ALL IN FOR ATTENDANCE
All in for Attendance Collective: a full day symposium held on June 10, 2025, brought together over 100 students, policymakers, educators, administrators, health care, public health, and legal experts to address chronic absence and unveil a new public health framework for promoting school attendance. The new attendance framework is organized around three evidence-based guiding principles that provide a roadmap for use by state and local public health, healthcare, education agencies and community-based agencies and leaders to collaborate, coordinate efforts, and pool resources to reduce chronic absence.
- Use school attendance data as a vital sign of student and system well-being to drive action
- Develop strategic partnerships to align goals and drive progress on reducing chronic absence
- Develop strengths-based policies and programs to prevent chronic absence and promote school attendance
Led by Johns Hopkins University, Attendance Works, and Kaiser Permanente, the event featured speakers from around the country who addressed the challenges of supporting school attendance in diverse communities. The morning session featured a panel discussion, From Ideas to Impact – Building Partnerships to Reduce Chronic Absence. An international perspective was provided by Dougal Hargreaves, Professor, Imperial College of Medicine, Department of Education Scientific Advisory Council, who shared challenges and solutions from the United Kingdom.
The highlight of the day was a youth panel entitled, Cool Kids Show Up: A Youth Conversation on Health, Support, and Attendance. Students shared why they are excited to go to school, including seeing peers, attending classes feel like they are succeeding in, and experiencing connection to teachers, sports, activities, and pep rallies. They identified challenges that impact school attendance, including drop-off times, health problems, the structure of school day with not enough breaks in transition between classes, the need for more individualized support and understanding of each student’s reason for missing school, and credit recovery system so students don’t lose motivation for their futures.
The afternoon included 4 breakout sessions:
| · Chronic Absence as a Vital Sign for Health and Education*
· Building the Evidence: A Cross-Sector Research Agenda on Chronic Absence · Designing Strengths-Based Strategies to Prevent Chronic Absence · Here Today, Ready for Tomorrow: Messaging Health and Attendance |
* In the first breakout session, leaders compared three different models of health and education system collaboration. Jessica Weisz with Children’s National discussed a model of patient-level attendance data sharing with 1:1 family engagement from the health care system while colleagues from Kentucky discussed implementing and expanding school-based health suites and partnerships with school nursing and colleagues in Los Angeles are using school-wide attendance data to direct nursing resources to higher needs school. |
The event concluded with a panel that provided some recommended actions for the audience to support school attendance in their own community:
- Find your local champions and build them up and support them
- Combine data and relationships – use data to find out where we need to deepen and invest in relationship building
- Ask the patients in your office – how many days of school have you missed in last month
To view the symposium’s opening plenaries and white paper, visit https://schoolhealth.jhu.edu/all-in-for-attendance/.
Header image from Canva by edhumv (Getty Images Signature)
About the author
Julia DeAngelo, MPH
Program Manager for School Strategies within the Child Health Advocacy Institute at Children's National Hospital
Jessica Weisz, MD
General Pediatrician within the Goldberg Center for Community Health at Children's National Hospital
Danielle G. Dooley, MD, MPhil, FAAP
Medical Director, Community Affairs and Population Health within the Child Health Advocacy Institute at Children's National Hospital
