Key points:
Every June, once the last bus leaves and the halls go quiet, I get the strong desire to take a deep breath and to allow the pressure of the previous school year to subside and let the slower pace of summer settle in.
But after years of working in a district such as Van Dyke Public Schools, I’ve come to understand that the reason I never truly settle into that slower pace is because summer isn’t a break. For the families school districts most need to engage with, summer is the time to act. And if we aren’t purposeful in using the “down time” of the summer, we will spend all of the following year trying to catch up.
This is because chronic absenteeism is an issue that doesn’t disappear when the school year ends. In the U.S., 23 percent of all students (nearly one-fourth) miss enough school to fall significantly behind. These aren’t just abstract statistics to me. These are children in my community whose future depends on whether the adults in their lives showed up to provide support prior to the first bell ringing in the fall.
Van Dyke Public Schools, where I have had the honor of serving as Superintendent for nine years, has experience in working alongside families experiencing real hardships including housing instability, health issues, and transportation obstacles. Some of our students have been put in situations where they must assume caregiver roles for younger siblings due to family circumstances. These are explanations for absenteeism, not justifications. They are also problems that a robo-call or form letter will never be able to resolve.
What I do know is that building relationships with students and families helps address chronic absenteeism. And relationships have a season.
That season is summer.
Consider what happens when school is not in session. Attendance notices cease. Disciplinary discussions go quiet. The pressures of the school year diminish a bit and families who have endured months of feeling judged or pursued by institutional systems they don’t trust enough to allow them to enter their homes become more receptive to engaging in a meaningful dialogue.
I’ve seen this firsthand. When my team connects with families during the summer break, not with a warning, not with a consequence, but with a sincere individual inquiring about their child’s needs, the response is different. The defensiveness that develops throughout a school year is lessened. We aren’t contacting them because something went wrong. We are contacting them because we care about what lies ahead.
This difference means more than I can express.
The research supports this finding. Root-cause analysis of chronic absenteeism consistently demonstrates that families who disengage from school do so not because they are indifferent to their child’s education, but because they are overwhelmed and exhausted. These families have frequently had negative experiences that have led them to believe they cannot rely upon institutional systems for support. Establishing institutional trust does not occur during a quick hallway discussion on back-to-school night. Institutional trust must be established before that.
The positive outcomes resulting from our efforts support this conclusion: Our efforts to reconnect with families and restore trust contributed to chronic absenteeism declining at Lincoln High School (from 64% in 2023-2024 to 58% in 2024-2025) and Lincoln Middle School (from 59% in 2023-2024 to 50% in 2024-2025).
I am proud that Van Dyke has decided to commit resources toward engaging students and families during summer months as a central component of our attendance strategy. Supported by our partners at Concentric Educational Solutions, our efforts to conduct outreach to chronically absent students and their families during summer months, serves as an example of a human-centered approach necessary for achieving success in this area.
When our team conducts outreach to chronically absent students and their families over summer months by visiting residences, making phone calls that appear more personable than administrative, and listening before speaking, we are not merely attempting to improve cold statistics. Rather, we are communicating to every family we contact: You are an important part of our community and we want you to return to school.
I say to you from experience that that message lands differently in July than it does in October.
I encourage other educational leaders across Michigan and the United States to examine their summer calendars and to critically assess how they are utilizing this time as an opportunity for action. For students who are disengaging from school and disconnecting from opportunity, summer is either a pathway back to school or a longer pathway away from school. For their families, it can mean a pathway of reconnecting with their community resources and school should be the most important of those.
I know which pathway I want it to be.
The effort required to maintain student connection to school is extensive, continuous, and inherently human-centered. However, summer gives us an opportunity we seldom receive during the school year: the chance to prevent problems from arising rather than chasing after problems once they arise.
That opportunity is too valuable to squander.
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