Allentown School District to publish public attendance dashboard after year‑one rollout shows 29.8% chronic absenteeism
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Summary
District leaders previewed a public attendance and chronic absenteeism dashboard and reported a year‑to‑date chronic absenteeism rate of 29.8%, said an internal draft will be posted after quality checks, and outlined an engagement campaign to help families and partners use the data.
The Allentown School District on Dec. 18 previewed a public attendance dashboard tied to its strategic plan and reported that 29.8% of students are classified as chronically absent so far this academic year.
Catherine Zimmerman, the district’s Strategic Data Fellow, told the board the dashboard is a draft in internal testing and will be embedded on the Allentown website once data validation is complete. Zimmerman said average daily attendance (an example metric) shows roughly 90.76% attendance on a typical Monday and the district’s overall daily absences represent how many of about 16,000 enrolled students are absent on a given day.
The dashboard will allow users to filter by school, grade and subgroup (English learners, IEP status, economically disadvantaged) and will report monthly and daily trends and chronic absenteeism—defined by the district using the standard threshold of missing 10% or more of enrolled days. Zimmerman said the district’s year‑to‑date chronic absenteeism of 29.8% compares to a year‑end rate of about 36% last year and that the number could change as the year progresses.
Superintendent Dr. Birx and Zimmerman stressed the dashboard is part of a broader plan to use data for community engagement and to target interventions, including school‑based attendance teams, improved two‑way family communications, and transportation routing improvements. Zimmerman acknowledged a small data error in the platform related to a Thanksgiving attendance code and said PowerSchool tickets were submitted to correct it before public release.
Officials said the district will roll out guidance on how to interpret and use the dashboard, host stakeholder conversations (family advisory council, school governance councils, business advisory council) and continue to disaggregate trends to inform interventions for groups such as students with IEPs, who currently show higher chronic‑absence rates. The district did not set a firm public‑release date beyond saying the dashboard will go live in the new year after internal validation.