Attendance issues have always been a front-and-center concern for schools everywhere. When a student struggles to attend, the first response often defaults to punitive measures—calling home, assigning consequences, or involving truancy officers.
However, treating attendance as a simple compliance problem leads to frustration and missed opportunities. Attendance, much like behavior, is often symptomatic of an underlying issue.
To effectively address chronic non-attendance, schools need a structured approach that moves beyond consequences. They need an attendance continuum of supports.
A continuum of supports is an anchor resource that drives a culture of continuous practice improvement. It provides an available-everywhere resource that helps staff answer the question, "So, what should we do?" It becomes an anchor point for professional conversations, planning, and documenting supports when developing IEPs or preparing for team meetings.
Through the constant process of creation, utilization, and refinement, the continuum normalizes conversation about practice. It shifts the culture from individual isolation reflected in the statement, "What do you do in your room?" moving to collective efficacy, "Is that strategy represented on our continuum? What does that look like in your room?".
While most schools develop continuums for priority areas like literacy, numeracy, and well-being, creating one for attendance requires a crucial first step.
Focus on Root Causes
You cannot create an effective attendance continuum by asking, "What do we do when a student doesn't show up?" that leads straight to a list of consequences and steers the school away from creating a collaborative response. Instead, you must adopt the same mindset used when addressing behavior issues to focus on the root cause, not the obvious symptom.
Here are a few examples to consider when articulating the root cause of attendance, taking into consideration the question
What are the possible underlying difficulties or circumstances that might be leading to this lack of attendance?
The key is to brainstorm and list every potential root cause before discussing any supports. Our response is different when we consider the root causes. For example, if a student is frequently missing on Fridays and we identify that the underlying issue is that they are involved in many different sports that take them away on tournaments our response will not be failing a course due to absences. But rather, we focus on what we can do. So a possibility for this student might be to require the student to meet with teachers every Wednesday or Thursday to collect materials for the Friday they will miss. This is a supportive response and ensures we focus on student success.
Building Your Attendance Continuum
Once you have identified the potential root causes, you can begin to build a tiered structure of supports that directly addresses those underlying concerns.
This process allows the team to ask: "This student is missing class 1st block. We suspect it's anxiety related. Have we tried a check-in with their designated mentor before school starts (Tier 2)? Is their class schedule conducive to their well-being?"
The tricky reality of attendance is that many causes (parental responsibility, home life, external circumstances) are outside of our locus of control. If a team begins the discussion in regards to a continuum of supports focused on attendance without reflecting on root causes, the conversation often leads to venting and a sense of powerlessness.
The creation of a root-cause continuum is an act of empowerment. It shifts the focus to a sense of influence and action. By identifying the root cause, the team can focus on the things within our control (relationships, instruction, school schedule, on-site supports) that can positively impact the situation. Instead of saying, "There's nothing we can do," a team can systematically work through the continuum, asking, "Have we tried this? Have we tried this? What's next?"
Here is a sample from Roland Mitchener Secondary school who worked through this process and developed a continuum to support their students in the area of attendance.
A continuum of supports focused on root causes transforms the attendance conversation from a triangle of punishment into a robust framework for student support. It ensures that every child receives a systematic, compassionate response designed to keep them engaged and present in their learning.
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