Ep 117 — One Daily Text with John Bird

Chronic absenteeism can feel like the one problem that refuses to budge, no matter how many letters you send home or how many consequences you add. We sit down with Vice Principal John Bird of Kingsburg High School in New Jersey to talk about why attendance is rarely a single-choice issue and how a systems approach helps schools untangle the real drivers behind truancy, missed days, and disengagement.

John shares what changed when his team treated absenteeism like a connected web: poverty pressures, transportation, caregiver work schedules, student anxiety, ADHD, and basic needs that students often hide. We walk through practical MTSS moves that make a difference quickly, including Tier 1 communication that resets expectations (and clears up myths like “a doctor’s note makes it fine”), plus Tier 2 tracking and meeting routines that keep students and families informed without shaming them.

Then we dig into the Titan Connect Mentor Program, a relationship-first attendance intervention built around something simple: consistent, positive morning text messages from a teacher-mentor. John explains what his data showed, what students said in follow-up conversations, and why texting works as a bridge to trust, support services, and stronger school climate. We also talk about student engagement after COVID, why “school feels boring” is a leadership problem to solve, and how teachers can try new methods without fear of failing.

If you’re looking for realistic strategies to reduce chronic absenteeism, improve student engagement, and lead with trauma responsive practices, this conversation gives you a clear starting point. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review to help more educators find the show.

John Bird serves as Assistant Principal and District HIB Coordinator at Keansburg High School in New Jersey, where he also coaches football. His research and practice focus on chronic absenteeism, MTSS, ACEs, and school climate. He holds an Ed.D. from Rutgers University along with graduate degrees in political science, special education, and educational leadership, and he is currently pursuing a Master's in Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. John writes and presents nationally on trauma-responsive leadership and student engagement, drawing on his work building the Titan Connect mentor program at Keansburg.

Find John at: https://www.drjohnbird.com/home

On X: @jbird0126

Read articles by John on Edutopia: 

https://www.edutopia.org/article/supporting-students-adverse-childhood-experiences

https://www.edutopia.org/article/reducing-chronic-absenteeism-tiered-supports

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome to the Minimalist Educator podcast, where the focus is on a less is more approach to education. Join your hosts, Christine Arnold and Tammy Musiowski, authors of The Minimalist Teacher and your school leadership edit, A Minimalist Approach to Rethinking Your School Ecosystem, each week as they explore practical ways to simplify your work, sharpen your focus, and amplify what matters most so you can teach and lead with greater clarity, purpose, and joy.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

He speaks with us about tackling chronic absenteeism at his school. The peardown pointer he shares with us is that relationships are crucial. John Byrd serves as assistant principal and district HIV coordinator at Kingsburg High School in New Jersey, where he also coaches football. His research and practice focus on chronic absenteeism, MTSS, basis, and school climate. He holds an ad doctorate from Rutgers University along with graduate degrees in political science, special education, and educational leadership. And he is currently pursuing a master's in curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. John writes and presents nationally on trauma responsive leadership and student engagement, drawing on his work building the Titan Connect Mentor Program at Gatesburg.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. Today, Christine and I are talking with Vice Principal John Byrd, who is from New Jersey. Thank you, John, for joining us today.

SPEAKER_03 1:58

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

I enjoy LinkedIn as a space for connecting with other educators in leadership spaces in particular. And so that's how you and I met, which was kind of cool. We just, I can't even remember how that came about, but we've had a little bit of conversation there. And then I asked you to be on the podcast. So it's nice that we can have meet some virtual people and then actually see them in person on Zoom and talk about important things that were that you're doing in your

John’s Path Into Leadership

SPEAKER_01 2:32

roles. So can you share with us in your vice principal role? So a lot of the work that you do with within your school is obviously around something that a lot of vice principals have to work with, and then it's absenteeism and potentially truancy and those kinds of things that, you know, potentially start as things like low student engagement in classrooms. So there's there's all these layers to absenteeism. So can you talk a little bit about before we get too deep into that, can you talk a little bit about just how you kind of got decided you wanted to do being in this kind of leadership role and what brought you there?

