Browsing by Subject "Absenteeism"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 11
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    Absenteeism: School mental health: Define, spot, and deploy
    (Pivot Attendance Solutions, 2021) Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Taylor, James; Martin, Kristen
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    Attendance CARE analysis
    (Pivot Attendance Solutions, 2021) Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Taylor, James; Martin, Kristen
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    Beyond Solo Acts: How Teams Supporting Schools Orchestrate Attendance Success
    (Indiana University, May 2024) Heyne, David; Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn
    This topic brief shifts the focus beyond attendance teams in schools to the collaborative efforts of teams supporting schools. In the US, this often involves the school district working alongside schools to address attendance. Across the globe, entities like regional bureaus, local authorities, municipalities, or collaborations play this vital role.
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    Building Trusting Relationships. Evaluating a School-Based Community Health Worker Program to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism
    (2023-10-12) Garcia, Silvia; Roelecke, Kate; Grim, Jim; Mohlman, Rachel; Peterkin, Allyson
    In 2021, MCCOY and the Daniel Webster School 46 (DWS) were awarded two grants1 to implement a Community Health Worker intervention at DWS to increase student engagement as a protective factor to prevent juvenile delinquency and improve youth outcomes. The project took a holistic approach to engage families and students who were chronically absent throughout the school year. Relying on multiple evidence-based and promising practices in youth violence and juvenile delinquency prevention, a certified Community Health Worker partnered with the school social workers and teachers to encourage consistent student attendance using coaching, referrals, goal setting, and family engagement activities to facilitate learning and address family needs. The evaluation, conducted one year after implementation, yielded the following results: The CHW at DWS has proved valuable for students, teachers, and families in several ways. The CHW provides services and builds trusting relationships with families, eventually influencing how families engage with the schools and their students' education. The CHW also connects directly with students, providing emotional support and encouragement, hence supporting the teachers’ work. Being part of the community where parents came from and previously volunteering in the school made the difference in becoming the bridge between the school, the families, and the community. Regarding absenteeism, several improvements in reducing the number of absent days were observed in students receiving support for themselves and their families. Some of the students reduced their absent days to less than half. More importantly, three chronically absent students became “improved attendees” after the first year. The short time the CHW has been in the school (10 months) has brought small but significant changes in students’ behavior.
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    Indiana Attendance Law
    (Pivot Attendance Solutions, 2021) Taylor, James; Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Martin, Kristen
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    Mental is Health in School
    (Pivot Attendance Solutions, 2021) Taylor, James; Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Martin, Kristen
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    Resolving Truancy through Community Collaboration
    (Pivot Attendance Solutions, 2021) Martin, Kristen; Taylor, James; Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn
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    Responsibility for socialization - Truancy: More than absences
    (Pivot Attendance Solutions, 2021) Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Taylor, James
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    Revealing underlying factors of absenteeism: A machine learning approach
    (Frontiers Media, 2022-12-01) Bowen, Francis; Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Siegler, Janaina; Jackson, Martin
    Introduction: The basis of support is understanding. In machine learning, understanding happens through assimilated knowledge and is centered on six pillars: big data, data volume, value, variety, velocity, and veracity. This study analyzes school attendance problems (SAP), which encompasses its legal statutes, school codes, students’ attendance behaviors, and interventions in a school environment. The support pillars include attention to the physical classroom, school climate, and personal underlying factors impeding engagement, from which socio-emotional factors are often the primary drivers. Methods: This study asked the following research question: What can we learn about specific underlying factors of absenteeism using machine learning approaches? Data were retrieved from one school system available through the proprietary Building Dreams (BD) platform, owned by the Fight for Life Foundation (FFLF), whose mission is to support youth in underserved communities. The BD platform, licensed to K-12 schools, collects student-level data reported by educators on core values associated with in-class participation (a reported—negative or positive—behavior relative to the core values) based on Social–Emotional Learning (SEL) principles. We used a multi-phased approach leveraging several machine learning techniques (clustering, qualitative analysis, classification, and refinement of supervised and unsupervised learning). Unsupervised technique was employed to explore strong boundaries separating students using unlabeled data. Results: From over 20,000 recorded behaviors, we were able to train a classifier with 90.2% accuracy and uncovered a major underlying factor directly affecting absenteeism: the importance of peer relationships. This is an important finding and provides data-driven support for the fundamental idea that peer relationships are a critical factor affecting absenteeism. Discussion: The reported results provide a clear evidence that implementing socio-emotional learning components within a curriculum can improve absenteeism by targeting a root cause. Such knowledge can drive impactful policy and programming changes necessary for supporting the youth in communities overwhelmed with adversities.
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    The Unlearning of School Attendance: Ideas for Change
    (Frontiers Media, 2024) Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Ansari, Arya; Marshall, Ineke; Gottfried, Michael
    This Research Topic on Unlearning Attendance champions a serious look at school attendance and absenteeism. It examines all forms of school attendance problems ranging from school refusal, truancy, school withdrawal, to school avoidance and its correlates of criminal, socio-emotional, developmental, psychological, academic, fiscal, technological, and societal impact. The issue gives a synopsis on the known problems and challenges but also those exacerbated by the pandemic and ideas for improvement. The issue takes a bold step to call out antiquated practices which have continued to fail students through teaching and learning, policy, laws and statutes, transportation, practice, program, funding, tracking, evaluation, and outcomes. Stop punishing our children for attending. Resilient students who overcome the odds to show up 170 days of the annual 180 required days are often marked truant. In some cases they are suspended, expelled, or reported by law to juvenile courts. Before COVID, and now more than ever, children's attendance and participation in education have been important. Yet since the establishment of required education, our laws, policies, school practices, data tracking, intervention response, and outcome measures have not been updated. These antiquated processes fail current students. Despite a focus on positive behavior interventions, tiered approaches, and socio-emotional learning in the last few decades we still only track absence and not presence. There is need for emerging and new ways of valuing participation in education from pre-school to high school. We must evaluate our governing policies of what constitutes presence (physical vs virtual). We must use more engagement versus discipline methods to foster success; update punitive laws requiring mandatory reporting to juvenile probation courts rather than development resources; change what we track, who we track, and how we report. We must unlearn the old way of attendance. Unlearning attendance speaks to the idea that policies, practices, and procedures in place for students in K-12 (primary) and high schools have consistently been punitive, ineffective in use of data, and non-progressive. As a result there is need for new research, new ways to evaluate, and emerging and best practice efforts to engage students. Unlearning Attendance: Ideas for Change is a call for action that features emerging practices from practitioners, educators, researchers, policy makers, and organizations from around the globe who have been toiling at solutions for problems faced everyday in and out of the classroom and with parents and partners to support student engagement in their education.