school would start, and we wouldn’t have all of the information we needed. We’d send home packets with families, and parents would have to fill out forms and return them. Nurses would have to make calls and follow up. Now they get that information right away, and they’re thrilled.”

Online enrollment frees administrators from excessive data entry so they can refocus their time on other critical projects while eliminating unnecessary printing and mailing costs from your budget. 

Colby Stevens, Director of Transportation at Teton County School District #1, says, “With the ability to add transportation-specific student information into PowerSchool Enrollment, our department has saved so much time. Rather than having to manually communicate this information to parents, we can now get the information into parents’ hands in a more quick, efficient, and accurate way. This has saved us a few thousand dollars and probably over 20 hours.” 

Make Data-Driven Attendance Improvements

Enrolled students need to attend classes to benefit from the instructional materials and learning resources you’ve invested in. PowerSchool’s attendance improvement solution combines PowerSchool Attendance Intervention data-driven attendance intervention capabilities with research-backed family engagement and communication tools in PowerSchool Communication to improve student outcomes and overall engagement.

“I can’t imagine going back to not having attendance and communications together in the same software. PowerSchool Communication and PowerSchool Attendance Intervention enable us to send effective communications based on data-driven decisions,” says Rebecca DelBarone, Assistant Principal at Del Sesto Middle School, RI.  

Boost attendance by monitoring and analyzing attendance data, identifying trends, and providing actionable data with Unified Operations Attend. Engage families with PowerSchool Communication by sending attendance notifications, nudges, and letters via two-way translated text.

“PowerSchool Communication empowers us to know exactly who we need to reach out to and what we need to say to make the biggest impact,” says Troy Brock, Director of Pupil Personnel at Paducah Public Schools, KY.

Communication + PowerSchool Attendance Intervention increases capacity by seamlessly integrating with your SIS to visualize your attendance data, quickly identifying early warning signs of chronic absenteeism, and automating appropriate interventions. 

 “We implemented PowerSchool Communication and PowerSchool Attendance Intervention (formerly KiNVO) 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,” says Tarek Alamarie, Assistant Principal of Guidance, Data, and Accountability, John Adams High School at NYC Department of Education (NYCDOE). 

You can use Communication + PowerSchool Attendance Intervention to foster positive school-home relationships by using an empathetic approach to communication that encourages change effectively. Within this method, you can shift from punitive measures and instead address barriers to family engagement, such as device availability, language barriers, and feelings of being excluded at school. 

“We now have nearly 100% of our students engaged in learning, which is higher than our regular average during ‘normal’ times. It just makes me smile,” says Karen Bailey, Principal at PS 153, NYCDOE.

Communication + PowerSchool Attendance Intervention protect attendance-based funding and increase your ROI on enrollment, educational tools, and other resources districts have invested in.

“With language translation and text message delivery, more families are receiving—and reading—the attendance letters. And they’re taking action,” says Scott Randolph, Director of School Attendance at Ector County Independent School District, TX, “We are overwhelmed with the level of family engagement, in a good way. Families have responded to the text-based letter in nearly real-time.”

All Together to Address Challenges  

The PowerSchool Enrollment and Attendance Intervention features products working together to give you an end-to-end solution to better prepare for the enrollment and attendance challenges now and in the future. While you hope to never have to make the tough choice of which school to close or how to handle chronic absenteeism, using these tools can help you proactively address these challenges to improve student success and operational funding.