SPEAKER_04 3:17

Yeah, so I've uh I've been in district for 14 years now. I started out as an assistant football coach and then eventually the head football coach and special education teacher. I worked with our behavioral intervention program for a number of years. And I always knew that I I kind of wanted to go into administration. It was kind of just another form of leadership similar to coaching, and it's been great so far. So about four years ago, the opportunity came about. Our vice principal at the time resigned. Actually, a principal at the time resigned as well. So myself and Sean Brophy, who's our principal, both took over simultaneously as principal vice principal. And we kind of had some work to do from the beginning. So in New Jersey, we're a school in need of supervision or help by the state. And basically that's based on a few things, but for us, it's based on our test scores in math and ELA, our chronic absorption rate, and our graduation rate. So we knew coming in that those were the four things that we really needed to tackle, which is, I mean, in in a nutshell, kind of everything in a

Absenteeism As A Systems Problem

SPEAKER_04 4:48

school.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

Yeah. Yeah, some really important things to tackle there. You mentioned the chronic absenteeism. I can't help thinking it's it there's obviously it's a very complicated situation, but you know, there's the side of it with the students themselves to tackle, but then there's also the role of of the parents or the caregivers in the situation as well. Can you talk a little bit about how those two dynamics play out?

SPEAKER_04 5:14

So you're right, it it's so multifaceted. And I was very lucky in that shortly prior to taking over, I had taken a class during my doctoral program. And I like to tell a story just because it's it's crazy interesting. And it was uh with a systems theorist, and his whole thing was breaking down intractable conflicts. And he his background was he was from Palermo, Sicily. He worked with the mayor of Palermo to eradicate the Sicilian mafia through disbanding systems thinking. And then, because I guess that wasn't enough, he went to Meteen Colombia and helped them dismantle the drug cartels. So this is what he did, and I'm sitting here thinking, well, students, cartels, the mafia, like they could all kind of be similar at times, right? So we we looked at our we all so we kind of looked at it from a systems perspective. So in our district, it's it's a high poverty district. We deal with a lot of different outside issues, some being, like you said, with parents, a lot of parents working, a lot of single parent households, a lot of parents that don't make a lot of money, and then everything that comes with that. So the parentification of students, the adultification of students, students needing to work, students having clothing issues, transportation issues, right? All of it. And it's that web of all these different things that kind of turns it into a an intractable issue, right? Where like one causes the other, causes the other, causes the other, makes it very difficult to alleviate. And I was lucky, having studied with this guy, that he basically taught us that the way to do it is to start, start slowly and short circuit different connections, right? So coming in, we knew we had those four things that we had to deal with. We knew that graduation rate couldn't happen overnight, math and reading, math and English scores couldn't happen overnight, but this was something we could start working on right away. So we started looking at those little things, and our first year kind of put in tier one and tier two MTSS structures in order to start kind of short circuiting some of these confounding issues.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

That's really complex and it is a bit yeah, super interesting story too, with the connection for kind of undoing some of those systems for people, all different kinds of people. And so I'm wondering then, once you kind of figured out these different things that were interfering with kids' attendance, how many of those things are actually and it doesn't have to be a number? I don't know how how you could quantify this necessarily, but what do the students actually have control over in that, in those situations? Are they things that they can control or a lot of is a lot of it things out of their control?

SPEAKER_03 8:36

I I would say if if you were to put a number on it, it's probably 50-50. But I think with with a a healthy school relationship, it's probably higher.

