Key points:
- Reaching out too late means playing catch-up for the rest of the year
- We can’t punish our way out of the attendance crisis
- When it comes to absenteeism, the real work begins in summer
- For more on fighting absenteeism, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub
Here is a lesson for you: If you wait until the first day of school to address attendance, you’ve already lost the battle.
For the students who struggle the most, summer isn’t just a break. It’s also when they lose the connection to the school community they need to stay on track. If we aren’t reaching out to them before the doors open in August, we spend the rest of the year playing catch-up.
The Ecorse community faces tough challenges: unemployment, housing issues, and a lack of access to basic healthcare. Many of our students have to take on adult roles at home far too early. When school lets out in June, the daily support and routine the district provides the students we serve disappears. For a lot of kids, that leads to a summer of disconnection rather than rest.
We used to see the results of that disconnection every September. We’d start the year with empty seats and families who felt completely out of the loop. For years, chronic absenteeism was our biggest hurdle. At one point, over 70 percent of our students were missing so much school that they were falling behind. It was a clear sign that we weren’t connecting with our families in the way they needed.
We realized we had to change how we talked to our community, and we found that summer was the best time to start. We partnered with Concentric Educational Solutions to begin home visits during the summer months. We didn’t show up to hand out warnings. We showed up to say: “We missed you, we care about your child, and how can we help?” Moving from enforcement to actual conversation changed the dynamic immediately.
Families who had stopped trusting the system started becoming partners. Parents who ignored automated calls and warning letters and emails finally answered because a member of the community they knew and trusted was standing on their porch. Students who felt like they were “in trouble” suddenly saw that they were cared for and that there were adults invested in their success and ready to offer a helping hand.
This outreach had impact. Our chronic absenteeism rate dropped from over 70 percent to about 26 percent. That didn’t happen because of a new policy; it happened because we showed up in person during the summer before the problems could snowball, then as the school year progressed, we continued to support those still needing our help..
What I want other leaders to know is that students don’t just decide to stop coming in October. That disconnection starts in July when no one reaches out. If the only time a student hears from us is when we need to fill a seat, they get the message that they don’t really belong. Summer is our chance to prove otherwise.
This means training staff to listen, meeting families on their doorsteps, and leading with curiosity instead of consequences. For Ecorse, this isn’t just a side project–it’s part of our foundation. We continue to work with Concentric because summer re-engagement is essential. We build the relationship in the summer so we can sustain the learning all year long.
The months between June and August are the most important 90 days of the year for at-risk students. I challenge every district leader to look at that window and ask: who are we missing, and what are we doing to reach them? In Ecorse, we decided we couldn’t afford to miss anyone. We still can’t.
