Balanced Leadership for Powerful Learning: Tools for Achieving Success in Your School

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Dana Goodyear. Dana is an educational leader and speaker with more than 18 years of experience. She holds an Ed.D. in educational leadership and management, and her research interests include district accreditation and parent opt outs from standard testing.

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And we're here today to talk about working with students with chronic attendance and truancy issues.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:40] SPEAKER_00:

Dana, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:42] SPEAKER_01:

Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

I'm excited to talk with you today about one of our neediest groups of students and often one of our most invisible groups of students, and that is these students who often simply are not here because they have those problems. chronic attendance and truancy issues. So help us understand the nature of this problem. What are a lot of schools dealing with and what was your school dealing with at the time that you went deep on these issues?

[01:08] SPEAKER_01:

So I think just having worked with a lot of students as a teacher and seeing that there were a lot of students that weren't in the classroom for weeks on end. Before I was even a dean of students, I worked as a department chair and I looked at students and how they hadn't attended for two or three weeks. And, you know, I wanted to contact parents and find out, you know, why were they not at school? A lot of the time, we didn't even have the right information for parents in the system, right? We'd call the numbers, we'd email parents, and often we didn't hear back. So when I became a school administrator at a Title I middle school, I decided to dive deep into the reasons why students were coming to school.

[01:48]

So at the the data of the students that were starting seventh and eighth grade and how many students had carried on from the previous year and had a high truancy rate. So looking at just that data and seeing a lot of kids that had not been able to achieve very well academically because of their high truancy. And then I went from there. So already in August, when school starts in my state, we have that data to work with from the previous school year. And then you want to set goals with those students before there's even an issue in the current school year.

[02:24] SPEAKER_00:

So you're actually able to begin not just with your own data, but with data from a child's previous school. So if you got them as a sixth grader, you were able to look at their fifth grade attendance data?

[02:33] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, definitely. I worked with a program that was part of Microsoft Office. It was called Power BI. And it would disaggregate the data based on days of the week, time of the day, and Also grade level. So if a student had attended schools in that district, K through five, we had that data. We were able to see, okay, were they often not at school Monday mornings or, you know, was it Mondays and Fridays?

[02:57]

That was often the issue. You know, they would take long weekends. So, and maybe there was a certain teacher they had in a certain year of elementary school, they were gone. So it was very interesting to look at which years students were absent. And also was this a trend? If they were a current sixth grader, Was this a trend that had been going on for a year or had it lasted throughout elementary school?

[03:17] SPEAKER_00:

Now, one thing that really stands out to me at the elementary level is, of course, that elementary students typically don't get themselves up for school, don't transport themselves to school. It's mostly a parent issue. What did you see as you started to dig in to the data and get into the cases of individual students in terms of that kind of shared responsibility at the middle school level between parents and students? Because, you know, clearly there are both factors are relevant. But if we're going to intervene, if we're going to make a difference for the student, what is the role of both the individual student and the parent in that case?

[03:56] SPEAKER_01:

Well, the simplest of reasons that I often found was that the student just wasn't getting up on time, right? We had school starting at eight o'clock. A lot of students would just kind of shuffle on in at 10.30, right? Around this time, we'd be serving lunch. What was close to the time we'd be serving lunch.

[04:13]

So they might be able to get to their fourth through seventh period classes in middle school, but they missed the first three periods of the day. So once I saw that trend with those middle scores, then I would dig into, Why weren't they able to get to school on time? A lot of the students were within walking distance. Some of the students took the bus, so they would miss the bus. And that reason why they weren't getting to school was often because the parent had a job that started way before they would have to get on the bus or get up. So the parent might have to report to work at 6.30 or 6 a.m. And the middle schooler would either be home alone or with an older sibling.

[04:48]

Sometimes the sibling would be leaving for school before the middle schooler had to leave for school. And then that middle schooler would just Why in bed? And so this was off of the trend for those students I looked at at the beginning of the school year. And the simplest thing was even though most students do have cell phones, we can't always rely on the fact that they're going to set an alarm on their cell phones. So the school actually provided alarm clocks for some of these students.