SPEAKER_04 8:52

It's probably much higher. It's probably 75-25 where they can control it with assistance, right? And and that's kind of where the MTSS came in, was giving students assistance in the way that they needed it in order to have them getting to school more often.

unknown 9:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

Some of it absolutely was outside of our control. Some of it was outside of students or outside of students' control, I should say, but we we did alleviate a lot of our attendance issues once we started creating relationships and and addressing first addressing some of the problems head-on, and then secondary creating relationships.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Yeah. Can I ask a part B to that? I usually ask a very layered question, but I held back that time. So part B. So knowing then that the relationship building was going to be essential to get students to come in more, what are some of the things that you did that you worked on with teachers

Tier 1 Communication That Resets Expectations

SPEAKER_01 9:54

to make sure that that was going to be the focus and be a successful piece for students getting to school?

SPEAKER_04 10:01

So I'll go kind of tier by tier. So tier one, we we first worked on communication with students and with home. We let them know what chronic absenteeism was, why it mattered, what the consequences of it were, both natural and in school. We did a lot of advertising, and you know, whether it was using social media, using our talking points up, using email, phone calls, even hanging posters up at the local bagel store or anywhere else kids would see them about. We want you in school, we need you in school, it's important. Every conversation that myself and Sean started having, whether it be a class meeting, an individual conversation, said something to the extent of you have to be in school, this is something we need to do. And I think that tackled a big part of it, just the information. I I don't think a lot of kids and families realized how much it mattered or that it mattered at all. And there was this misconception that if you get a doctor's note, it's okay, right? Like it just goes away. But at the end of the end of the day, if you're missing school, you're missing school. So, you know, whereas we could take that into account, we were still telling them like you kind of have built-in days for that, right? You you you don't become chronically absent after two absences because you have the flu, right? You're chronically absent because you have the flu nine times in the school year and you're getting doctor's notes, right? So that that was the big one. The second phase of it was we started having a lot of meetings and just really keeping track of it, right? Using data to make sure that we knew where the kids were, the kids knew where the kids were, their parents knew where the kids were. And at certain thresholds, like 10 days, 15 days, whatever, we would have meetings with the students, meeting with the students and their parents, you know, bringing the parents in is always a huge thing because they do have other things going on. And when you you have to take them out of their day to deal with the situation, they're more often likely to help us. So those were, you know, some of our earlier interventions. Going into year two, we did really work on that part that you just asked about. So we had two primary drivers in relationship building. The first was we did a year-long professional development on student engagement. So we understand that especially for today's students, school can be boring, right? And it's not because of the teachers, it's not because of the framework of schooling, it's because you're competing with YouTube and Snapchat and a million other things that are designed to capture students' interest, right? So we we did a lot of work with our teachers on just trying to be more engaging in in their

Using Data And Meetings For Tier 2

SPEAKER_04 12:58

lessons and whatnot. The big thing we did that that I'm really proud of is we launched what was called the Tight and Connect program. I kind of jumped over it when you had asked before. We do struggle sometimes with with parent involvement, just the nature of things. Again, a lot of time it's it's work conflicts and and stuff like that. So what we did was I kind of went back to my my football days when I would, you know, if we had practice, I was texting all the kids, we have practice tomorrow, be there at this time, do it at this time, we're fundraising at this time, remember your blue jersey, not your white jersey, right? Like I was using Reminds 101 to text these kids 10 times a day to stay on top of them. And and I kind of wondered, why don't we do this for school? Right? Because I'm sure the drama teacher does the same thing for the play, I'm sure the band teacher does the same thing for the band, right? But when it came to academics, we never directly talk, you talk to students in class, but we would never like rarely do you hear somebody using reminds 101 to remind the student to do their homework. And it was almost like tabo for some reason. And we said, let's give this, like, let's give it a shot. So at the beginning of the year, I asked teachers to volunteer for this program. We had 11 teachers, our first year volunteer for a program to be mentors. And excuse me, I took the first the 50 most practically absent students from the prior year, spoke to each one of them, said, Do you want to be part of this program? And basically all it was was every morning prior to school, they would get a text message from their mentor. So if I was mentoring a student, you know, I every morning stop and I get a coffee and a bagel, right? So after I got back in my car on my bagel, I would just shoot out a text, right? I'm about a half hour away from school, shoot out a text to my my kids saying, Hey, can't wait to see you in school today. Hey, I missed you yesterday if they had been absent. We're doing PSATs today, important day to be there. There's a pep rally today, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Any anything like that. Just always positive, always trying to build relationships. And we so out of that 50, 33 students said, yeah, they were interested in being part of it. They were allowed to pick which one of the 11 people they wanted to be their mentor. So some had teachers they wanted to develop a relationship with, some had teachers they had a prior relationship with, how they picked, you know, it was completely up to them. And we went the full year with teachers sending out these text messages every day. And, you know, they did it in different ways. Some only did it like twice a week. Some would schedule them on Sunday night to be automatically sent for the week. But what we really so this actually became my dissertation over the course of the year.

