Cracking Chronic Absenteeism: A Practitioner's Playbook for School Support Teams
A step-by-step, tools-first course that equips school counselors, social workers, MTSS teams, and attendance coordinators with root-cause assessments, tiered interventions, family meeting scripts, and a progress-monitoring system to measurably reduce chronic absenteeism—starting Monday.
Perfect for: School counselors, social workers, attendance coordinators, MTSS/PBIS team members, school psychologists, and administrators at the K–12 level who are responsible for reducing chronic absenteeism and supporting student re-engagement.
Chronic absenteeism doesn't fix itself with a robocall. Behind every student missing 10% or more of the school year is a specific, solvable barrier—and your job is to find it fast and respond with precision. This course gives you the exact frameworks, scripts, templates, and decision trees used by high-performing MTSS teams to move students from chronic absence to consistent attendance.
You'll start where every effective intervention starts: the root cause. Using a structured diagnostic process, you'll learn to distinguish between avoidance, anxiety, economic hardship, disengagement, and medical barriers—because the right intervention for one is exactly wrong for another. From there, you'll build a tiered response system: Tier 2 group check-ins and mentoring structures for students at risk, and individualized Tier 3 Student Attendance Plans for your most chronically absent learners.
The family piece is where most teams lose momentum. This course arms you with ready-to-use meeting scripts, reframing language that builds trust instead of shame, and a clear agenda structure that moves families from defensive to collaborative in a single conversation. No more winging it—walk into every family meeting with a purpose, a plan, and the right words.
Finally, you'll implement a lightweight progress-monitoring system that takes less than 20 minutes per week to maintain, surfaces early warning signs before a student hits chronic status, and gives your team clear data to share with administrators and at IEP/504/SST meetings. Whether you're a one-person counseling department or a full MTSS pyramid team, you'll leave with a system that actually runs.
What you'll be able to do
- Conduct a structured root-cause assessment interview to accurately identify the primary barrier driving each student's absences
- Differentiate between Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 attendance interventions and match each student to the right level of support
- Facilitate a productive, shame-free family meeting using a scripted agenda that moves caregivers from resistant to collaborative
- Build a legally sound, actionable Student Attendance Plan (SAP) with measurable goals, assigned responsibilities, and a review schedule
- Design and run a Tier 2 attendance group or check-in/check-out mentoring structure within your existing schedule
- Implement a weekly progress-monitoring tracker that flags at-risk students before they reach chronic absence thresholds
- Use attendance data to communicate impact to administrators, school boards, and multi-disciplinary teams
- Create a sustainable team workflow that prevents caseload overwhelm while covering all students on your watch list
Curriculum
6 modules · 18 lessons
Your teacher
Patrice Banks
I've spent almost 16 years in school support roles—as a school counselor, then an MTSS coordinator, and eventually a district-level attendance specialist—watching brilliant, caring practitioners burn out trying to fix chronic absenteeism with the wrong tools. Robocalls, shame-based letters, and generic "attendance matters" campaigns don't move the needle. Root-cause thinking, tiered systems, and real family partnerships do. I built this course because I wish someone had handed me this playbook on my first day. Every script, template, and framework here was stress-tested in real schools, with real students, including those facing housing instability, school phobia, chronic illness, and family crises. I've facilitated hundreds of family attendance meetings, built Tier 2 mentoring programs from scratch, and presented attendance data to skeptical school boards. I know what works, what wastes your time, and what actually gets kids back in seats. My goal is simple: by the time you finish this course, you should feel less reactive and more in control—like you finally have a system, not just a to-do list. Let's get to work.
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