[05:13] SPEAKER_00:

I love it. And I want to highlight something that you're doing that matches perfectly what Dan Heath talked about when he came on Principal Center Radio a while back to talk about his new book, Upstream, where he talks about solving. We look at the data. We see that there's a problem in the data. Wow, we've got this subset of kids who just consistently miss first, second, and third period every day. But then it becomes not just about data.

[05:38]

It becomes a kid-by-kid process of kind of digging in and investigating and saying, what's really going on with this kid? And he's found that that is true in almost any effort to solve an upstream problem that might seem somewhat out of scope. You know, if the kid is not in school, the kid can't learn. So what do we do? Well, we can sit on our hands or we can do what you did, which is to look at the data and then start asking questions and start to get into some of those specifics. As you would unpack the particular factors for a kid, whether it was an alarm clock or a transportation issue or whatever it may be, what did you do to initiate that conversation with the student, with the family, and among staff?

[06:20] SPEAKER_01:

So I would call students in. I mean, we have those students that came in that I would already have on my list at the beginning of the school year. But as the months progressed during the school year, obviously that list would get bigger because more kids would be truant. So I would call students in and I would just ask them some simple questions to begin with to start an attendance plan. They would take what is called a school refusal assessment. It's pretty plain and simple.

[06:47]

And that would just be scored on a number level with zero as never and six as always. And a lot of those questions were just related to, do you have bad feelings about going to school because of something related to school? It Maybe there's issues with the bus. I mean, students might be able to get on the bus on time, but were there bullies on the bus, right? Was there something that triggered motions like fire alarms? So maybe they were afraid to come to school because of things like fire alarms going off.

[07:16]

Also, were they not wanting to come to school because there were other kids at school they didn't want to see or they didn't want to be around? Maybe they felt embarrassed. being at school because the lack of clean clothes, the lack of personal hygiene items because the family lived in poverty. There could also be issues with them feeling worse because they were at school, because they didn't feel any connections with any of their peers. Maybe they stayed at home because they felt they didn't have friends. And the assessment went on and on, but there were many questions just related to that social-emotional side of kids, you know, how did being at school affect you versus being at home?

[07:59]

And a lot of this was based on did they have those connections at school first and foremost with peers, but also did they have connections with the adults at school as well?

[08:09] SPEAKER_00:

It strikes me that there are so many different dimensions of You know, the student experience, you know, we go, of course, quickly to things like alarm clocks. Do you have an alarm clock? But to get into those peer and those kind of confidence and, you know, how did these various aspects of school make you feel? I think really takes that to a whole new level. And you said that's called the school refusal assessment scale? Yes.

[08:34]

So to recap the process so far, looking at data, talking with the students to figure out what their challenges are, and then doing some formalized data collection to get a sense of what some of those issues might be, even if students weren't exactly forthcoming in sharing those. And then what does the intervention phase look like? Once we've identified the student, identified the pattern, identified maybe some of the factors that are contributing to that, you know, that lack of attendance. What does the intervention and kind of ongoing support work look like?

[09:08] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, so I would have students, this student refusal assessment would be completed. I had them in two phases, but I had a group of students already, I think, mid-October, early November during the school year who would complete this. Those students who were already early on that truancy list. Once they've completed this assessment, I would then have them come in and do a attendance contract with me and very simple attendance contract. And this can be just adjusted for schools, but very few bullet points, a lot of just arriving on time at school, right? Within, you know, five minutes of the bill, right?

[09:44]

If you're absent, parents will notify the school within 24 hours. provide necessary documentation if it's an excused absence. Also, I threw a couple of things in the attendance contract that had to do with just treating others with kindness and having that respect as well. So part of the behavior as well. But students would then sign that contract. I would have the parents come in.