Titan Connect Mentors And Daily Texts

SPEAKER_04 16:04

So we did a qualitative study after, and the quantitative part was that half the students, half of that 33 became not chronically absent. So which if you're gonna tell me I can take half of a cohort and make them not cry, I'm gonna do it over and over again, right? So the qualitative part though was super interesting because I thought, okay, the kid gets a text message, it gives them a little push out the door, you know, maybe it helps them. But it wasn't. It was that that text message formed a relationship with the mentor where the kid wanted to be, right? That's that's kids' form of communication. They they start dates online, they start relationships, they talk to their parents, right? That's where they want to be, that's where they're most comfortable. So they would reach out to these mentors, or the mentors would reach out to them, but then once they came back into school, they would feel more comfortable. So they'd be walking down the hall and they'd say, Hey, thanks for texting this morning, or see I'm here on time. And it would start these conversations. And out of the conversation, what we got was this student has anxiety and they have a lot of trouble getting to school, right? They're they're phobic. We had another student that says, I have real bad ADHD, and every morning I'm ready to leave for school, and something else gets my attention, and then I go into something, and before I know it, it's 10 o'clock, and I'm like, why am I even going to school? And they would say the ding of the phone, like almost refocus them into like, oh, I gotta get out the door. We interestingly had that first year three kids self-enroll in the program where a mentor and a student were talking in class about, hey, you gotta text me tomorrow, because like you're texting so and so. And they described it to them, and these three kids were like, Can you text me too? Right. So they like jumped on the caseload. And it it did, it really created these good relationships between students and and to go back to the original problem of what do you do when there's so many different reasons.

SPEAKER_05 18:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:19

Well, now that now they have a person that they trust that started through a simple text message who can now help them through the problem.

unknown 18:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:29

Right? So a student with anxiety, it just happened that her mentor is also one of our mental health clinicians in the building. So she went to her and said, I'm anxious every day. I have trouble getting to school. They worked through that. By the end of the year, she had no trouble getting to school. You know, the the one student, I think, struggled with with clothing and said, you know, well, we have a life skills class here that has a washer and dryer. They didn't know about that. The mentor was able to say, Listen, bring your laundry and we'll get your laundry done, and you'll be fine, right? And and deal with that. Because kids, kids don't know what resources are out there more often than not, you know. So it it really created this great and and just a better feeling in the school, you know. And then unfortunately, as administrators, we're we are always concerned about numbers. So coming out of COVID, so we had we had always had an issue. Prior to COVID, we were in the low 30% range of product absorbing. Coming out of COVID, we got into the mid-40s, that first year back. First year, you know, so we were almost half. Then after that first year with the the tier one, tier two, we got back down to that 30%, that like pre-COVID range. And then once we put in the the Titan Connect, which this year will be our fourth year doing it, this past year, if you take out out or out of district students, we're around 20% chronic absorb. So we're lower than post-COVID, way lower than post-COVID, which is pretty special just based on data. So, you know, and and it has been that. It's been this idea of we want our students here and and we're gonna let them know we do.

