Giving Compass' Take:

• Debbie Lieberman and Tia Anzellotti explain how to address chronic absenteeism through effective data collection by partnering with United Way.

• How else can schools use data to better serve their students? How can funders help districts collect, secure, and use data? 

• Learn about improving data culture in schools. 

While data should not be used to pigeonhole students with academic labels such as “proficient,” “remedial,” or “chronically absent,” we can and should use data to help schools shed light on the systems, policies and home-life circumstances that are helping or hindering student success.

It’s not enough to know which students are falling behind or missing school. The more important questions are: Why are they falling behind? And what can we do about it?

To tackle these questions, United Way of San Diego County launched the Every Student, Every Day initiative. Under this program, United Way provides support to a school’s attendance team — a cross section of school staff who meet regularly and work together to improve attendance. These teams often include the principal, school nurse, attendance clerk and school counselor.

Traditionally, these teams simply printed lists of who missed school and jotted notes about calling home or mailing a letter to a family. Often the data were out of date and staff had to toggle between multiple systems and reports. Sometimes notes got lost and action steps were missed. There was no system to track which interventions were used or if they even made a difference.

Additionally, teachers, nurses, counselors, principals and other staff held valuable information about why kids were absent — a sick parent, the family moved, chronic illness, or a student who feels bullied — but the school lacked a system to log and use this data.

To address this, United Way, with support from the Tableau Foundation, helped schools and their attendance teams create a system to bring together the relevant data sources to get the complete picture. The attendance teams now access a data dashboard that provides all the essential information with one click: Who is missing school and why — e.g. illness, unexcused, transportation challenges, or any number of other reasons? What strategies have been deployed? And are those students’ attendance rates trending up or down?

Read the full article about how data can help address chronic absenteeism by Debbie Lieberman and Tia Anzellotti at EdSource.