How Postcards to Parents Can Help Schools Get Kids Back to Class

View the full episode transcript.

When students didn’t come back to Maple Elementary after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, Niki Espinoza, the school’s community school coordinator, noticed right away. “I live in the Shafter community, the community that I serve. I see these children out with their parents in the market, at recreational sports, games, at high school sports games and out at restaurants,” she said, emphasizing that the school community is small and close-knit. Situated in a rural district in California with nearly 300 students, Maple Elementary faced the concerning reality that nearly a third of their students were becoming chronically absent.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing 10% or more of the school year, has long been a concern for educators, but the challenges worsened during the pandemic. Stanford economist Tom Dee’s research revealed that chronic absenteeism rates across the country nearly doubled on average. “People just fell out of the habit of going to school, and the experience of remote instruction may have diminished the perceived value of in-person learning,” he said. “This underscores a widespread failure of students to reintegrate into their academic routines as they return to schools.” Other research on chronically absent students has shown that they are less likely to graduate and more likely to struggle academically.

Determined not to let students slip through the cracks, Espinoza began to seek solutions. She found a study by Stanford education researcher Carly Robinson that showed that sending mailers to parents about their child’s attendance could reduce absenteeism. Robinson acknowledged that it may seem like too simple of a solution to an issue that is affecting schools across the nation. “In many cases, schools are already communicating to parents in a variety of different ways,” she said, adding that the mailers helped parents better track missed days and understand the importance of regular attendance.

Seeing that it was a low-cost solution, Espinoza decided to try it out. “I jumped into Canva, and I created two postcards,” she said. One postcard said “We Miss You. We Want You to Come Back to School,” while the other one plainly stated how many days of school the child has missed. Espinoza’s experimentation revealed three insights that are pivotal in addressing absenteeism: Parents aren’t informed about the effect absences have on their child’s education, parents often don’t know how many days of school their child has missed, and schools must be prepared to address the root causes of absences.

Attendance in early grades matters

Parents may underestimate the impact of missing a day of school here or there. However, even sporadic absences can hurt learning. Contrary to common belief, chronic absenteeism is not exclusive to middle or high school students; it begins as early as kindergarten. “The biggest predictor of whether a student is going to be chronically absent is their absences from the prior school year,” Robinson said. Absences during the early grades can create a pattern that continues throughout a student’s educational journey, with consequences such as failing to reach crucial third-grade reading benchmarks, which is closely linked to future dropout rates.

Espinoza said students who missed school were missing out on other benefits, too. “When a child is on campus, they’re learning to engage with peers, they’re learning to engage with adults,” she said. “The socialization part of school is very rewarding in a young person’s life.”

To address parental misconceptions about attendance, Espinoza shared facts about attendance on Maple Elementary’s social media feeds in addition to sending out mailers. “I put the facts in black and white, and I started to educate my parents on why it matters,” she said. By sharing research on the importance of regular attendance, schools can help parents make sure their children consistently attend class.

Keeping track of absences is hard

In Robinson’s study, researchers used the mailers to provide parents with accurate information on their child’s attendance record because parents typically struggle to keep track of their child’s school absences. “Parents often underestimate their own child’s absences by about 50%. Let’s say my child has missed 20 days of school. If you ask me how many days I think my child has missed, I’m saying about ten days of school,” Robinson said.

In Espinoza’s district, many parents were unaware of their child’s absenteeism or what constituted chronic absenteeism. “If I call a parent and say your child is chronically absent, they’re going to say, ‘I don’t know what that even means’,” she said. She realized that it was unfair to hold parents accountable for what they did not know. Espinoza used the mailers as a proactive means to kindly inform parents, often sending them in the family’s home language. Upon receiving the postcards, some parents reached out to her with surprise and embarrassment. “The postcards are not punitive. They’re not meant to shame. They’re there to say, ‘Hey, we love your kid. Attendance matters. We miss them’,” Espinoza said.

