School Attendance is a Family Affair [Narrated Story]

Cheyanne used to hate school. She missed most of her freshman and sophomore years and was ready to give up... until something shifted. 

In the rural school district of Jewell, Oregon, with just over 100 students, educators, families and students came together to rebuild what school could be. In the course of one school year, attendance skyrocketed by 25 percentage points. In real numbers, that means about 30 more students from Jewell’s class of 115 were coming to school nearly every day.

Northwest Regional ESD’s Whitney Wagner tells the story of how one community learned that showing up starts with feeling seen.

Read this article.

Transcript

My name is Lindsey Pratt and I work on the Behavior, Attendance and Social Emotional Systems team at Northwest Regional Education Service District. 

Today we are bringing you a story about the work one rural school district is doing to create a school community where students feel valued, educators feel capable and families want to be. 

Too often in education, we try to solve big problems with isolated programs or quick fixes. But those approaches often lead to disappointing and disproportionate results. 

When we take a step back and think about the whole system -- and make changes with that in mind, we are engaging with what we call systems work. 

If a school has low attendance, rather than jumping right into making phone calls home, systems work demands we think bigger. When we think about the patterns, policies and routines that are in place and then question and rethink those, that is systems work.

But what does this actually look and feel like on the ground? 

Today, we take you to the Jewell School District to walk you through what the district is doing differently and how schools have changed as a result. 

Whitney Wagner, a program administrator who leads our attendance, migrant education and English language learner consortium, will read the story Attendance is a Family Affair.

After missing most of her freshman and sophomore years, Cheyanne, now a junior at Jewell High School, says she’s rarely absent. 

“It’s just for medical appointments or for my braces,” she says.

She plays volleyball with her best friend TJ, volunteers with the fire department on Wednesday nights and is earning college credit through the local community college. 

She’s scoring top marks on most of her assignments and wants to be a traveling trauma nurse. 

But it wasn’t always this way. 

“I hated school,” she says. And in this rural district with just 115 students, she missed more school than most. 

“That was me,” she says. “I’m not gonna lie.”

Getting her back to the classroom has been years in the making. Her mom says it started back in sixth grade.
It was the summer of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic had shuttered nearly all in-person interactions, including school. As a sixth grader, Cheyanne was struggling to read, so a teacher named Ms. Jansen spent the summer getting her back on track. 

Although she was getting extra help in school, she developed anxiety and a neurodevelopmental disorder in her early teenage years and began regularly missing classes. 

Her mom, Angela, says she felt attacked whenever the previous administrators approached her about Cheyanne’s attendance. “I felt like they weren’t listening to me.” 

She says the tone has shifted noticeably in recent years. Cory Pederson, who taught band and music for 16 years in Jewell, was named interim superintendent in 2022 after much administrative turnover. 
In addition to staffing changes, Jewell, like the rest of the state, nation and world, had to contend with the COVID-19 pandemic. That disruption was massive, and in many ways deeply altered the way families think about their children missing school especially when they’re sick. 

Despite statewide and local campaigns focusing on the importance of going to school, attendance rates in our four-county region have not yet caught up to pre-pandemic levels. 

Statewide, only 65% of students were regularly attending school last year compared to 77% in 2018-19. 

But 19 of 20 districts in our region had more students attending school regularly in 2023-24 compared to 2022-23. 

Five districts — Astoria, Clatskanie Jewell, Neah-Kah-Nie and Vernonia — saw double-digit growth last year. 

Compared to other districts, Jewell saw the most dramatic rise in attendance. In just one school year, the percentage of regular attenders — defined as students who attend 90% of the time or more — jumped 25 percentage points.

In real numbers, that means about 30 more students of Jewell’s 115 were coming to school nearly every day.

Cory says he feels like the district is just getting started. When he took the reins in 2022, he set out to stabilize the schools by putting research-based systems and structures into place. 

To the untrained eye, these systems might not be obvious at first. But walk through the halls at Jewell, and you’ll see all of the work the educators have undertaken in the past few years. 

Teachers are posted up right outside their classrooms during passing periods, the principal greets students at the front of the school every morning and banners proclaim the school’s values: learn courageously, work persistently, give graciously. Students receive a medal after passing each grade and families are invited to attend end-of-year celebrations that always include food.early every day. 

The librarian doubles as the bus monitor so the driver can focus on the road and students come to school calm and ready to learn. There’s also a yearlong incentive for good behavior that students clinched this year, which earned them a field trip to King Pins bowling alley and arcade in Beaverton. 

Then there’s the less obvious work that doesn’t have a visual cue, like the software system (SWIS) that tracks student behavior data and helps teachers make real-time decisions about how to shift the school environment to better support students. The school also tracks students’ academic progress and communication with families. 

Research shows that building strong relationships with families improves attendance, supports better academic outcomes in reading and math and promotes social emotional development. 

Cory refers to it as the triangle effect and equates a child’s family and other caregivers as one side of a slanted roof of a house and the school as the other. Each side comes together to provide support and shelter to the child underneath. 
“When both sides are intact, the child is sheltered by a solid structure (aka the family-school partnership) that protects and guides them in their life journey,” he says. 

That’s why we’re trying so hard to build relationships with families, he says. 
Angela, who has raised four other children who are all young adults now, says she was looking for that teamwork from Cheyanne’s teachers. 

“When you have teachers and people that listen and support and understand and we all work together, it helps,” she says. “It’s more support for Cheyanne.” 
When Northwest Regional Education Service District offered professional learning to school districts in Clatsop County last school year, Cory took the agency up on its offer. 

Four professional learning coaches with various specialties in school safety, social emotional learning, culture and climate and multi-tiered system of supports visited Jewell five times during the 2023-24 school year. The coaches worked with all 45 educators and staff members — even those not working in classrooms — to set goals, problem-solve and make meaningful changes. 

Neha Hertzog, a school safety and prevention specialist at NWRESD, says the work the teachers undertook was impressive. “They were ready to make some big changes and see system-wide improvement,” Neha says. 

And they had support from administrators like Cory.

“In order to make a system-wide change, you need strong buy-in from the top,” Neha says. 

Together, the team looked at what was going well and what needed work, and they set out to create a consistent school experience that would be better for everyone — students, teachers and families. 

And that buy-in goes both ways, Neha says. One of the highlights from their work was co-creating school expectations with the students themselves. Being involved in setting their own expectations means they are more likely to actually follow them, she says. 

Whitney Wagner, an NWRESD program administrator, has supported all 20 school districts in our region with their attendance efforts in recent years. After working in this realm for more than a decade, she was ecstatic to see Jewell’s attendance spike this past year. 

“When you pay attention to the culture and climate of a building, people want to be there,” Whitney says. As part of her work with districts, she supports efforts to rethink how school staff answer the phones, how they greet students who arrive late, what the energy in the hallway feels like and how to help teachers stay calm when things get chaotic. Whitney also works with districts to ensure students have multiple options, opportunities and invitations to connect with their schools through sports teams, art, clubs, leadership groups and more.

She says being intentional about creating a welcoming and calm space is foundational to improving academics through increased attendance. There are so many components that interact with each other, and they all increase the likelihood of students like Cheyanne showing up. 

One vital aspect of Cheyanne’s own school experience has been volleyball. 
“During volleyball season, I did not skip a single day,” she says.