Connect-Text: Leveraging Text-Message Communication to Mitigate Chronic Absenteeism and Improve Parental Engagement in the Earliest Years of Schooling

ABSTRACT

Poor school attendance in the early grades is predictive of poor subsequent educational outcomes. We report on a pilot intervention aiming to reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten. We designed and implemented a two-way, text-based parent-school communication system to encourage daily attendance, provide parents with personalized feedback on their child's attendance, and provide support to mitigate challenges that threatened parents' ability to get their child to school regularly. The program was well received, with nearly all families registering for participation, and three-quarters of those receiving outreach responding and engaging with school personnel via text. The pilot school's kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate was substantially lower in the intervention year relative to prior trends. Further, in the intervention year, the pilot school's kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate (13%) was substantially lower than for that of a synthetically constructed comparison school (24%). We discuss implications for sustainability and scaling of an effort such as this.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the generous support of State of Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning for the funding of this project. We thank Carol Barone-Martin, Ruthie Rea, Kara Bane, Dave Breingan, Jessie Chatta and the Pittsburgh Public Schools faculty and staff who contributed their time and talents to this project. All errors are our own.

Additional information

Funding

State of Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning, [2014 Innovation Zone].