Students may need additional support

In response to the mailers, Espinoza saw the number of chronically absent students decrease significantly. She sent 70 postcards in her first batch – covering almost a third of students. The following term, she only needed to send out 20.

While mailers can alert parents to their child’s absences, it’s important to recognize the root causes of absenteeism, too. Homelessness, health problems and family responsibilities are among the most common reasons for student absenteeism. In many cases, it’s not enough to just tell parents how many days of school their child has missed. When absences continued after parents received mailers, Espinoza followed up with phone calls to parents and conversations with students to learn what was going on. “There were conversations of fear. There were conversations of ‘My child feels like they’re so behind, they don’t want to go back.’ And I had to address those,” she said.

Maple Elementary’s community school model, which prioritizes social services in addition to academics, proved to be instrumental in addressing the factors contributing to student absenteeism. Once Espinoza identified the reasons for a student’s irregular attendance, she could collaborate with school staff to implement targeted interventions and support services. For example, when Ayden, an eighth grader, missed school after his grandfather died, the school provided referrals to mental health services to help him cope with his grief.

In many cases students feel as if they have fallen behind and won’t be able to catch up again. That was the case for Noel, a third grader who felt behind in his studies after missing several days of school when pandemic restrictions were lifted. Literacy and math coaches provided additional academic support during and after school to help him catch up.

Prioritizing collaboration with parents, proactive intervention and holistic support were essential in reducing absenteeism at Maple Elementary. Throughout her attendance campaign, Espinoza recognized a child’s reluctance to attend school could signal deeper issues, such as anxiety, bullying or academic struggles. “Attendance, if monitored and watched, can help us help children in all other areas of their lives,” she said.

Episode Transcript

Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, the podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir.

Nimah Gobir: Do you remember perfect attendance awards? They’re used to encourage students to come to school regularly, but there is a growing debate about whether they are outdated. Word on the street is that they basically award students for having good immune systems – or even worse – for coming to school sick! Also one study found that these kinds of incentives don’t actually work. In the study, students who received perfect attendance awards essentially realized they were attending more school than their peers and then they felt like they could miss school going forward.

Nimah Gobir: But the importance of attendance – whether it’s perfect or not – is crucial.

Nimah Gobir: Today’s episode is all about chronic absenteeism. That’s when a child misses 10% or more of the school year. Typically that ends up being around 18 days. Chronic absenteeism has become a major concern across the country, especially after the pandemic when 93% of households had kids doing distance learning. The experience of being remote may have led kids to see less value in in-person schooling. There are several kids who miss so many days of school that they just stop attending.

Nimah Gobir: Niki Espinoza, was determined to not let any of her students slip through the cracks. As Maple School District’s community school coordinator, it’s her job to communicate with parents and students and make sure the school district is meeting their needs.

Niki Espinoza: The school community community coordinator is so important because we are bridging that gap. We are standing in the middle of the gap and saying, no, we’re on your side. I’m not your child’s teacher. I’m your child’s advocate on this campus, and I’m your advocate. And I want them to love coming to school.

Nimah Gobir: Maple is located in the Central Valley, an agricultural region in California. Many of the families who live there work on farms or in packing sheds. Niki lives there too.

Niki Espinoza: I see these children out with their parents in the market, at recreational sports, games, at high school sports games, um, out at restaurants. We’re not urban. We’re in the middle of an orchard. We only have one teacher per grade.

Nimah Gobir: It’s a TK-8th grade with about 300 students so pretty small.

Nimah Gobir: So just a note here: It’s common for the word “district” to be used to describe a group of schools. But in Maple’s case things are far apart and it’s a rural area. So when we talk about Maple you might hear the word “district” or “school” and we’re talking about the same thing.

Niki Espinoza: Covid drove a wedge on a lot of school campuses across the nation, the parents versus the school.

Niki Espinoza: It was easy for students to stay home when we started to roll back in, because there was a fear attached to COVID.

Nimah Gobir: Many students at Maple found returning to school challenging.

