Clay McDonald, District Attendance Officer at Yukon Public Schools, has spent three years watching a familiar crisis unfold in slow motion. Before stepping into this role, he served as a middle school principal and learned firsthand how hard it is to spot the early warning signs of chronic absenteeism.

"When I was principal I would see kids that were struggling," Clay explained. "Attendance is before grades. It's an indicator before that. Once I got this job I never realized how much it matters until something slips right past you."

With 9,700 students and a manual, multi-contact, multi-channel attendance system, unverified absences were piling up at an alarming rate. Parents with children at different schools faced a confusing tangle of different phone numbers, email addresses, and call-in procedures. Many simply gave up.

That 300% spike wasn't driven by student behavior. McDonald says it was driven by a system that was too tough to use.

“A lot of our attendance secretaries were like ‘hey we don't have a good call in procedure. Parents are just supposed to email. Well, if they have three kids and three different schools and they're all absent they're supposed to email three different emails. You got three different phone numbers and it just was so hard people just started giving up and not doing it. Including school personnel.”

A district staffer with kids enrolled in Yukon schools told Clay she'd finally stopped trying to report absences, "It was just too stressful for me to figure out," she said. When school personnel are giving up on the system, the data can no longer be trusted.

Without reliable attendance data, identifying chronic absenteeism (defined in Oklahoma as 18 missed days, or 10% of the 180-day school year) becomes nearly impossible. And If you cannot identify the problem, you certainly cannot intervene and help solve it.

Clay's mission was clear: modernize. "The word I used to the people who write the checks was, 'We've got to do something to get into 2026. We are in a texting and app world.'"

When Apptegy presented Attendance Pro — a natural extension of the platform Yukon already trusted — the feature that stopped the conversation was two-way texting.

"As soon as they said we think this will be seamless and it answers the question you wanted: can we text? I was like, seriously, there is a system out there that will do this?"

— Clay McDonald, District Attendance Officer, Yukon Public Schools

What Made the Difference

Attendance Pro was approved by the Yukon school board and is set to launch at the start of the 2026-27 school year. Clay has a measured, data-driven vision for what comes next.

For Clay, the proof will come in the data. "I can't wait till December when I run the first semester reports. I've done this job long enough to know that when you make small, subtle changes, it makes a massive difference."

FOR ATTENDANCE SECRETARIES

Today, secretaries manually log every parent call, decide whether a reason warrants escalation, and compose follow-up emails. One secretary asked Clay if they could start "next week" after hearing about Attendance Pro. With automated coding and instant routing of flagged responses, that manual burden disappears.

FOR TRUANCY COURT

Clay attends every truancy proceeding for the district's 60–70 annual cases. With Attendance Pro, he walks in with a documented record of every text sent, every response received, and every intervention offered. "I can prove it right then," he said.

FOR PARENTS

A parent leaving the doctor's office can snap a photo of the note, text it in, and the documentation arrives before they're back in the car. One system, one number per school, regardless of how many children they have across different schools.

FOR STUDENT SUPPORT TEAMS

When the AI flags a transportation barrier or a mention of bullying, it doesn't wait for a secretary to decide if it's worth escalating. The right team member gets it immediately. "If Jimmy has missed three straight days because of a bus issue, we need to get on that right now, not three weeks later," Clay said.

This is the level of service and ease of use that parents want to have when engaging with their child’s school. Attendance Pro creates a positive customer experience through proactive communication, instant gratification of resolved absences and it opens the door to deeper conversations that change student outcomes.

"There's going to be so much more I can share. There are so many meetings such as IEP meetings and parent-teacher conferences where people are going to get attendance information they've never been able to see before."

Clay McDonald | District Attendance Officer, Yukon Public Schools