SPEAKER_05 20:18

Yeah, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Yeah, and it as you say, it's about it's about so much more than just compliance. It's more than just teachers saying we want students at school. It it's it's gives them so many benefits in so many different ways. So that's that's amazing that you've been able to achieve that. You mentioned

Engagement Shifts After COVID

SPEAKER_02 20:38

earlier as well about you know changing in the classroom environment and and especially you mentioned making teachers work a little bit, maybe with a little bit more engagement. I would love to hear more about that. I immediately just started imagining teachers performing in some way, but maybe you listen.

SPEAKER_04 20:55

Yeah, I mean yeah, I I mean I wish it was as exciting as that. Um and and you know, probably in some cases it was. I I think so we amongst other things, new New Jersey over the last seven years has kind of changed the way the round the change around the way they do school finance. And unfortunately, a bunch of districts, us included, lost a good deal of money. So we went from a teaching staff in like 20, let's say 2017, of about 55 teachers to now we have 30. So with lost a lot of teachers, the teachers we the vast majority of teachers we did lose were those, you know, zero to five and five to ten year teachers, right? Because it's based on seniority.

SPEAKER_05 21:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 21:50

So we had an experienced teaching staff that had done things the same way for for a long time and had a lot of success doing it, right? W you know? So I think the the biggest message was you just had kids that sat home for two years juggling whatever kind of learning was going on online with their video games, with their ability to sit there and Snapchat, with the ability to get up and go to the bathroom whenever they would like. And now we're bringing them back into this, you know, structured environment and asking them not to do half of these things, but then to also want to be a part of what you're giving them. And I I think, you know, that's a losing proposition, whether you're here or or Hawaii or or anywhere else in the world, you know, so and I think, you know, if you look, I think as educators, we're still trying to figure that out. But I think it was, you know, to answer your question, it was it was it was more so about trying new methods and being willing to fail, right? Because you're talking about people that had got used to succeeding in the method they were using, and and now we're saying, well, let's try to use AI a little bit. Let's use the computer more, let's, you know, integrate multimodal forms of learning. You know, let's uh again, I'm not sure if I let's put on the costume and act out the American Revolution if, you know, that's that's what engagement is for you. But, you know, capture capture the kids' attention. And, you know, I think part of it isn't just your pedagogy or your teaching technique. I think part of it is creating your relationships, right? That's the one thing that they couldn't get through a computer or sitting at home was the fact of, hey, this person cares about me and they want me to learn, so I'm gonna pay attention to them.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Yeah, the human connection cannot be replaced. So that's a huge step that you've made. We're already

The Pared-Down Pointer And Closing

SPEAKER_01 24:09

wrapping up time for our episodes. Oh, well. Yeah, I know it goes so fast, and we like to keep it in that kind of like nice community time range. But if you could share one simple pared-down pointer with our listeners, could be something you've mentioned already or something that we haven't talked about. What would you share with our listeners?

SPEAKER_04 24:30

It may be cliche at this point, but it's all about relationships. Any attendance work I do, anybody I talk to, uh, whether you talk about engagement, attendance, discipline, anything. It's going to be about the the relationships. And I encourage people to kind of look outside of the box as to to how they can do that, right? And and to be willing to. You went into business to work with kids, so so be very willing to find ways to create relationships with kids.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yeah. Thank you so much, John. That was really powerful. And I know that a lot of people listening will will take what you've said and hopefully try some things out to change their absentee issues as well. Thanks for being with us today, John. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

This episode is sponsored by Plan Z Education Services, supporting educators with forward-thinking professional learning that puts both student impact and teacher wellness at the center. Driven by a vision to teach less, impact more, they help educators find purpose, prioritize what matters, and simplify their practice. Learn more at planzeducation.com.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Thank you for listening to the Minimalist Educator Podcast. Join Christine and Tammy and guests again next time for more conversations about how to simplify and clarify the responsibilities and tasks in your role. If today's episode helped you rethink, reimagine, reduce, or realign something in your practice, share it in a comment or with a colleague. For resources and updates, visit plan zeducation.com and subscribe to receive weekly emails. Until next time, keep it simple and stay intentional.