Marion County schools roll out attendance campaign and new data tools to cut chronic absenteeism

Marion County Public Schools presented an update on Strategic Plan Goal 2 — "safe and positive learning environments" — on Aug. 21 and described a multi-pronged strategy focused on attendance, safety and student supports. Deputy Superintendent Michael Whitehouse and attendance staff outlined a new attendance awareness campaign and a software rollout intended to identify and intervene with students at risk of chronic absenteeism.

Deputy Superintendent Michael Whitehouse told the school board the district has completed four years of strategic-plan tracking and that reducing chronic absenteeism remains a major objective. Attendance lead Dawn O'Dell described the districtwide campaign, this year titled “Here today, ready for tomorrow,” and said district teams will recognize schools that show the greatest improvement. She noted the district’s chronic absenteeism rate at the close of the 2024–25 school year was 32.9%, a decline from a 2021 baseline of 35.3%.

O'Dell described tiered attendance work at the school level and said letters are typically sent to parents after a pattern of three unexcused absences. She summarized local response processes, including Child Study Team (CST) meetings, which are “typically requested after the student has accrued at least 5 unexcused absences within a 30 day period or 10 unexcused absences within a 90 day period,” and noted that truancy petitions are filed when a student meets Florida’s truancy threshold — “missing at least 15 days within a 90 day period,” she said.

As a new tool, staff presented the Attendance Intervention Suite (AIS), which district staff said will provide school- and student-level dashboards, automated alerts and two-way communications in families’ preferred languages. O'Dell said AIS can track daily and period attendance, allow staff to target messages to groups of students, and provide early-warning indicators for chronic absenteeism. “Most exciting is the communication tool that will provide translated messages and allow families to respond directly from a mobile or email address in their preferred language,” O'Dell said.

Board members asked technical and policy questions. Board member Campbell and others pressed for clarity on how the district defines attendance for purposes of chronic-absence measurement and whether period attendance counts toward the chronic-absence definition. O'Dell and staff said the chronic-absence figure reported (32.9%) counts students who “are not setting foot on campus at all”; students who attend at least one period are not counted as chronically absent under current definitions, though period attendance will be tracked and used for targeted messaging.

The board and staff discussed transportation-related tardies and coding practices. Attorney Powers and district staff explained that late buses are coded differently from absences and, under current truancy procedures, late buses should not generate truancy filings. Staff said some retroactive Skyward coding is done to reflect late buses at the period level to protect students from inappropriate truancy referrals and to provide accurate instructional-time data.

Whitehouse and the board stressed that reducing chronic absenteeism requires coordinated work with families and that district leaders plan to continue recognition, attendance-response teams, and community engagement to reach the district target of 20% chronic absenteeism in coming years.

No formal board action was recorded at the work session; staff said additional trainings and rollout steps for AIS are underway and that schools will receive training and dashboards as the platform is implemented.