ATTENDANCE

Consistent class attendance now has a direct impact on students’ future success. As one of its areas of focus, the Department of Opportunity Youth collaborates with schools to promote an attendance culture. For schools, this involves engaging the knowledge and expertise of the department’s supervisors of attendance (SOAs).

With the collective goal of reducing chronic absenteeism and enabling students to fully engage in their education, SOAs serve as a resource to schools around attendance protocols and procedures, working with school leaders, attendance teams, and student success teams on strategies to address barriers to attendance, including the district-wide use of Panorama Student Success, with its data dashboards.

Following the adoption of Panorama Student Success, schools have an intuitive platform to develop individual student success plans, including ones for attendance. The platform provides a common space for school staff to collaborate on these plans, having a rich array of timely data at their disposal and the ability to monitor the impact of tiered attendance interventions.

As the law requires certain actions when absences begin to mount, one of the six SOAs functions as a liaison between the school district and Suffolk County Juvenile Court when, as a last resort, an attendance case must be referred there. Still, SOAs work with students and families to overcome student truancy challenges.

Tiered Attendance System

Offered by the department as a service, the Tiered Attendance System (TAS) enables schools to reflect on school-wide attendance practices to pinpoint gaps. Modeled off the multi-tiered system of supports, TAS delivers a bonus of resources and tools to address areas for improvement, built right into the system. TAS also complements Panorama Student Success.

TAS includes a self assessment schools complete to reveal gaps in school-wide attendance practices across tiers. Schools then receive consultative support to drive improvements. TAS works well at structuring needed supports, organizing them along increasing levels of intensity, from those delivered universally, through to targeted supports, and moving to intensive ones.

Superintendent Circular: Attendance Policies & Procedures