Dallas: It was kind of tricky coming back to school.

Nimah Gobir: Students like Dallas, an eighth grader.

Dallas: And then you have to interact with people and, and then also you’re like, learning online isn’t like learning in school. So whenever you went back to school, it was a way different, like, environment and everything.

Nimah Gobir: Noel, a third grader, faced a similar situation. His parents were hesitant to send him back to school immediately after it reopened.

Noel: I was one of the kids, like, took forever to get from, like, virtually to class to, like, here.

Nimah Gobir: When Niki noticed students’ attendance starting to lag, she started gathering all the information she could on chronic absenteeism. She did not like what she found.

Niki Espinoza: The absenteeism was hurting our children.

Nimah Gobir: Niki was not the only educator seeing attendance at her school plummet. Stanford economist Tom Dee has been doing research on the increase in chronic absenteeism across the country.

Tom Dee: Literally every state for which we had data available – that was nearly all of them – saw substantial increases in chronic absenteeism.

Nimah Gobir: According to Tom, states that kept schools closed for a long time during the 2020-21 school year tended to experience the highest rates of absenteeism later on.

Tom Dee: Before the pandemic, that rate of chronic absenteeism was around 14% or so, 15%, and it nearly doubled in the 21-22 school year, which was the year when virtually all our kids returned to in-person instruction.

Nimah Gobir: In California, where Maple is, chronic absenteeism went from 12% before the pandemic to 30% in the years after. Even though we’re getting further away from the pandemic in terms of time, things have not improved for a lot of schools.

Tom Dee: For many schools, their capacity to address these issues is diminishing, because right now the federal financial support that was available to them during the pandemic is beginning to expire.

Niki Espinoza: I believe that children excel when they’re on a school campus.

Nimah Gobir: Here’s Niki again.

Niki Espinoza: I believe they excel academically, but also socially, emotionally and mentally. Because when a child is on campus, they’re learning to engage with peers, they’re learning to engage with adults. And the social socialization part of school is very rewarding in a young person’s life and in a child’s life.

Nimah Gobir: Niki recognized the need for intervention.

Niki Espinoza: If a child doesn’t want to come to school, that’s a red flag for me. Tell me why. Are you nervous? Is somebody hurting your feelings. Are you being bullied? Do you not understand the assignments and are you getting behind and are you scared? Is something happening at home? See if attendance is monitored and watched in Can help us help children in all other areas of their lives.

Nimah Gobir: Luckily, one research paper Niki found provided solutions that she could use immediately. We’ll get into her next steps after the break.

Nimah Gobir: In her quest to find solutions to chronic absenteeism, Niki Espinoza came across a study by a group of researchers, including Carly Robinson. Carly is currently a researcher at Stanford University’s Graduation School of Education.

Carly Robinson: In general, I focus on how we can use the various people in children’s lives to improve their outcomes. So, really, how does social support impact students success? Both in terms of their achievement, but also in terms of their well-being.

Nimah Gobir: The research revealed something that many parents might not be aware that consistent attendance in grades K-5 is extremely important.

Carly Robinson: When people think of a chronically absent student, they think of, you know, students skipping class often, students that are in middle and high school, but in reality, students start being chronically absent as early as kindergarten and we see that students who are absent more in these early grades tend to have much lower academic achievement in third, fourth, fifth grade and, and beyond. And so one really important point is that the biggest predictor of whether a students is going to be chronically absent is their absences from the prior school year. And so these absences just compound.

Nimah Gobir: Something else Carly surfaced in her research is that when parents are asked how many days of school their child has missed, they are usually a little off. Actually they are kind of off by a lot.

Carly Robinson: Parents often underestimate absences by about 50%. So, let’s say my child has missed 20 days of school. If you ask me how many days I think my child has missed, I’m saying about ten days of school.

Nimah Gobir: It’s not that the parents are being neglectful. It’s just really hard to keep track of numbers like that.

