Attendance

Low attendance is one of the most significant issues facing schools today. Excessive absences and truancy are known early warning signs for school dropouts. Educators also know how critical a role attendance can play in overall school performance. More importantly, especially in the lower grades, it's a safety and parent peace-of-mind issue. SchoolMessenger has a unique feature that lets parents provide a "reason for absence" response when they get a call about their student's absence. It's a convenience for parents that can help reduce the percentage of unexcused absences. Attendance calls help get students to school more reliably.

By automating attendance calls, SchoolMessenger can help lower truancy rates, increase attendance, help identify students at risk of dropping out, and dramatically reduce the staff, teacher, and parent overhead that is caused by each student absence. Automation also increases accuracy and can report on phone numbers that need to be updated in the Student Information System. Automated attendance calls have proven to result in lowering absenteeism and holds great potential for labor and cost savings. In addition, increased attendance can mean increased enrollment-based payments from the state or relevant funding agency.

Results Achieved:

Accountability
Peace of mind for parents, who need and expect to know if their child isn't in school
Improved overall school performance
Better SIS integration and call automation means more reliable calls and less staff overhead

"We found out that our absence verification auditing agency would treat an archived voice response from a parent giving a reason for absence as a legal absence verification. It cut our secretarial staff's work down a lot, because they didn't have to go and find those parents and get notes from each parent. The parents could simply leave a message on the phone and we just keep records of those and are able to produce them if need be."

Scott Mohr
Technology Coordinator
Chowchilla USD, CA