Attendance Works, is a national nonprofit initiative that is helping to solve an urgent crisis facing U.S. schools in every state – unacceptably high rates of student chronic absence. Approximately one in every four students across the country is chronically absent, which is still far higher than the one out of six students chronically absent prior to the pandemic. All the evidence suggests that the stakes couldn’t be higher, both in terms of the future success of a generation of young people and the long-term viability of regular enrollment and attendance in our public schools.
Over the past 15 years, Attendance Works has evolved from functioning as a start-up organization that first coined the term “chronic absence”— missing 10% or more of the school year for any reason— focused on raising awareness about the problem into a well-recognized national leader with the aspiration to catalyze large-scale solutions and collective impact on this critical metric of student success. The nonprofit has a proven track record as the go-to national expert responsible for not only helping people understand the underlying causes and the far-reaching consequences of chronic absence, but also for its tools resources and strategies that have been proven to improve student attendance and engagement. These resources help build the capacity of schools, districts and states to advance sustained solutions to chronic absence. A wide variety of these resources are freely available to educators at all levels from the Attendance Works website and many are available in multiple languages.
The organization recently launched The 50% Challenge as a cross-partisan call to action with EdTrust and Nat Malkus with the American Enterprise Institute to help state education agency teams share strategies, troubleshoot challenges and spark solutions to reduce chronic absence. The 50% Challenge currently reaches 17 states and Washington, DC, collectively serving over a third of all U.S. public school students.
The Attendance Awareness Campaign, launched in 2012 along with several national nonprofit groups, has resulted in September being widely recognized as national Attendance Awareness Month. Today thousands of schools and districts kick off the school year by making attendance a priority. The campaign is sponsored by Attendance Works and supported by 115 national and state level partners who expand the nonprofit’s reach by sharing resources and awareness.
The Attendance Awareness Campaign includes a dedicated website with a wide range of print-ready and digital resources, including talking points, posters and banners, parent flyers, and the Count Us In toolkit with resources and guidance on how to create a local awareness campaign. At the end of each campaign Attendance Works solicits input on the campaign resources from participants. These survey results, along with input from the campaign partners, guides the development of a new campaign slogan and image as well as talking points for each annual campaign.
Attendance Works metrics demonstrate its growing reach. In 2025, nearly 428,000 users visited the website. Just over 48,000 individuals subscribed to our newsletters, which have a healthy open rate of 39.2% and 12.3% click rate. The four Attendance Awareness Campaign webinars attract an increasing number of registrations: in 2025, almost 19,000 people registered for one webinar versus around 10,500 in 2024.
Educators across the country tell us how much they appreciate our free tools, resources and webinars: “All of the work that we have been doing in Kansas City Public Schools would not have been possible without the partnership, collaboration and all the amazing resources that we get from Attendance Works. So thank you for this collaboration,” said Naomi Tolentino Miranda, Coordinator of Attend to Achieve, Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. “Attendance Works resources and toolkits are beyond beneficial county wide, not only because they are available in multiple languages but they are also designed for different age groups, because the same strategies and resources that work for elementary kids may not work for high school,” said Jennifer Elenes, Coordinator of Attendance and Engagement, Santa Clara County Office of Education.