Carly Robinson: It’s often not presented to them by the school until they see it on report cards or at the end of the year. And so you’re not necessarily, you know, motivated to intervene if you don’t think there’s a problem.

Nimah Gobir: In order to address the fact that parents might not know how much school their kid is missing, Carly and the other researchers designed an intervention that would give parents information that was both timely and accurate.

Carly Robinson: And so what we ended up doing was sending a series of mailers with information on how many days of school their child had missed to date, and also link absenteeism with sort of negative outcomes. So highlighting that absences actually can add up to have negative implications for your child’s learning.

Nimah Gobir: That’s right. Snail mail turned out to be an effective intervention.

Carly Robinson: We did send them in the families home language. The mailers tended to have a pretty consistent effect across different populations of students. They were quite responsive to when their parents received these mailers.

Nimah Gobir: Niki – the community school coordinator at Maple – read this study and felt energized.

Niki Espinoza: I created two postcards. One that says, “We’ve missed you. We want you back at school” and “Your child is actually missed 20 days.”

Nimah Gobir: Carly’s study proved accurate. Niki found that parents did not know how many days their kid was absent.

Niki Espinoza: If I called a parent, Nimah and said, “Do you know how many days your son has missed?” They will not know. So why are we as schools holding them to accountable, um, information that they don’t know. Why are we holding them accountable? That’s not fair.

Nimah Gobir: They also didn’t know what those absences meant for their child. So she went all in on educating parents by taking her attendance campaign to social media.

Niki Espinoza: I started to push out fliers through Instagram, Facebook, through our remind messaging app, that gets a text message to our parents. Nothing was on it but true attendance facts.

Nimah Gobir: These facts were showing up once a week across all of Maple’s social feeds. Facts like…

Nimah Gobir: Chronic absenteeism is associated with lower academic performance.

Nimah Gobir: Students who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to reach important learning milestones.

Nimah Gobir: Chronic absenteeism can be a better indicator of whether a student will drop out than test scores.

Niki Espinoza: The postcards are not punitive. They’re not to shame. They’re there to say, “Hey, we love your kid. Attendance matters. We miss them.” In fact it says, “We miss you student. Let me help you.”

Nimah Gobir: Niki took a proactive approach by informing parents about their child’s absences before they reached chronic levels. She provided this information under the assumption that parents always want what is best for their child.

Nimah Gobir: The number of students who were chronically absent started to decrease almost immediately.

Niki Espinoza: We started seeing kids come back to school.

Nimah Gobir: In Niki’s first batch of mailers she sent over 70 in 2021. That’s nearly a third of students. The following quarter she only needed to send 20.

Nimah Gobir: But Maple’s success isn’t just about sending mailers. Niki and her team adopted a holistic approach by getting to the bottom of what is keeping kids from coming to school. Niki started with talking to parents.

Niki Espinoza: Begin to call and say, “Hey, I miss so-and-so, you know? Or how are they feeling? Or are they coming back?” Are they nervous to come back?

Niki Espinoza: They were conversations of fear. They were conversations of my child feels like they’re so behind they don’t want to go back. And I had to address those. And I spoke to the teachers and I spoke to my admin, and I said, “Hey, we got to all be on the same page. We got to show these kids that we’re going to help you get caught up. We’re going to be there for you.”

Nimah Gobir: Do you remember the third grader we heard from, Noel? When he returned to school, the thing that he was dreading the most was math.

Noel: I didn’t know any multiplication at all. Division too. I didn’t know any division. I need to catch up on a bunch of stuff!

Nimah Gobir: Even though Noel was a bit overwhelmed coming back he felt really supported in getting back on track. Part of the reason for that is he received extra support. Students who need it are taken out of classes to get more focused help.

Noel: If I needed help, they’d come help me, explained it to me and then gave me worksheets catch up on multiple occasions and I just do like extra multiplication to, like, catch up.

Nimah Gobir: Noel’s concerns were academic, but the primary causes of chronic absenteeism are homelessness, health problems, and family responsibilities. In order take on these barriers, Maple uses the community school model.

