Key points:
- School leaders must act before more students slip away from the classroom
- Attendance is the scoreboard–connection is the game
- Chronic absenteeism isn’t the problem–it’s the signal
- For more news on students and school attendance, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub
According to research I recently saw , About 16% of young people ages 18 to 24 are not in employment, education, or training. Researchers call them NEETs, or disconnected youth. After 35 years in public education, I read the number a different way. Almost every one of those young adults sat in somebody’s classroom a few years ago. Somebody had them at 14. Somebody had them at 16, the year they missed 32 days and the system recorded the absences and moved on.
Disconnection at 20 is rarely a surprise. It is the final step in a long slide, and most of the slide happens while a student is still enrolled and still within reach. We are not powerless in that window. Unfortunately, we are simply working in it alone.
A seventh grader starts missing Mondays. The attendance clerk calls. The counselor pulls him in. The principal sends a letter. Everyone in the building follows the script, and none of it touches the actual reason, which turns out to be a mother working a 6 a.m. shift with no one to get three kids out the door. No letter fixes a schedule. No suspension fixes an unmedicated asthma condition or a family two weeks from an eviction.
Schools see the warning signs first, earlier than any other institution in the community. Schools also have the least authority to resolve them. A superintendent and board controls the budget, calendar, and staff. They do not control housing stock, bus routes, clinic hours, or the hiring practices of the largest employer in the county. The barriers keeping a 13-year-old out of class live almost entirely outside the buildings they lead.
The people who do control those things are already in town. The mayor. The community foundation with a board looking for something durable to fund. The workforce board with employers begging for workers and no pipeline. The health system. They are all working on youth outcomes in their own way, in their own rooms, on their own timelines, and most of them have no idea which specific children in their community are sliding right now.
School leaders are the only ones with the standing to pull those rooms together.
I do not say this to flatter my colleagues. It is a plain fact about how communities work. The superintendent sits with the mayor. Districts hold the trust of parents who will not answer a call from a local official but will answer one from a school. No other local institution touches as many households on a Tuesday morning. When a superintendent asks a foundation director and a workforce board chair to sit down, they sit down.
What we have not done, often enough, is spend that standing early, on behalf of students who are still in front of us.
Convening is not another task force. I have sat through enough of those to know the difference. A task force produces a report. A working partnership produces a name, a next step, and someone accountable for taking it.
Start with the students showing the first signs, not the ones already gone. Bring partners a real list of children whose attendance is slipping this month.
Then, get to the why, which means going to the family rather than waiting for the family to come to us. Housing. A car. A child at home. A health problem nobody screened for. We have spent years counting absences and almost no time understanding them, and counting has never moved a single number on its own.
Then, decide who acts on what. The foundation funds the transportation gap. The health system opens an after-hours slot. The workforce board gives a 16-year-old a paid summer placement and a reason to stay enrolled. The district keeps the case open until attendance recovers.
At Concentric Educational Solutions, we work with communities building that kind of shared front, and Concentric360, the platform we launched this week that gives partners one coordinated way to see who is slipping, understand the barriers behind it, and connect a family to the support needed to reverse course. The tool matters far less than the decision to sit at the same table, and the decision belongs to leaders.
I hear the objections every week – district leaders are stretched thin. The budget is flat. Enrollment is down and the levy failed. But the question is never whether we can afford improvement. The question is whether we can afford to wait. A sixth grader missing 30 days becomes a sophomore with no credits, and a sophomore with no credits becomes a 20-year-old outside every system built to help him. Waiting moves the cost to emergency rooms, courtrooms, and shelters, where the price runs higher and the outcomes run worse.
Boldness here does not require a bond issue. Boldness looks like a superintendent calling her local partners and saying, I have 200 children sliding right now, I know their names, and I am not willing to hand them to you in six years as a workforce problem.
We have these young people today. Keeping them connected, supported, and on a path to graduation is the choice leaders must make now, together, before another student slips away from the classrooms.