Connecting with and supporting chronically absent students and their families often takes an extra shift of adults, whether they are volunteers from faith-based groups, mentors from the business world or national service members. These resources can help you organize that additional help.
- Experience Corps
- Leveraging National Service in Your Schools: A Superintendent’s/Principal’s toolkit from the Corporation for National and Community Service
- AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers support students in public, private, and charter schools, as well as out of school time programs.
- Local Boys & Girls Clubs of America offer afterschool and summer programs and can partner with schools to improve attendance and connect students with resources.
A high quality, one-on-one mentoring program with supportive, caring adults can help lower chronic absenteeism and encourage youth and children to attend school regularly. Click on the links below to learn more and find resources to support development of a quality mentoring program:
- My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) Success Mentors Initiative
- Relationships Matter: Attendance Works Toolkit for Launching Elementary Success Mentor Initiative
- Attendance Action Planning Worksheet
- Strategies for leveraging volunteers and national service
- Sample confidentiality form for community-based organizations
- Sample confidentiality form for mentors
- MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, Fifth Edition
- MENTOR’s Databases for Volunteer Opportunities
- Check & Connect implementation manual and monitoring form
- Spread the Word with Youth Mentoring Attendance Awareness Social Media Toolkit 2025
School attendance teams provide a vehicle to keep track of school-wide attendance trends, as well as what’s going on with chronically absent students. September is a great time to identify students who were chronically absent in the past year or in the first month of school.
Check & Connect assigns trained mentors to at-risk students to improve engagement with school and learning through close monitoring of their attendance, behavior, and grades.
City Year uses AmeriCorps members who commit to a year of full-time service in schools, where they work as tutors, mentors and role models. Attendance is a key focus.
RAMP: The Ready to Achieve Mentoring Program uses group, peer and individual mentoring to build on career-development efforts by schools and employers.