Nimah Gobir: That means bringing the services and resources families need onto the school campus. The wraparound services Maple has on campus include school psychologists, food pantries and housing services. Local organizations and businesses are a big part of how this small district is able to support students beyond academics. There is only one small hold up for this particular school district…

Michael Figueroa: Our districts are separated by miles and miles of farmland.

Nimah Gobir: This is Michael Figueroa. He grew up in the Central Valley and now he’s an education consultant that works with school districts in the region.

Michael Figueroa: There’s really very few nonprofits, if any, that support our specific region or area. So just by nature of where the kids live, they have less access to resources.

Nimah Gobir: To address this, Michael helped Maple and 5 neighboring rural school districts band together to form a community school consortium. That way they can pool resources.

Nimah Gobir: For example the consortium collectively hired a social worker who serves multiple districts at once to save money. By doing this, the social worker gets a full-time salary, which is a good motivator for them. And since the districts in the consortium share the costs, they can afford to pay for a full-time social worker together.

Michael Figueroa: By putting resources together, we’re just trying to get even a fraction of what schools 20 miles, 30 miles down the road just get without any supplemental funding.

Nimah Gobir: Being a small school in a rural area come with it’s challenges and opportunities. It sometimes hard to find the services they need, but their tight relationships with students ensure that they can identify students who needs the services it the most. For example, Ayden, an 8th grader who missed several days of school after a devastating loss.

Ayden: I missed like a whole week because my great grandpa passed away. This, I think it was like two months ago now. And I just really loved him, so I just, I felt like I didn’t want to go to school.

Niki Espinoza: We’re here to offer services. We’re here to offer referrals, to get help. We’re here to say we’re here for your family. And that’s really the heart of the matter. That’s how we started looking at it, is let us educate. Let us equip you. No judgments, zero judgments. Tell me what’s going on. Zero judgments. Let’s help your kid.

Nimah Gobir: Niki’s snail mail campaign coupled with Maple’s community school model has not only reduced chronic absenteeism but it also addressed underlying issues affecting student attendance.

Nimah Gobir: The cherry on top is that Maple also does a great job of making coming to school really appealing.

Niki Espinoza: A community school will not thrive if there isn’t engagement between the parents, guardians, caregivers, and the school. And that is why we work so hard with doing community engagement and having events on campus where we welcome the community on campus.

Nimah Gobir: They purposefully build community beyond the classroom. Ayden told me that there are fun carnival-like events a few times a year that give students an opportunity to build connections with teachers and other kids who may not be in their grade.

Ayden: You’re thinking about school, you’re thinking about staying in the classroom, not doing anything but Maple is a lot different because, like, it’s more outgoing.

Ayden: It’s a very loving school. Like, you know, everyone here, especially me, I’m like friends with like, the littlest kids.

Nimah Gobir: Students have a positive touch point with a teacher or staff person every day because they are excitedly greeted by staff each morning.

Ayden: Maple is a school that you don’t want to miss out.

Nimah Gobir: This episode could not have been made with out Julie Boesch, Michael Figueroa, Niki Espinoza, Tom Dee, Carly Robinson, Bryan Easter, Patty De Julian, Nick Aguirre, Christian Brown and staff at Maple School District. Thank you to the students at Maple: Ayden, Nehemiah, Dallas, Noel and Teegan.

Nimah Gobir: If you’re interested in hearing more about how the community school model supports students, listen to our episode titled “How Community Schools Can Support Teachers and Families.” It features a school that created a homeless shelter on their school grounds.

Nimah Gobir: We’ll have more community schools episodes coming down the pipeline.

Nimah Gobir: The MindShift team includes me, Nimah Gobir, Ki Sung, Kara Newhouse, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Jennifer Ng. Carlos Cabrera Lomeli provided additional reporting. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. We receive additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Cesar Saldaña and Holly Kernan. MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. And members of KQED. Thank you for listening.