Working with nearly 50 national partners, we’re launching our plans for Attendance Awareness Month today with a webinar and the release the Count Us In! 2015 toolkit, an essential guide to the templates, tools and strategies for making the most of activities this September.

As in past year, the toolkit is chock full of handouts for parents, resources for mentoring programs, strategies for tracking data and the ideas for promoting awareness across your community. This year, we’re emphasizing a theme of Mapping the Attendance Gap, asking schools and communities to determine who, when and where students are most likely to miss too much school.

What else is new this year?

• Easier Access: You can still download the entire toolkit, but if you just need to grab a template or print out a handout, you can access materials through the interactive Table of Contents on our microsite.
• Outreach to Stakeholders: We’ve got specialized web pages for 10 stakeholders this year, including new tools for early education providers and housing authorities. We’ve also got Making the Case handouts for persuading these folks why they should care about improving attendance.
• More social media: We’re expanding our social media offerings, including the images and memes that were so popular last year. The hashtag remains the same: #schooleveryday
• New toolkits and handouts: We’ve added in our Leading Attendance toolkit for principals that we released last month, as well as our The Power of Positive Connections toolkit from last summer. You won’t want to miss the Bringing Attendance Home video designed for parents of elementary school children.
• What to Do When: The toolkit concludes with a revised calendar of what schools and communities should be doing in the next five months to get ready for Attendance Awareness Month.

The toolkit’s release coincides with the Ready, Set Go! webinar at 2p.m. ET today, which launches planning for September’s activities. More than 500 people have registered for the webinar, but there’s still room for more. Click here to sign up.