At El Puente M.S. 50 community school in Brooklyn, New York, students are greeted by a remote coach when they log into Zoom at 8:30 a.m. each day. The coach takes attendance, engages with students, and stays online throughout the school day, even as teachers rotate.

Principal Ben Honoroff said, "Every time the bell rings, the coach uses the transition time for community building, like 'Hey, you did great in English class, I loved your participation.'" The coach then helps students prepare for the next class and introduces new teachers with a theme song—similar to the entrance music played for baseball players at Yankee Stadium. If a student is late or drops off mid-session, the coach immediately texts parents to check in.

These strategies—including adding coaches and keeping students in the same Zoom meeting all day rather than switching between classes—stem from lessons learned in the spring semester. At that time, student attendance was inconsistent depending on the time and subject. School leaders realized they needed to do more to keep students engaged.

Honoroff said the approach seems to be working for El Puente M.S. 50, with online attendance this fall "significantly higher" than in the spring. On the day he spoke with Education Dive, the school had 100% attendance—no small feat in the era of pandemic remote learning. During the pandemic, Wi-Fi access, technical glitches, home circumstances, and other factors have led to decreased student engagement, and education advocates and administrators are concerned aboutrising chronic absenteeism rateswhile schools lack unified oversight and standards for tracking attendance.

Lack of a unified metric

"In the past, everyone knew whether a child was in school," said Hedy Chang, executive director and president of Attendance Works, an organization dedicated to improving student success and closing equity gaps by reducing chronic absenteeism. "You were in school because your body was in the classroom and someone saw you."

She noted that attendance used to be a "common-sense" metric that many states used as an accountability indicator under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, reporting the number of students who missed 10% or more of school days. In the spring, schools received a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education for this indicator, but no waiver has been approved for this fall.

"Accountability works when everyone is doing the same thing, and we no longer have a standard measure of attendance, which makes accountability more difficult," Chang said. Currently, states and districts vary widely in how they determine whether a student is present.

At El Puente M.S. 50, students must attend classes all day (from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.) to be counted as present, just as they would if attending in person, Honororoff said. In many cases, however, attendance tracking is more complex.

Low bar with few exceptions

"At the start of the new school year, there was a real emphasis on tracking attendance, but how to do that poses many challenges—especially in remote or hybrid settings," said Phyllis Jordan, editorial director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. "Did the student log into the computer? Did they attend a live synchronous class, or did they submit an assignment?"

Jordan said states have taken different approaches in their reopening plans for the school year. Connecticut, for example, issuedstatewide guidance on attendance calculation, where a student is considered "present" if the total time spent in synchronous virtual classes, synchronous virtual meetings, logging into electronic systems, or submitting/completing assignments reaches half a school day.

D.C. Public Schools in Washington, D.C., requires students to complete at least one activity in the Canvas system between 6 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. each day—whether logging in, clicking a link, opening a course, or working on an assignment—to be marked present. Ohio education officials allow schools to useassignment completion as an attendance metric. For example, if a student submits a project expected to take eight hours (like a diorama), it counts as eight hours of attendance.

Jordan noted that many state guidelines specify there must be contact between the school and the student, but this raises questions about how much contact counts as attendance. "If a teacher calls a student or a student calls a teacher and leaves a message, does that count as contact? I don't think so," she said. "But if there's an actual conversation, does it need to be one minute or ten? States are trying to figure this out."

Elsewhere, attendance for remote learners is not tracked at all. Chang said that according to her organization's analysis, fewer than half of states currently mandate daily attendance, whereas before the pandemic all states did. Some states even count students as present regardless of whether they attend class.

"The bar for attendance in most places is low—with few exceptions, and I think Connecticut is one—which means if the bar is low, you won't notice when students are absent," Chang said. Her organization believes this matters because absenteeism is a leading indicator and cause of educational inequity, and an early signal of missing conditions for positive learning—whether academic, health and safety, or a sense of belonging and support.

"Kids want to be part of something"

"We know relationships are critical," said Natasha Ushomirsky, Massachusetts director of The Education Trust, which promotes the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership. "Schools with stronger relationships with students and families struggle far less with disconnection than schools with weaker relationships."

She added that if the first time a school contacts a parent during the pandemic is to ask why their child isn't logging into online classes, it won't sit well with families. "Relationships matter."

Erica Forti, superintendent of East Haven Public Schools in Connecticut, has prioritized this over the past few years, overseeing a drop in chronic absenteeism from 15.7% in the 2016-17 school year to 10.7% in 2019-20 (according to district data). Forti personally calls families, making an effort to understand them and the issues that might affect their child's attendance. She also has a dedicated attendance team that conducts home visits when necessary.

"Unless you take the time to do the homework, reach out to these families and find out the root of why they're not engaging, you won't know the reason," Forti said. Many of these strategies have carried over into the remote learning era, where building relationships with families is crucial, she said: "Nine times out of ten, you can solve the problem."

This is also the most successful strategy El Puente M.S. 50 has used to combat absenteeism. In addition to livening up transitions with music, remote coaches celebrate student birthdays, and the school's dean hosts virtual dances during lunch.

"We've put a lot of time and energy into thinking about how to build community remotely," Honoroff said. "My hypothesis is that if we just had students turn in assignments to count attendance, their attendance would actually be lower. Kids want to be part of something."