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District reports attendance, home-visit and volunteer gains under 'safety and belonging' strategic goal
Summary
Washoe County School District presented its Milestones and Momentum report showing expanded parent-teacher home visits, a near 2-point drop in chronic absenteeism in March, an increase in schools participating in home visits and a planned volunteer-management rollout.
Washoe County School District staff told trustees on April 22 that the district has expanded family-engagement strategies tied to strategic plan Goal 3 — safety and belonging — including a 60% increase in schools running the parent-teacher home-visit program, a planned rollout of an online volunteer-management system, and early indications of a districtwide decline in chronic absenteeism.
Dr. Paul LaMarca, chief student and family support officer, and Dr. Laura Davidson, director of research and evaluation, presented the district’s final Milestones and Momentum report for the school year. The report highlighted three measurable areas: larger school participation in the parent-teacher home-visit program, more volunteer applications in the district’s system and a nearly two-percentage-point decline in chronic absenteeism as of March.
Delisa Crane, director of family school partnerships, described operational changes. The district will pilot the Raptor volunteer-management system in three schools (Galena High, Dilworth Middle and Desert Heights Elementary) with a database of more than 13,000 vetted volunteers already in place. The system allows online applications in English and Spanish, background checks through a third-party vendor, five-year clearance windows for supervised volunteers and a route for unsupervised volunteers and non-paid coaches to upload fingerprinting forms for state checks.
"The beautiful thing about the system is our unsupervised volunteers and non-paid coaches can download the forms that they need, fill them out, go get fingerprinted, and then upload those forms into the system," Crane said. The system also enables real-time check-in logs and monthly scans of approved volunteers.
On home visits, staff said the district grew participation from 25 schools to 43 schools and trained more than 450 educators to use home visits as a strategy to reduce chronic absenteeism and strengthen relationships. Staff quoted family feedback describing the visits as "touching" and as a confidence builder for parents.
Research shared with trustees also included a partnership analysis with Northwestern University showing the effect of chronic absenteeism on academic outcomes: at the elementary grades the district’s analysis showed a statistically negative association, with a roughly 7.4 percentage-point reduction in math outcomes and about a 4.5 percentage-point reduction in ELA for chronically absent students versus those who were not.
District staff added seven new data tools to help schools track attendance and climate at the building level and said they are training principals on brief qualitative tools — for example, a five-minute interview protocol with students — to surface root causes for absences.
Trustees praised the cross-department work and said the combination of volunteer access, home visits and improved data tools creates more actionable information for schools seeking to re-engage students.
