District Guidance

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How Can Districts Improve Attendance and Engagement?

Efforts to improve attendance can be accelerated by leadership from the superintendent and school board to align policy and support consistent school attendance practices. Here are seven potential key actions that district leaders can take to align local policy and practice:

1. Designate a cross-departmental district team to focus on consistent attendance
2. Define roles and responsibilities for attendance
3. Communicate why attendance matters and how it aligns with other district priorities (including Local Control and Accountability Plan [LCAP] goals)
4. Consider the collection and review of actionable chronic absence data
5. Promote consistent attendance practices across schools and consider how they can help implement key actions
6. Examine district and community resources that may help promote health, well-being, safety, family engagement, and student connectedness, and assess the availability of these resources across all school communities
7. Prioritize support to elementary, middle, and high schools with the largest number of chronically absent students

1. Designate a cross-departmental district team:

The superintendent may wish to identify a cabinet-level, cross-departmental team that is responsible for aligning strategies to improve attendance with all existing initiatives to improve student outcomes. In selecting the team, the superintendent may consider whether team members have the knowledge, expertise, and authority over key areas such as:

• Health and behavioral health
• Family engagement
• Expanded Learning
• Community Schools
• Student Services
• Early childhood education/transitional kindergarten
• Specific student groups that struggle with attendance
• Research and Data
• Attendance
• Communications
• Site-level leaders

If a district has an existing MTSS or PBIS district leadership team, it may not need to create another team. Rather, the district’s role may involve helping school teams connect the dots and break down silos. In smaller school districts, which have fewer staff, consider integrating attendance into an existing district level team that is already looking at academic and behavior data.

Districts may also wish to consider engaging staff from other public agencies or community groups at strategic times to join the district team to identify barriers to attendance as well as develop and implement solutions.

2. Define roles and responsibilities for attendance:

Ideally, all members of the school community would see attendance as a shared responsibility. However, while it is a common goal, district and school staff as well as families and students may have different roles toward this end. The district team’s role can be to clearly define the roles of staff, from the superintendent to classroom teachers, and to define the responsibility of the school teams tasked with creating a comprehensive tiered system to improve attendance. Families can be encouraged to make attendance a priority, establishing routines to support their student’s attendance, and seeking out help when they experience barriers to attendance.

3. Communicate why attendance matters and how it aligns with other district priorities:

District leaders have a variety of ways they can communicate the importance of showing up for student well-being and learning, which may include:

1. The board’s attendance policies: The board can examine its policies to determine whether they discuss the importance of attendance for students’ success, and provide guidelines on what absences are excused or unexcused. (1) A board can also examine whether the district’s guidelines on when students should attend or stay home due to illness are with legal requirements. Sample attendance policies are available, such as those included on the California Department of Education (CDE) Sample Policy and Administrative Regulation web page.
2. Strategic plan and goals: District leaders can determine whether attendance is addressed in the district’s strategic plan.
3. LCAP: District leaders can examine whether the district’s LCAP includes measurable goals and strategies for attendance as well as academics and behavior.
4. Student handbooks: District leaders can review student handbooks to see if they describe the benefits of showing up to school and the risks of absenteeism, and explain how students and families can secure needed support through the school and district.
5. Communications: District leaders can evaluate whether and how the district provides schools with toolkits, resources, and standard letters to communicate effectively with families about attendance. Messaging materials, such as those from the national Attendance Awareness Campaign, offer adaptable, research-informed strategies that reflect best practices—emphasizing the benefits of regular attendance, the potential social and academic consequences of chronic absence, and practical tips for families to support consistent attendance (see Attendance Works Resources: Handouts and Messaging web page [2022a] and Attendance Awareness Campaign web page [2022b]). Districts should also ensure that truancy notifications align with the requirements outlined in California Education Code sections 48260.5.

