Monitoring and supporting student attendance and engagement presented key challenges to districts as schools closed in spring 2020 due to COVID-19. According to the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s review of 477 districts nationwide, fewer than half monitored attendance or engagement after closing.
If districts do not have clear policies or guidelines specifying when and how to record and monitor attendance and engagement in the context of different instructional models, including hybrid and virtual learning, then data collection could become inconsistent or even nonexistent, further complicating schools’ efforts to track student progress and performance.
Our report, Best Practices in Monitoring Attendance and Engagement Across Environments, aims to inform states’ and districts’ reopening plans by providing recommendations for monitoring attendance in hybrid and virtual learning models, including guidance on tracking the nature of student absences (e.g., truancy, chronic absenteeism, COVID-19, and other excused absences).
