During Attendance Awareness Month, we’ll be running several guest blogs from allies who are working to improve school attendance and student achievement. Windy Lopez, Director of Community Affairs for Scholastic, contributed this post about the extraordinary work going on in Gainesville, Georgia. The blog post originally appeared on Scholastic’s blog Frizzle.

How can students benefit from effective classroom teaching if they are chronically late and often not in the classroom at all? Research continues to demonstrate the direct correlation between academic achievement and school attendance as well as how excessive absence in the elementary years leads to truancy and school dropout in middle and high school.

via A Framework for Learning Leads to Better Attendance & Achievement « Attendance Works.

With as many as 7.5 million U.S. students missing nearly a month of school each year, state education leaders have begun mining attendance data to find out how many students and schools are at risk academically and how to turn around absenteeism, according to a report released today by Attendance Works.

For as long as teachers have taken the roll, schools have recorded attendance data. But most schools and districts treat monitoring absenteeism as a matter of compliance with compulsory education laws rather than a key data point that serves as a red flag that a student or school is headed off track academically.

via The Attendance Imperative: State Policy and Chronic Absence « Attendance Works.