This is a guest blog post by Dan Horel, president of School Technology Associates.

I’m Dan Hoerl, president of School Technology Associates, and a proud corporate sponsor of the Attendance Awareness Campaign, a project led by Attendance Works. I started working in the education market in 1983 selling robotic training solutions and in 2011, I started my own company, School Technology Associates, Inc., which focuses on administrative technology solutions for K-12 schools.

Throughout the years, I’ve visited many schools and attended K-12 conferences all over the country. Those site visits and conference connections allowed me to better understand some of the daily tasks and challenges that every school must navigate. One situation that frequently came up was the long line of tardy students, first thing in the morning, jamming up the office waiting for a handwritten tardy slip. Seeing these long lines first-hand is what drove my company’s primary mission to automate the administration processes, so school staff have more time to engage with students and work on other important tasks.

We expanded our solutions to alleviate other challenges, such as food service lunch programs. We saw schools struggling with managing the huge lunch volumes and dietary requirements of each student, all at one time. Classroom attendance was also a focus, providing schools more information on the who/where/when of their students, improving the accuracy of attendance data. However, we soon realized that everything we had worked on for four decades assumes that a student actually shows up at school.

As we have continued to work with schools and improve data, the issue of chronic absenteeism has become apparent. We were helping gather the data and saw the problem, so now the question was what to do about it?

Through my research, I came across Attendance Works, and our School Tech team started attending their Attendance Awareness Campaign webinars. We were impressed by their dedication to solve the specific problem of chronic absenteeism.

Attending school is a very important life skill. This skill carries over to many other aspects of their future careers and showing up to ‘life’ on time. On top of that is the importance of the instruction they miss out on by not being in class. There’s no knowing what kind of opportunities just one student misses out on by not showing up to school and attending classes. It’s so important that there is a non-profit organization like Attendance Works completely dedicated towards helping families and their school-age children get back to class.

Attendance Works has been breaking down the issue of chronic absence into smaller pieces to figure out how to approach the problem. The team has worked hard to create practical tools, step-by-step resources and evidence-based strategies for schools and districts to help address this problem. It’s not just about changing the attendance numbers, but about each student that Attendance Works impacts by getting them back to school and learning.

Knowing that Attendance Works has been able to successfully help communities combat this issue that really affects the lives of so many is why we are proud to be a corporate sponsor of the Attendance Awareness Campaign. We are delighted to help them continue this incredible mission, one student at a time.

School Technology Associates, Inc. is a corporate sponsor of the 2024 Attendance Awareness Campaign.