They Examined 3.3 Million Text Messages on Chronic Absenteeism. Here Are 4 Big Findings

By Greg Toppo - November 12, 2025

More than five years after the dawn of COVID-19, chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools remains high — at last count, it exceeded prepandemic levels for the fifth straight year. In about half of urban school districts, more than 30% of students were chronically absent, missing 10% or more of school days.

And bedrock attitudes about attendance seem to be changing. A recent RAND study noted that one in four students now doesn’t think being chronically absent from school “is a problem.” The study found that about 40% of school districts consider reducing chronic absenteeism among their top three most pressing challenges. One in 12 ranks it as their biggest challenge. 

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company SchoolStatus, which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. 

In a paper out Wednesday, it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways:

1: Early intervention works

Contacting families before students become chronically absent is crucial. Once a student crosses the 10% threshold, fixing their attendance becomes much harder, so intervening when students register just three to five absences is most effective. Contacting parents early with a letter improved attendance dramatically, reducing absence rates by 28%.

Researchers found that 51% of students whose families receive just one letter don’t need a second one. The “save rate” for these students suggests that many families simply don’t realize how quickly absences accumulate. 

2: Timing and communication methods matter

Joy Smithson

Parents are highly responsive to text messages, researchers found, with 73% of texts garnering a response from parents in just 11 minutes. They’ll engage with schools when communication is “accessible, timely and specific.”

“The method does matter,” said Joy Smithson, a SchoolStatus data scientist. “We get a lot higher rates of response with text messages.” Placing a phone call, on the other hand, is “for those more critical conversations,” she said.

Kara Stern, the company’s director of education, agreed. “Not every parent is in a position where they can pick up a phone call during the day. For many people, it might jeopardize your work situation, and so to assume that that’s the best way to reach a parent is not necessarily to be in tune with the actual realities of the parents in your community.”

SchoolStatus

The best times to text families, the data suggests, are either around 8 a.m., when parents and students are preparing for school, or 2-4 p.m., typically during pickup times. These align with natural breaks in parents’ daily routines, when they’re most likely to check their phones.

The best time of year to engage families is August or September. Parents who hear from schools early maintain higher response rates throughout the year — 77% vs. 71% — and respond, on average, one minute faster. By January, 33% of these parents are still engaging with schools, compared to just 16% of parents who first heard from schools later in the fall term. 

That suggests that early conversations “do extra work,” researchers maintain, establishing trust, opening communication channels and signaling to families that working together matters.

“It’s important to reach out at the beginning of the year, so that you’re not waiting for a crisis,” said Smithson, “because it’s too late to build a relationship at that point.”

3. Plain language outperforms edu-jargon

Researchers found that being specific about how much school a student has missed outperforms vague messages such as, “We’ve noticed some absences.” 

Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” also outperform lengthy explanations of attendance policy.

And when students are older, direct messages can be very effective.

“What this data shows us is that connection is really driving so much of a student’s experience,” said Stern. “When a school is able to reach out to the kid and say, ‘Hey, Greg, we missed you today, what’s going on? What do you need to help you come to school?’ that’s a really different experience than having a form letter appear at your house saying, ‘Greg has missed school six days.’” 

She added, “What I hope districts will take away from this report is that communication is intervention,” she said. “It’s not extra work. It’s the work that makes everything else stick.”

4: Three key moments merit extra attention

Students at three moments in their school careers are more likely to be chronically absent: in pre-K, sixth grade and high school. Stern called them “high alert moments.”

Surprisingly, pre-K students have the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any group, mostly due to the high frequency of illness and families underestimating the impact of missing school. 

Sixth grade is “the tipping point,” said Stern, with chronic absenteeism spiking by 3.3 percentage points from fifth to sixth grade, the sharpest increase across all grades.

Kara Stern

Smithson said middle-schoolers typically have more autonomy. They’re often getting their first mobile phones. And current sixth-graders, she said, were in kindergarten when COVID hit in 2020. “So just imagine knowing that patterns get established in kindergarten,” she said. For those kindergartners in 2020, school “really got disrupted,” with their baseline experience of school being “categorically different” from what it should have been.

And for many students, the transition from elementary school to middle school represents a shift from a safe, contained environment, where both students and parents are highly engaged, to a less personal one, with less consistency and connectivity, said Stern. Students “don’t know that there is someone who’s really paying attention, who cares that they’re there, who knows what’s happening with them, and so maybe it doesn’t really matter if they’re there or not.”

And middle school can also be the place where many students first experience bullying, which also worsens attendance.

In high school, chronic absence rates more than double, and students have lower response rates to traditional methods like letters, suggesting that schools should contact students directly — actually, they found that direct student messaging could work for students as young as 11. 

A text message to a high school freshman can start a conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Pairing these messages with notes to parents can improve response rates in these critical years, researchers found.

“The chronic absenteeism numbers in high school suggest that kids are really voting with their feet,” said Stern. “And so one way to get them back would be to invite them in to be part of the solution, to say, ‘What is it that is not meeting your needs? How can we include your voice in the process of making high school what you want it to be?’”

In many ways, the new findings echo what researchers like Johns Hopkins University’s Robert Balfanz and Hedy Chang have long suggested. Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said Wednesday’s report “reflects what we know from common sense and research. Improving attendance is possible when we use data to take early action as well as determine where we should invest in building relationships so we can partner with students and families to encourage showing up, monitor absences, and address barriers to getting to school.”

But Chang said that while timely, data-informed engagement of families is essential, “it is not always sufficient and should be combined with other strategies for identifying and addressing barriers to getting to school.” Those barriers could exist in the community or in schools and should be addressed in “a comprehensive, systemic approach.”

She suggested that a tiered system of interventions is sometimes necessary, including “intensive interventions” for students who miss more than 20% of school days. It could include housing supports, a student attendance review board, a community-based, non-criminal truancy court, individualized learning and success plans and even, as a last resort, legal intervention.

Stern and Smithson said the findings boil down, in a larger sense, to the importance of what they call “active noticing” about attendance. 

“I really think that it would be a big plus for faculties to actively notice every week and go through their rosters,” said Stern. “‘Who do we not know? Who can’t speak about this child? Who doesn’t know anything about this student’s life after school? We have someone that we need to actually pay attention to learning more about — who’s suddenly not coming to school, who’s turned it around and suddenly being there?’ ” 

Smithson said the biggest takeaway for educators is that “Timing is everything. Do not wait. Act with urgency. It’s about building those relationships, and it’s just so important — and it’s so important to start right away.”

To read this article on The 74 website, click here.