School culture

Cultivating safe, supportive, and joyful school cultures Culture defines the values and behavior we believe are important for everyone in our learning communities. While culture is intangible, there are some important indicators we can consider to understand our progress, including attendance and suspension rates.

Increasing attendance

We did not move the needle on student attendance last year, despite the effort of a number of district teams working toward this critical goal. What we did not do, however, was clearly articulate leadership and ownership of this work. We learned a hard lesson last year, but we know that mistakes are opportunities to learn. Here are some of the changes we are implementing this year:

• Using our real-time data dashboards daily to identify students who need additional supports;
• Making calls to the parents and guardians of every absent student every day; and
• Increasing school and district communications to families about the importance of good attendance.

Early impact

• 92.4 percentage point average daily student attendance
• 25.7 percentage point students who are chronically absent

Early impact

• 26.5 percentage point decrease in unique out-of-school suspensions
• 7.8 percentage point students who received at least one out-of-school suspension
• 21,000 increase in instructional days due to decreased suspensions