Key points:
If I had been asked a few years ago, I would have told you that chronic absenteeism was a school system’s problem to fix. With better data systems, staff trained on outreach, and improved intervention protocols, school districts could move the numbers on their own. But today we can see that while the numbers moved a little, the deeper story didn’t change nearly as much as we hoped.
Why? Because chronic absenteeism isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom.
In speaking with school leaders across the country, I’ve found near-unanimous agreement that the real issue is disconnection. When a young person stops believing that school has anything to do with their future, they stop showing up. Not because they’re defiant. Not because they don’t care. Because somewhere along the way, school stopped feeling relevant to them.
Personally and professionally, the fact that some students don’t see school as relevant is hard to admit. It would be simpler to say that today’s kids and families need to try harder to get out of the house in the morning and go to school. But if you actually sit with a teenager who has disengaged from school and ask why, “I don’t feel like it” is rarely the answer. Rather, you’d hear something closer to “no one there really knows me” or “I don’t see the point.”
So we’ve shifted how we think about this work. Attendance is the outcome, not the mission. The mission is reconnecting young people to people, purpose, and opportunity. Get that right, and attendance follows. Chase attendance directly, without addressing connection, and you’re just measuring a symptom while the underlying condition festers.
Belonging beats compliance
Think about the places in your own life where you show up without anyone reminding you, like your gym or church or your job. You don’t need a policy to make you go to those places. You go because you feel you belong there.
Kids are no different. Students go where they feel connected. Belonging, trusted relationships, and hope for the future move young people far more reliably than rules ever will. You can install every attendance tracking system in the world, and it won’t out-motivate a kid’s need to feel like they matter to somebody.
This is where I think schools–districts like mine included–have sometimes gotten it backwards. We’ve treated disengagement, and by extension chronic absenteeism, as a compliance problem best solved with stricter policies and more consequences. But you can’t discipline your way into belonging. You have to create belonging.
Why schools can’t do this alone
Here’s the part that took me longer to accept: even the best schools can’t build that web of belonging by themselves.
I believe that the Ithaca City School District, which I am proud to lead, is home to extraordinary teachers, principals, counselors, and support staff. Each day, they pour themselves into our students, and I’ve seen them work near-miracles for individual students. But I believe in the old African adage, “It takes a village to raise a child.” No matter how gifted a teacher is, they can’t be the only trusted adult in a student’s life. Unfortunately, schools alone can’t create the community of relationships children need.
Humans are social creatures. Our brains are wired for connection and community, and that community has to extend beyond the school building.
That’s why I’ve stopped talking about youth disengagement as a school problem with a school solution. It’s a community issue that requires a community-wide answer. Reconnecting disconnected youth is not something schools do to communities. It’s something communities do with schools.
What this looks like in practice
Pause for a minute to consider all the parts of your community young people interact with after school. Each should ask: How can we become one more reason young people stay connected?
Youth sports. A coach who shows up early to talk with a struggling player about how things are at school before discussing the game plan is doing identity-building work, whether they know it or not.
Libraries. A librarian who remembers a teen’s name and saves the next book in a series is actually saying, “I know you, and I expect you back.”
Faith communities. Churches and congregations have long been anchors of belonging, offering young people mentors, structure, and a sense of purpose that stretches beyond any single Sunday service.
Employers. A local business owner who gives a 16-year-old their first job is handing that young person proof that the adult world has a place for them.
After-school providers. Here in Ithaca, we’re fortunate to have organizations like the Greater Ithaca Activities Center, the Ithaca Youth Bureau, and Village at Ithaca doing this work daily, wrapping kids in mentorship, activity, and community after the final bell rings.
Mental health agencies. Counselors and clinicians in the community help young people work through the barriers–trauma, anxiety, family stress–that no attendance letter home will ever resolve.
Mentoring organizations. A mentor who keeps a standing weekly appointment with a teenager teaches that young person, through simple consistency, that they’re worth showing up for.
Local businesses. In addition to offering jobs, businesses sponsoring teams, hosting events, or simply knowing their young neighbors by name, add another connection to the network.
None of these efforts are new. What’s new is naming them for what they are: essential infrastructure in the fight against youth disconnection, not just “nice to have” community programming on the side.
Building an ecosystem, not a campaign
We’re not simply trying to improve attendance numbers. We’re building a community ecosystem that reconnects young people to opportunity. That distinction matters more than it might sound.
An attendance campaign has a start date and an end date. It has a target and a deadline. An ecosystem doesn’t work that way. It grows, it adapts, and it depends on many different organisms doing their part, day after day, without any of them needing to control the whole thing.
Communities don’t solve chronic absenteeism by demanding students show up. They solve it by becoming places young people want to show up for. That’s a fundamentally different posture. It’s less about enforcement and more about invitation. Less about tracking kids down and more about giving them somewhere worth going.
A shared responsibility
I’m not suggesting we let schools off the hook for absenteeism, or that we should shift blame elsewhere. School systems still play the most prominent role in engaging students and ensuring students go to school, and we’re backing that up: building relational advisory structures, training staff in trauma-informed practice, redesigning what engagement looks like inside our buildings.
But we’ve also learned that our work only goes so far if it stops at the schoolhouse door. Reconnecting youth is a responsibility shared by schools, families, employers, youth organizations, places of worship, libraries, coaches, mentors, and local businesses. Each of those groups holds a piece of the puzzle that schools simply can’t hold alone.
Collective responsibility isn’t a slogan. It’s a practical necessity. If you want a young person to feel connected seven days a week, you need more than a five-day-a-week institution trying to do it single-handedly.
The real scoreboard
I keep coming back to this image: Attendance is the scoreboard, connection is the game. Watch any scoreboard by itself, and you’ll miss everything that actually matters, the strategy, the effort, the relationships built between teammates over a long season. The score just tells you the outcome. It doesn’t tell you how you got there.
The same is true for our young people. Attendance numbers tell us something happened. They don’t tell us why, and they certainly don’t tell us how to fix it. If we want different numbers, we need a different game–one built on belonging, trusted adults, and genuine opportunity.
So here’s my invitation to this community, and to every community wrestling with this same challenge: Don’t wait for the school district to solve youth disconnection on its own. It won’t, because it can’t. This is community development work as much as it is education work. If we want young people connected to school, to work, and to their own futures, every sector of our community has a role to play.
The question isn’t whether our kids will show up. The question is whether we’ve given them enough reasons to.
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