4. Consider the collection and review of actionable chronic absence data:

Districts can play a key role in providing schools with easy access to clear, understandable, and timely chronic absence data reports. Districts may wish to:

1. Consider the collection of accurate attendance data: This can include standard operating procedures for recording daily attendance, training staff, including substitute teachers, taking attendance with care, and conducting regular audits/checks for inaccuracies.
2. Set attendance goals: Districts can consider establishing districtwide goals and encourage building leaders to include attendance goals and strategies in their school improvement plans based on an analysis of the school’s current attendance and chronic absence data and an understanding of the reasons for absence.
3. Provide data that helps with early intervention: (please see Key Uses and Sources of Quantitative Attendance Data for more detail.) Ideally, authorized school administrators and teams working on attendance have real-time access to data to understand which schools, as well as how many, struggle (or struggled) with chronic absence during the prior and current school year.
4. Disaggregate data by grade: Districts and schools can also disaggregate chronic absence by grade to determine where they can focus their efforts. Statewide, over one in four (26 percent) students in transitional kindergarten (TK) and kindergarten are chronically absent . Positive family engagement strategies during TK and kindergarten enrollment can be key to establishing the habit of daily attendance. Looking at district chronic absence data by grade may reveal other grades with high levels. Typically, chronic absence rises as students enter middle school and high school. If that pattern exists in your district, intensifying strategies to help students connect and engage in their first year in middle school or high school may help. You may wish to consider funding summer bridge programs, offering afterschool programs to boost student engagement in learning as well as connections to adults and peers, or examining career technical education options that may include paid internships (Chang, Chavez, and Hough 2024; Public Policy Institute of California [PPIC] 2025 ).

5. Promote consistent practice across schools and consider how they can help implement key actions:

Districts can play a number of key roles in supporting consistent school practices around attendance. District leaders, particularly those who supervise site administrators or support school teams that address attendance , can provide critical oversight. They can work with school teams to:

1. Help define and implement clear processes: The district can consider what should happen at each level of absence.
2. Help find ways to include family and student voice in identifying causes of absences and solutions: At the system level, the district can determine the various ways to hear from families and students, from surveys such as the Healthy Kids Survey to focus groups .
3. Curate evidence-based practices: District leaders can help school teams by vetting and supporting a set of evidence-based practices. They may draw upon resources such as the Attendance Playbook or this list of evidence-based practices to potentially improve health, well-being, and safety.
4. Offer Professional Development: Ideally, professional development would occur over the course of a year and include a range of staff, including administrators, support staff, attendance clerks, supervisors of attendance, and certificated staff. These can range from regular agenda items on principals’ meetings to communities of practice.
5. Leverage existing resources across the district and in each school: Districts can create time, space, and expectations for staff who work on different initiatives to help communicate and collaborate around their efforts to improve learning conditions, engage parents, and motivate attendance for students. Initiatives like Community Schools, Expanded Learning, Universal Pre-K, Multi-Tiered System of Supports, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and social–emotional learning may support a shared goal of positive learning environments for students (Strengthening Coherence Through a Whole-Child Lens ).
6. Communicate current policies: Districts can examine whether school staff receive updates on changes to state or district attendance policies regarding excused or unexcused absences and health guidance. If the district needs to update its health guidance, resources are available and include handouts .

6. Examine district and community resources available that may help promote health, well-being, safety, family engagement, and student connectedness available to all schools:

1. Health, well-being, and safety: Addressing health (physical and mental health) -related barriers may be important. In working in partnership with physical and behavioral health professionals and agencies, educators may wish to consider taking steps to:
   
   • Prevent Absences: Support healthy routines at home and school. Maximize access to school-linked and school-based health-related screenings and resources
   • Engage in Messaging: Highlight the importance of an attendance routine, while also providing consistent and up-to-date messaging on when a child should stay home
   • Promote Teaming: Include school health team members such as a school nurse, social worker, or counselor as part of the attendance team
   • Attend to Health Barriers: Identify, document, and address health needs and barriers to attendance
2. Family engagement: For our youngest children, family engagement is highly important. Families may be more likely to get their students to attend school if they have a voice in the decisions that affect their children, understand the impact of attendance on their children’s well-being, believe that school is a safe place and that sending their children to school will lead to a better future, and have faith that schools will support them.
   
   Family engagement can include a partnership between families, educators, and community partners to support children’s learning and development. This may include working hand in hand with families so they can fulfill their responsibility, with support from schools and community organizations, to get their children to school. Ideally educators take steps to engage families starting when children are young and just entering school in preschool, TK, and kindergarten.
   
