We were delighted to celebrate the annual Attendance Awareness Campaign with you. This year’s theme, Be Present, Be Powerful! serves as a reminder of the connection between school attendance and achieving our hopes and dreams. The theme highlights the role that schools play in promoting student well-being, personal development and achievement. Be Present, Be Powerful! is a call for everyone to focus on ensuring students show up regularly, even when it isn’t easy.

This year’s campaign emphasizes how creating partnerships between communities, schools, students and families supports building and implementing long-term plans to address today’s very high levels of chronic absence. When chronic absence reaches high levels, the educational experience of peers, not just those frequently missing school is also affected. We shared strategies that research and practice show can improve attendance and engagement.

Our Count Us In! toolkit provides schools, districts and community partners with resources and tips to explain how being in school supports students’ social, emotional and physical well-being while offering opportunities to learn and achieve. It includes approaches to help engage students and families as partners to ensure students attend school as often as possible.

This year showing up to school remained challenging for many students and families. Yet, we saw that the Attendance Awareness Campaign was celebrated throughout the start of school by schools and communities across the country. We also saw significant efforts to engage students and families to address attendance barriers. We are inspired by these efforts and the dedication of teachers, staff, education leaders and community partners!

Here are a few of the metrics we gathered from AAC 2024:
● 10,429 people registered for one of our Attendance Awareness Campaign webinars.
● 44,000 people signed up for our newsletters.
● 10 attendance awareness updates were emailed (go here to see them all).
● 109 national and state-level partners disseminated information to their constituents.
● 7,233 news stories and blog posts featured student attendance issues or Attendance Awareness Month in July, August and September.
● 614,647 website page views occurred in July, August and September.
● 250 tweets featured the #SchoolEveryDay hashtag in July, August and September, generating 767,756 impressions.

Here are a few more highlights:
Four Attendance Awareness Campaign webinars:
1. On the Front Line: The Crucial Role of Teachers – April 3
2. Essential Partnerships for Showing Up: Families, Youth and Community – May 15
3. Creating a Culture of Belonging and Engagement: Principals In Action – August 7
4. Leadership for Sustainability: Superintendents Making a Difference – September 27

We owe a special thank you to this year’s Attendance Awareness Campaign corporate sponsors: Scholastic, Kaiser Permanente Thriving Schools, RaaWee K12 and School Technology Associates. Their support helps to make it possible for us to provide strategies and materials at no cost to hundreds of thousands of practitioners across the country.

Join the Campaign! Sign up for our newsletter to receive regular updates about the Attendance Awareness Campaign delivered straight to your email inbox.