[10:06]

So a lot of the time it did take a few phone calls to get parents to come in and explain just why this was so important. and why it was important that kids got to school and attended all their classes and got to school on time. A lot of the parents I call, you know, I even call parents for students who were just had a lot of tardies because we assigned detentions for kids that had a certain amount of tardies in one week. So once those tardies racked up, those parents were also called to be on attendance contracts because they did equal unexcused absences after a while. you know, I explained to them, you know, if the student was more than 10 minutes tardy, then that would be considered in an excused absence. So we wanted to just explain to them, you know, the importance of kids getting between those classes and not hanging out in the hallways and responsibility of getting to class on time and how it disrupted learning when kids were getting to class late.

[11:02]

So I would call those parents in and have them be a part of that attendance contract signing. And then parents would also have a student refusal assessment that they would fill out themselves. So this will be part of the process to collect data for the district.

[11:16] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I'm interested in kind of what we do with some of those trends, because I've heard of the laundry issue being one, you know, that some schools, you know, maybe they have the facilities, maybe it's in, you know, an athletic locker room where they can do some laundry, can make that accessible to students so that if there's, you know, kind of an embarrassment issue, if they're not able to come to school with clean clothes, that some interventions like that can be put in place. What showed up in some of the patterns in the refusals that you saw based on the data that you collected from students and parents?

[11:47] SPEAKER_01:

So a lot of the students I worked with, there were issues with transportation. That was a common issue. So if they didn't get to the bus on time, or maybe if their parent often drove them and the car hadn't been working for a while. There were issues with them, as I explained, not being able to get up on time. There were also a lot of those social emotional issues. So they didn't connect with other kids at school.

[12:13]

There were a lot of struggles students had academically. because they'd missed so much school, uh, that they would only go to certain teachers classes. Cause you sometimes would see they were in a 10 period five, not period six. And then they went to 10 period seven. So there would be certain trends there, you know, where they would skip with certain friends during a certain period, often period four around lunch. So you'd see those trends as well.

[12:37]

So it could be maybe because of that teacher and because of that certain class I didn't like, or they would just find a time where they'd skip with their friend and, um, you know, we'd find out, you know, where they'd be and monitor that area. So, you know, there's a wide range. It's not just the having the hygiene and the clean clothes that does fall into the category for some of those students, but a lot of it also is just that attitude that kids have at the middle and high school level about trying to get away with it as well. I think the whole school plays an important role on being a part of an intensive team. And when An administrator is working to get an attendance team together. It's important to have not only teachers represented, but also some of the classified staff.

[13:22]

The people that helped me the most with the attendance plans were some of the front office secretaries. And I could not thank them enough for just their help because they were so willing to greet those parents when they came in to sign those attendance contracts. And also if they got phone calls from from parents and I wasn't available and parents were asking, I've gotten a message about coming in. They were able to then explain to those parents why. So it's important to have a front office staff, but also the school nurse was often a part of this because we had a lot of parents who were trying to excuse students and they would get a large number of excused absences and then the district would have to evaluate were those truly excused absences because of the medical condition or not. So we would have to have medical documentation for that.

[14:10]

So I think getting together an attendance team at the beginning of the year is a very important part of having a consistent work, having consistent work for truancy for the school, whether the data is showing that the school doesn't have very many truancy issues or if it has had many truancy issues. I think that's an important part. I've worked at the high school level as well on attendance teams. getting that together and then having those key players work together on helping because it does become a large task as we rack up those absences throughout the year.

[14:46] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Dana, I think there often are, you know, multiple factors going on. And I'm curious what your experience has been with the overlap between different issues like attendance, like academics, you know, failing grades versus passing grades, and discipline. So obviously, for many assistant principals who work with both discipline and attendance, they see some overlap. And I'm curious what your experience has been and how you've found it effective to support students through those challenges.

