Chronic Absenteeism

By Cecelia Leong, Vice President of District Impact, Attendance Works

It takes a lot of collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and levels of leadership to create the kind of sustainable change for state and Tribal education systems that achieves better outcomes for all students. When addressing chronic absence and student engagement, state educational agencies (SEAs), Tribal educational agencies (TEAs), and their key partners must not only collaborate on technical aspects of systems change but must also build trust.

During the 2025–26 school year, the nonprofit initiative Attendance Works, through its subcontract with the Western Educational Equity Assistance Center (WEEAC) at WestEd, provided technical assistance to help SEAs and TEAs in New Mexico, Alaska, and Nevada improve their student attendance and engagement systems.

We knew that aligning complex systems at this level couldn’t happen overnight, so our team focused on assisting SEAs and TEAs in taking positive steps forward through three dedicated virtual consultation sessions.

The New Mexico Public Education Department wanted to advance two interrelated goals: (a) partnering internally with their Family Engagement and English Language Learner departments and (b) equipping districts with targeted strategies for student groups, particularly English Learners and Native American students. Furthermore, the English Learner Office had already partnered with another federally funded center—REL Southwest—to create a new resource on attendance strategies. That work culminated in a statewide webinar that combined the efforts of both of these offices, highlighted the resources created with REL Southwest, and bolstered alignment in New Mexico’s statewide efforts to address chronic absence.

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development (AKDEED) wanted support for their ongoing attendance and engagement work, which they hoped to connect to their state Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework. (In Alaska, the MTSS framework guides interventions and supports for students struggling academically.) Many Alaska Native students live in remote or isolated communities and attend schools that are spread across vast distances. This unique geographic situation creates significant attendance challenges. By performing this work, we learned that principals are in the best position to lead on attendance because they often serve as the most consistent and trusted presence connecting schools, families, and communities. We began by using the Attendance Works Principal Toolkit to help AKDEED think through how to build their capacity for this role. This turned into a bigger conversation about supporting principals’ professional learning in a more systematic way. As our conversations with AKDEED continued, they grew to include the Alaska Council of School Administrators, which led to the decision to tie principal professional development to the state’s MTSS.

Finally, Attendance Works joined the WEEAC team that facilitated and is now supporting the implementation of the Nevada Department of Education’s (NDE) plan to improve outcomes for American Indian students. We worked with the American Indian specialist and other SEA staff to set goals for reducing chronic absence for Native students, facilitated discussions with Tribal leaders and districts about the root causes of chronic absence, and served as a partner in identifying effective practices and solutions. As a result, the chronic absence rate for Native students dropped significantly, from 45.4 percent to 37.6 percent. Attendance Works also leads a separate initiative called the “50% Challenge,” which calls on states to commit to cutting chronic absence in half over 5 years. We helped NDE coordinate efforts aimed at reducing chronic absence for all in Nevada—and specifically for Native students—by setting up regular collaboration between teams.

Like a nautilus, SEAs and TEAs are a single organization with many separate chambers that can work together to navigate to a shared destination. Throughout our direct consultation, one theme was constant: the necessity of alignment. Whether we were working within SEAs, bridging SEAs and TEAs, or coordinating with other technical assistance providers, our role was to build upon relationships that the wider WEEAC team had already established.

As we look to Year 5, our path is clear: Sustainable systems change takes time and, above all, intentional alignment. The WEEAC team will keep looking for ways to connect groups and partners, acting as subject matter experts and also turning separate, siloed efforts into a more unified force for supporting student attendance.