Showing Up Matters: Attendance Drives Student Success and State Funding

As the new school year kicks off, there’s not a public school district in Texas where administrators won’t be carefully tracking student attendance. 

Not only do higher absences equal poorer student outcomes, but they also amount to fewer dollars for school districts – often, more than $45 per child for every day missed.

“People think that a few days missed here and there doesn’t really matter,” said Jamey Hynds, Katy ISD assistant superinten­dent of Finance. “But it adds up — both from a learning and a financial perspective.”

At this large, high-achieving district just west of Houston, Katy ISD is working hard to change the bottom line. For the second year in a row, the district is embarking on a strategic attendance campaign to encourage students to come to school every day and not miss out on critical instruction time. At the same time, the district will be leveraging one of the only ways it can increase its state funding, which is driven in Texas by a district’s average daily attendance.

“Texas is one of the few states in the country that funds its schools using average daily attendance,” said TASB Executive Director Dan Troxell. “So, there’s more incentive than ever, especially now with many districts facing financial challenges and budget pressures, to ensure kids come to school every day. It makes a difference both in academic achievement and in making sure districts are maximizing the revenue they need to support strong instruction.”

Attendance has been an issue for many districts since the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the state, the percentage of chron­ically absent students — characterized as students who miss at least 10% of class, or about 18 days a year — rose to about 15% in 2019-20. That increased to 26% during the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent Federal Report Card data released by the Texas Education Agency.

Across the country, educators and policymakers are grap­pling with how to get kids back in school. National data show that nearly 14.7 million students, or nearly 30%, were chron­ically absent in the 2021-22 school year. The jump in absences means that roughly 6.5 million more students were missing 10% or more of school days, compared with the school year prior to the pandemic.

“Chronic absence doubled nearly everywhere in the United States for every district, state, and student group,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national and state level initiative aimed at advancing student success by ad­dressing chronic absence. “The amount of time spent in remote learning does not explain the significant increases, though at the margins it might explain a small amount. I don’t think any­one foresaw how much chronic absence would increase, across the board, and also be slow to reverse.”

She noted that absenteeism doesn’t just impact the stu­dents who are missing school. “It makes it harder for teachers to teach, since they have to repeat lessons, and set classroom norms. It also makes it harder for students to learn,” Chang said. She added that recent research also shows that, “when absenteeism occurs, it makes peers more likely to miss school for the next few days.”

Focusing on Attendance

Katy ISD, a suburban district of more than 96,000 students, has not had the same drop in attendance that many other dis­tricts across the state and nation have seen. Yet the decision by the district and its school board in 2023 to focus on attendance was in recognition that moving the needle, even just a little bit, could result in big gains, both academically and financially.

“Getting our attendance rate up is an investment in our students and our district,” said Chris Smith, Katy ISD’s chief financial officer. “Mainly, we wanted our kids to come to school and learn.”

In recognition of the importance of attendance, the district launched an attendance campaign ahead of the 2023-24 school year that set goals for each of its 74 schools and then incentiv­ized each campus to improve against those benchmarks.

For Katy ISD, the COVID-related drop in attendance was less than the rest of the state at about 2%, but it was still higher than acceptable.

“We all know that the best place for a student to be is in the classroom learning,” Ronnie Edwards, Katy ISD’s assistant su­perintendent for School Leadership and Support, told the board of trustees in June 2023. “Attendance is a powerful predictor of student outcomes.”

In that board meeting, district administrators presented a plan to incentivize attendance, not only as a way to encourage campuses to support student success, but also to ensure they have the maximum state funding to do that work. That incen­tive included an allocation to campus instructional budgets for those schools that hit their attendance goals.

As Smith later noted, “School districts can’t control their revenue. You can have a VATRE (Voter-Approval Tax Rate Elec­tion), and you can improve your attendance.”

Analyzing, Reacting, Encouraging

What followed in Katy ISD was an intensive focus on attendance that had principals and campus administrators analyzing and reacting to their daily numbers in real time, using a customized dashboard. Principals were encouraged to come up with their own specific raffles and celebrations to encourage students to show up. The central office supported the work by raising overall awareness about the importance of daily atten­dance among families and students with a broad communica­tions campaign.

When leaders spotted data patterns or trends with specific students, steps were taken to address the problem, including family calls and visits. If the entire district saw a dip in atten­dance related to weather or other external factors, they consid­ered whether to follow up with a request for a state waiver.