Close your books. Pop quiz.

Which of the following is true?

A. Missing two days of school per month makes a student chronically absent.

B. Kindergarten has among the highest rates of chronic absenteeism.

C. Unmet health or social needs are major contributors for students routinely missing school.

D. All of the above

(The correct answer is D)

Heidi Schumacher M.D. ’10, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont (UVM) Larner College of Medicine and a pediatrician at the UVM Children’s Hospital, knows the potential consequences for children who are chronically absent from school. 

“There are clear data to show that kids who miss just two days of school a month are less likely to meet their academic milestones. School absenteeism can be both an indicator of an unmet health or social need and also a strong predictor of long-term health and well-being,” explains Schumacher, a principal investigator with the Vermont Child Health Improvement Program at the Larner College of Medicine. “People often underestimate both how often their child misses school and the impact of those absences.”

Missing school can fuel a downward spiral that is hard to reverse. Chronic absenteeism—missing 10 percent or more of school days—is tied to poorer educational and health outcomes, lower graduation rates and even shorter life expectancy. The problem affects the entire classroom, too.

There is ripple effect as teachers repeat material and trusting relationships between students and staff may be harder to build, explains Schumacher. “Everyone's education is impacted.” 

She is the principal investigator for Every Day Counts, an initiative to reduce absenteeism in Vermont schools, and studies how strong partnerships between schools, health services, and families can boost attendance. The effort is funded by UVM’s Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships and supports pilot projects in four schools to strengthen coordination with local healthcare providers to prevent and respond to absenteeism and its root causes. It also fills a gap in the scientific literature since most scholarship on health care partnerships to address absenteeism focuses on urban populations. 

Over the last five years chronic absences have increased across all demographics, Schumacher says, but kids living in poverty, experiencing homelessness, or who have disabilities or unmet health or social needs, are more likely than their peers to miss school, and “many of those conditions are felt more acutely in rural areas.”

But Vermont’s rural nature may be part of the solution, too. 

“We have really strong relationships in communities where folks know each other,” Schumacher says. “This Leahy grant is about using school attendance as a shared marker of success that can really bring sectors together.” 

Moving in the same direction

The Every Day Counts initiative also aligns with efforts at the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) to increase flagging attendance rates. A few years ago, Vermont state officials identified the issue in an interagency working group and began examining how other states and school districts reduced absenteeism. They began strategizing how to move the needle in Vermont, says Anne Bordonaro, AOE’s director of federal education programs.

The AOE team revisited the state’s statutory framework and developed a statewide attendance policy to establish consistent definitions and criteria for determining absence. The Every Day Counts team is partnering with AOE, the Vermont Department of Health, and Catamount Community Schools Collaborative to host a state-level summit November 17 to elevate school attendance as a shared priority across sectors. The team is also coordinating state agencies to reframe absenteeism using a public health lens rather than a punitive one. By viewing absence as a marker of an unmet health or social need, potential solutions can be identified to overcome them.

Early detection can also prevent small problems from becoming bigger ones. Rhode Island uses real-time data collection to note problems as they arise, Bordonaro explains. While they do have more resources, she admits, they also use a multi-pronged messaging strategy about the importance of school attendance that spans faith groups and business communities and includes statewide ad campaigns. 

“They have got everyone moving in the same direction,” Bordonaro says. “We need to pull all the levers.” 

This is, in part, because there is not one factor behind chronic absenteeism. 

“There are as many reasons for absenteeism as you can imagine—and probably more that you cannot,” explains Bordonaro. 

The issue affects high schools all the way down to preschool. While this makes it harder to flip one switch to make a big change, it means there are more pathways to make a difference. 

“The good news is that we know that schools can have an impact,” Bordonaro says.

Changing the narrative

In 2019, national absenteeism rates hovered around 15 percent. The Covid-19 pandemic made things worse. Attendance became difficult to track between classes shifting online and students staying home sick for long stretches once schools re-opened. In Vermont, chronic absenteeism ballooned to 42 percent by 2022, recovered slightly in 2023, and remains high at nearly 25 percent today. 

For Schumacher, part of the issue concerns messaging. 

“During Covid families learned ‘If you have a runny nose or are exposed to someone sick, stay out of school for 10 days. Or was it 14 days?’” she recalls. “Guidelines have largely returned to pre-pandemic policies, but I think there is genuine confusion in many communities around when it is appropriate to be in school.”

Covid also changed the way students and caregivers thought about school. 

“We definitely saw a shift in people's perceptions about the importance of coming to school every day,” explains Michelle Irish, director of educational quality for the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union—one of four pilot projects in the Every Day Counts study. “Coming back in, it was really hard to get people back into the habit of school.”

Over the summer Schumacher surveyed caregivers in the pilot communities to understand their attitudes around school attendance and what measures they support to improve it.  While nearly all respondents said that it was important for children to attend school every day, only one third thought missing a few days a month was a major problem. Additionally, a majority of respondents  indicated that they wanted their child’s school to work with community partners to support student needs and to receive personalized messages about school absences.

The Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union is trying to directly share attendance data—with parental consent—with a local healthcare partner, Monarch Maples Pediatrics.

“I'm really excited for this bidirectional consent because I think that will allow us to talk to each other a little sooner when there is a concern,” says pediatrician Deanne Haag. 

Instead of learning that a child has missed several weeks of school when they come in for a problem, providers are looped in early on to help families manage chronic illnesses or mental health issues that may be preventing students from going to school. 

The supervisory union is also encouraging local health providers to incorporate attendance screenings in their intake procedures to identify areas where resources may be needed. For example, while most rural kids in their schools have access to the school bus, the problem is when they miss it, Irish says. Patient surveys have found the reasons students miss the bus often stem from lack of a morning routine at home.

Schools can respond by connecting families with an engagement coordinator to establish a routine or build patterns of good sleep hygiene so that kids can get up in the morning, Irish says. “It's going back to that root cause.” 

Using data to surface attendance barriers is an integral part of reversing the decline.  Last fall, Monarch Maples Pediatrics started surveying adolescent patients and found that illness was the primary reason they reported for missing school, but a considerable factor was mental health issues, which skyrocketed during Covid and remain high.

“Fifteen percent of respondents were reliably saying that the reason they were having difficulty getting to school was anxiety or depression,” Haag says. “That was just eye opening.” 

I'm really excited for this bidirectional consent because I think that will allow us to talk to each other a little sooner when there is a concern. - Deanne Haag

The data also showed that individuals experiencing food insecurity were over twice as likely to have trouble getting to school—a place where meals are provided. 

“What a missed opportunity,” Haag says. 

She wants to flip the narrative that school is more than a site for learning, she says. “… Not everyone feels the same way about education that Michelle and I do, but there are other aspects of school that are equally important.” 

Changing the attendance narrative also requires a shift in tone. The focus for school officials now is less on compliance and more on trust building with families who may have felt judged in the past, Irish says. 

They also celebrate small improvements. 

One high school principal instituted an attendance challenge last year that resulted in students helping each other wake up or drive friends to school, Irish recalls. “If you make it important, kids will help each other figure it out.”

Shifting the conversation 

Michaela Martin sits at a small round table in White River Valley Middle School, toggling between spreadsheets on her laptop. As the multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) coordinator for the White River Valley Supervisory Union, finding patterns in data enables her to pinpoint students who may need academic, social, or behavioral interventions to improve their outcomes.

All meetings start with a data point, and students at-risk emerge from that data point, Martin says. “It works really well when the communication is strong. It works like a machine.” 

The White River Valley Supervisory Union is another pilot project in the Every Day Counts initiative, and this fall marks the first time absenteeism is a metric scrutinized by school officials much like math or reading scores. Each week, Martin reviews attendance data with school specialists and representatives from the South Royalton Health Center who are partners on the grant. It’s a change she welcomes after three decades working in education.

“We were so fixated on compliance,” Martin explains. “We weren’t focused on the barriers. Attendance is a data point, but you want to get to the why behind it.”

Now, discussions revolve around two questions: What are the barriers? And who can help? 

“We do a lot of problem solving,” Martin says.

We were so fixated on compliance. We weren’t focused on the barriers. - Michaela Martin

With attendance elevated as a key data point for student success, schools can focus on the kids who are at risk and develop targeted plans to keep them in school. Over the summer, school staff were trained in new procedures for tracking attendance and the role everyone plays in creating a welcoming space for students and their families. 

“If you provide a nurturing environment where students feel safe, then kids will come,” Martin says.

Identifying barriers

One morning in September, nearly a dozen school and health specialists huddled with Martin in a small room off the middle school’s main office. The Tunbridge Fair looms large in their discussion. Several students were absent the week before so the team sorts which students were showing animals at the fair, an activity encouraged by the school, from individuals who couldn’t—or wouldn’t attend. 

For instance, a student previously on their radar wouldn’t get out of the car in the morning, so the team designated a school employee to greet him in the parking lot. It worked to preempt a fight between the parent and the student, and he now attends school every day. 

During the meeting, new students emerge from the data and are triaged. Some are straightforward cases of someone having an infection and returning to school. Other cases are more complicated. These are the ones where students come from homes with a history of dropping out of school. One such student floats to the top. The team discusses the possibility of the student attending an alternative campus, but a few staff members voice concern that it might stop her from coming to school altogether. 

“She has good friends here,” one counselor notes. “She is just starting to connect more with the adults in the building, I feel like we should give her a little time.”

The team zeroes in on the student’s home life and suggests helping her mother with time management skills. A nurse with a track record of positive communication with the family offers to be the point of contact. This process of identifying barriers and tapping a point person to follow up allows school staff to address small problems before they fester. It’s also a holistic practice that considers the pressure a child and their family face and what can be done to reduce them.

“We’ve taken the shame out of it,” Martin explains.

She believes other schools can easily incorporate attendance tracking into MTSS systems they likely already have in place and that viewing attendance as a measure of child health underscores it importance. 

“Absence is an outcome of something,” Martin says. “What is it?”