[15:16] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, there definitely is some overlap. I would not say that all the students who are to rent have discipline issues, but you definitely see with many of these students who aren't attending classes, when they do get to class, they do have discipline issues. So, you know, if they're chronically absent starting even at the beginning of the school year, they're not attending those first couple of weeks of school when the teacher is making those connections with students and laying out their expectations. And they come three weeks into the school year, definitely they're not going to know what's going on. Also, if you have students who, you know, miss a week or miss two weeks and then come into the classroom, you know, the teacher usually isn't able to take time out of the class just at a drop of a hat to explain what the student has missed. The student will need to come at a separate time and get some extra help.

[16:02]

And that's on the student often. Right. And those students often aren't coming to the after school tutoring. So a lot of the time, because they are lacking those academic schools in that particular class that they aren't attending, they will then act out and they don't know what the expectations of that class is. They aren't able to connect with their peers either. So if they're doing a lot of group work or project-based learning, they're feeling left out because they really don't know what's going on.

[16:29] SPEAKER_00:

That to me really reinforces the importance of a team approach where we can sit down and say, you know, we've got to wrap around this student. We've got to create an environment where they feel welcome and where they feel like they actually have a chance of reentering this community because they really are, you know, almost like they've been kind of self-expelled for such a long time in some cases that, It really is, you know, I think we've all had that experience of being the new kid, maybe at the sometimes, you know, if you moved as a kid, we've had that experience of being the new kid. But to compound, you know, missing out on the relationships with teachers, with peers and on academics, you know, obviously we can we can get very quickly into those patterns of school avoidance, work avoidance and then discipline.

[17:13] SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And that's why it's very important to have those RTI systems in place. at any grade level, right? And also being able to monitor those students in teams. You know, there are students that attend some classes, as I mentioned. There are students that attend the afternoon classes, not the morning classes.

[17:30]

But, you know, when those teachers are meeting in those RTI or MTSS teams and they're able to then provide information to other teachers as to what works with that particular student as well. And then what struggles that student might be having in the classes that they do attend. And then also it helps to have some type of a shared document where the teachers are able to see what communications they've had with the parents, if they've been able to get a hold of the parents at all. And then, you know, has that varied from what the student has said? Because when I have those parents come in to do these attendance contracts and I would speak to the parent individually, their story would vary from what the student had previously given me too.

[18:07] SPEAKER_00:

So Dana, as we think about starting the school year right and knowing that if we let some of these problems kind of go down the road a ways and get to kind of a bad point, if we want to be proactive, if we want to be quick to build relationships and build bridges with parents and with students who may be struggling with attendance, what are some steps that school leaders can take to start the year strong and intervene early and build those relationships right off the bat?

[18:33] SPEAKER_01:

So I think attendance works. There's a website that has a ton of resources for districts and schools to use with their parents. I think having parents come to a open house, which usually takes place sometime in August, a few weeks after school started, and invite them just to feel a part of the community. It's very important to have them just understand why it's important for their student to attend. You know, a lot of times parents don't feel connected to the schools. And that's why maybe they're not helping their student attend as much as they should.

[19:05]

So I think that's the most important thing. And then having staff reach out, not just the teacher of the class the student isn't attending, but also administrators, any intervention specialists, kids has an IEP, any of the SPED teachers, the school nurse, having people from different parts of the building reach out to the parents and making that connection as well. And then just helping them feel welcome in the building when they come to the building, I think helps greatly. And then just having them feel like they're part of the team, because once you get to the point where the student is up for truancy court, you know, it can become very difficult. And the parents then feel like they're in a bind. So you don't want it to get to that point.

[19:46]

you want to prevent the kid from becoming truant to begin with.

[19:50] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Dana, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me and talk about this important topic for, again, an easily overlooked population of our students. In some schools, it may be a large number. In some schools, it may be only a few, but virtually every school has students who really need our teamwork and our intervention and our willingness to look at data and go kid by kid to figure out how we can help them succeed. So thank you for your time today. If people want to connect with you on Twitter or online, where's the best place for them to find you?

[20:19] SPEAKER_01:

So my Twitter handle is my name, Dana Goodyear, and my website is my name as well, danagoodyear.com.

[20:28] Announcer:

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