Speakers:

• Brenda Tapp (Host, Senior Customer Success Manager, SchoolStatus)
• Dr. Eric Guerrero (District Administrator)
• Mrs. Diem Johnson (School Principal)

Key Highlights:

District Overview:

• Sulphur Springs Union School District serves about 5,000 students
• Diverse student population: 54% socioeconomically disadvantaged, 22% English learners
• 16% of students have disabilities

Valley View Community School:

• 550 students from TK through 6th grade
• 72% socioeconomically disadvantaged, 27% English learners
• Serves a regional program for medically fragile students

Results:

• Significant reduction in chronic absenteeism (from 30% to 14% in one year)
• Improved attendance rates, especially around holidays

Ongoing Efforts:

• Aiming for single-digit chronic absenteeism rates
• Continual improvement and adaptation of strategies

Brenda: They know that students come first regardless of who they are, their background or anything.

Dr. Guerrero: We have about our students are made up of about 54.8 or about 54 of our students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. About 22 are English learners as well. We do have a foster population of about half a percent and then homeless is about 1% as well. You can see we have a very, very diverse population as well when it comes to our student backgrounds, Hispanic and white being the majority of the students. But again, we are a very diverse, diverse district. We celebrate all of our students and all means all when it comes to our schools.

We also have very unique special ed programs that we have. Mrs. Johnson will talk a little bit about the program that is at her site, which is a regional program. It serves our multiple students with multiple disabilities. And then we also have a severe op program as well. We service students who are severely impacted by autism, as well as just your regular RSP and regular SDC programs. It’s about 16% of our students who are students with disabilities.

Brenda: Oh, very interesting. Thank you very much. Let’s hear a little bit about Valley View Community. And you, Mrs. Johnson.

Mrs. Diem Johnson: Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m very excited to share all of the wonderful things that are happening at Valley View. Just to give a little background on our school, we are also a very diverse school. We have about 550 students who are enrolled. We span from TK all the way through sixth grade, just like Dr. Guerrero had mentioned, we serve the regional program, which really encompasses all of the Santa Clarita, SELPA area, where we serve our medically fragile population.

We are a Title I school, and so we have about 72% of our scholars who are socially economically disadvantaged. For our English learner population, we have about 27% of our scholars are ELs. We have about a 1.6% that are homeless youth and about half a percent that are foster. And then 13% of our scholars are also, they have an IEP.

It is just me as an administrator. I do not have an assistant principal, but we are very, very fortunate that we do have a program specialist that supports me with our special ed population as well as a full-time social worker.

Brenda: Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on at your school. And I think our group that’s attending and listening in today is going to get so much information, the wealth of information that you’re going to be sharing out today.

With all the challenges and the opportunities you have in front of us, how you’re continuing to keep attendance a main focus. Really quickly, before we go into that, I just want to quickly introduce myself again as Brenda, but more importantly, SchoolStatus and why I’m here disrupting your guys’ conversations.

So SchoolStatus is um… We’re the partner with Sulphur Springs. We worked with them now for over seven years. We’re in our seventh school year as a district partner with them. SchoolStatus itself, we have many different tools to help support communications between the schools and the families. And we’re going to talk today specifically about [SchoolStatus] Attend, which is our attendance platform, attendance platform program that we partner with districts nationwide. We have about 2 million students under our umbrella for Attend and again we have been around for over 20 years.

Brenda: So today what I’m going to do is jump down to the agenda. We’ll talk a little bit more about SchoolStatus and Attend as we get further into the presentation today. We’re going to do some, we did our introductions. We’re going to talk about the challenge we’re all facing today. Attendance, right? Number one challenge. We’re going to look at some data.

And then Silver Springs is going to share some of their intervention strategies that have helped them become very, very successful in regards to attendance and student success and achievement. Mrs. Johnson is going to share what they’ve been doing at her campus. And then Dr. Guerrero is going to be sharing from a district-wide perspective the all hands on deck philosophy that they’ve been using and talking about those holidays update, the upcoming holidays.

So Madison, let’s go ahead and go down to talking about kind of some of the challenges that we’re all faced with. So we know attendance is the number one indicator of student success. We know that attendance has always been challenging, but specifically since COVID, we are nowhere near where we want to be nationwide as a school. In fact, when we take a look at our 23-24 data compared to the year before. We are seeing nationwide, we’re seeing improvement in attendance, but we’re still about double where we were before COVID.

But we’re coming back. Now, the reason I invited Silver Springs today is they are really reducing their chronic absenteeism year over year at a much faster pace than many other school districts. So I wanted them to share what they’re doing so we can all kind of move that needle faster because we’re not coming back as fast as we want to. And we know it all starts with just a few days missed, right? Just four days per quarter equates to about 16 days per school year over that student’s educational journey or experience that equates to over a year of lost learning.

You may know that, but do your families and do your parents? It’s mind blowing knowing that just a few days here and there just really does add up and being on time as well really does play into the student’s success and connection at the campus.

So what we’re going to look at today is, and on top of that, attendance not being where we want it to be, we have some very fun holidays coming up and we know that as we head into the holiday seasons, attendance can go backwards, right? More kids are missing school, extended holidays.

And so I know that that’s typically a challenge. And I wanted to ask you all, all of our participants today, our attendees, what is your district’s biggest challenge with attendance around holiday breaks? So we’re going to do a poll. I would love to see, and I’m going to ping you guys, GM and Eric, what do you feel like your district’s biggest challenge is? Well, we have everybody taking the poll in regards to holiday attendance.

Dr. Guerrero: You know, Mrs. Johnson and I, we were always discussing this and, you know, we meet frequently, as I do with all of the principals, and we’re always discussing what is the biggest thing when it comes up to holiday breaks. And I think one that we can always kind of bank on, we always talked about, you know, illness is coming up and we always can predict when that happens and how we can get ahead of it.

But we’re also talking about how our students don’t typically disengage. It’s not that we’ve never heard from them, but they do also tend to take those vacations as they come up. And, you know, they try and take the Thursday or the Friday off. And a lot of the absences as we dig into the data, we look and saw, you know, they’ve either called out ill or it’s been the families they’re going to go on a vacation. Definitely looking across the district, that’s what we’ve seen. But Mrs. Johnson, what have you seen from your site when we’ve dug in there?

Mrs. Diem Johnson: I definitely concur with you. It is a combination of family vacations. They are taking that extra day before or after the holiday. And then also leading up to the holiday, we already know it’s flu season, cold season, and especially for our little ones, the ones that are in TKK, we’ve talked about this with our district and my fellow principals. You know, parents, this is their first time where their children are coming to school and there’s a little sniffle and so they have to kind of keep their child at home. So we’re working through that as a school with our families to let them know that, you know, when is it appropriate for them to come to school and when is it that they should definitely stay home. So it’s all about communication and collaboration.