   Districts may wish to consider offering ways to communicate with families about their students’ attendance including flyers , nudge letters (PDF),or truancy notifications such as the sample First Notice of Truancy letter included in this guidance document.
3. Student connectedness: As students get older and become more independent, focusing on their engagement and sense of connectedness may become increasingly important. When students see the relevance of learning for their lives and communities, their engagement and attendance may improve. While there are many instructional strategies such as problem-based instruction and project-based learning that have a positive impact on student engagement and attendance, this section focuses on four specific, potential strategies:
   • Expanded Learning Opportunities: In the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELO-P), California provides funding for LEAs in the state to offer year-round learning opportunities to students TK–6. According to one article, when expanded learning programs focus on attendance , it has a double bottom line. First, regular attendance and participation in a quality program can help impact social and academic outcomes. Second, according to the article, research shows that quality programs can improve school-day attendance. The sense of belonging, the connection to caring adults and the academic enrichment they provide outside of school may make children more likely to go to school.
   • Community Schools: With a focus on family engagement strategies and youth voice, community schools may help transform learning environments through family and student engagement and partnerships with expanded learning. California has made significant investments in community schools, which include the use of family and community engagement strategies that, according to research by the Learning Policy Institute, have been shown to reduce chronic absence . California defines a community school as a “whole-child” school improvement strategy where the district and school work closely with teachers, students, families, and partners (CDE 2025; California Education Code Section 8901 ).
   • There are four programmatic components:
     • Integrated support services;
     • Family and community engagement;
     • Collaborative leadership and practices for educators and administrators; and
     • Extended learning time and opportunities (Learning Policy Institute 2020 ).
   • Career Technical Education (CTE): CTE programs may help prepare students for specific careers and future employment by integrating academic knowledge with technical and occupational skills. They emphasize practical, real-world knowledge and training, often through hands-on learning experiences and industry partnerships. Because students often participate as a cohort and have a faculty advisor, these programs may improve student connectedness to peers as well as a trusted adult while also providing learning opportunities that may feel more relevant. Please read the five-year study of the Career Technical Education Incentive Grant as well as CTE outcomes to learn more.
   • Attendance Recovery Programs: Beginning July 1,2025, local educational agencies (LEAs)—including school districts, county offices of education, and classroom-based charter schools—may offer Attendance Recovery programs to eligible students to recover instructional time and average daily attendance funding (California Education Code 46211(a), (b)(1), (d)(1), (c)). Attendance may be recovered during non-school hours, such as before or after school, weekends, or intersession days. Students may earn no more than one day of attendance credit per calendar day and no more than 10 days per year or the number of absences accrued, whichever is fewer (California Education Code sections 46211(d)(1), (d)(2)). Attendance Recovery is separate from Expanded Learning but may use ELO-P funding if it operates in collaboration with the ELO-P and does not interfere with its implementation (California Education Code Section 46211(c); Section 46210(b)(2)). For more information, see the CDE Attendance Recovery web page and the CDE Attendance Recovery Webinar slides.

7. Prioritize support to the elementary, middle, and high schools with the largest number of chronically absent students:

Districts rightly focus on student groups such as foster youth or McKinney-Vento with disproportionately high levels of chronic absence. However, to help cut chronic absence in half, districts may also wish to focus their attention and resources on schools with the largest number of chronically absent students regardless of their grade spans. As this PACE analysis of 2022–23 data finds, there were 2,708 elementary schools, 610 middle schools, and 724 high schools across the state with more than 20 percent of their students chronically absent. In addition, districts may wish to consider focusing on transition grades (TK/kindergarten, sixth, and ninth) where chronic absence typically spikes. Districts can organize Communities of Practice for elementary, middle, or high schools. They can also provide professional development for key staff.

Quick Links to Other Sections of this Guidance

• Key Uses and Sources of Quantitative Attendance Data
• Resources Available to Improve Attendance and Engagement
• Sample Truancy Letter

Notes

(1) The California Education Code lists 14 reasons for excused absences (California Education Code Section 48205). However, school boards may wish to consider whether rules such as requiring a doctor’s note to excuse an absence might result in more students being assigned unexcused absences. The Disparities in Unexcused Absences in California Schools report discusses this topic further.