Chronic absenteeism has become one of the most persistent challenges in K–12 education. District leaders know it. School staff feel it every morning. And families experience it—often without realizing how quickly a few missed days can add up.

Today, nearly one in four students is considered chronically absent, meaning they miss 10% or more of the school year. That represents more than 10 million students nationwide, according to recent national reporting from The Hechinger Report and RAND.

What makes this trend especially concerning is its persistence.

Despite new requirements, expanded reporting, and widespread use of automated alerts, attendance outcomes remain largely unchanged. Putting academic performance, graduation rates, student engagement, and district funding at risk.

Most districts now rely on a familiar attendance process:

• A student is marked absent

• A one-way notification is sent to the family

• Staff follow up later if absences continue or documentation is still needed

This approach assumes families receive the message, understand what it means, and know what to do next.

In reality, that rarely happens.

Automated calls are easy to ignore. Emails get buried. App notifications go unopened. And when families do respond, it’s often days later and through disconnected channels that require staff to manually piece together information and documentation.

According to The Hechinger Report , post-pandemic absenteeism is no longer driven only by a small group of students facing extreme challenges. Even students who are otherwise engaged and academically successful are missing more school more often, allowing moderate absences to quietly accumulate until they become chronic.

This makes one thing clear:

Student attendance is not an awareness problem. Families already receive plenty of alerts.

If it’s not related to awareness, then why is chronic absenteeism a growing problem? Research consistently shows that student absenteeism is influenced by a wide range of factors, including:

• Illness and health considerations

• Transportation issues

• Family responsibilities

• Student disengagement

• Changing perceptions of how essential daily attendance is

• And, a growing rise of mental health and anxiety reasons. 

Yet most student attendance systems are designed to:

• Flag issues only after thresholds are crossed

• Record absences with a standard code without capturing context

• Focus on compliance rather than prevention

When systems only record whether a student was present or absent, they miss the reason behind the absence. Without that context, staff are limited in their ability to offer the right support to help students return to the classroom. 

This is where attendance efforts tend to fall short—not because schools don’t care, but because the tools and workflows were never designed to understand absences. And without understanding, meaningful support comes too late.

You cannot understand absences, without effective communication. The student attendance crisis will not be solved by more notifications, stricter thresholds, or louder reminders.

It will be solved when districts shift:

• From sending one-way alerts to having real, two-way conversations

• From tracking absences to understanding what’s causing them

• From reacting too late to supporting students earlier

• From expecting families to chase down next steps to making it easy for them to respond, right away

Attendance support cannot exist in isolation. It must live inside the same communication environment families use every day.

Research from the Institute of Education Sciences shows that two-way, text-based attendance communication can reduce chronic absenteeism by 3–7 percentage points, particularly for students already at risk. The difference isn’t the channel, it’s the interaction – the ability to communicate easily and instantly. 

When families can respond easily and share context, schools gain insight sooner, and can offer the support needed to prevent absences from becoming chronic.