"For students to be successful in school, they first have to be in school." With that simple statement, Jessica Sprick and Randy Sprick launch a compelling case for prioritizing student attendance. This comprehensive guide provides school and district-level administrators and teams with the background information, strategies, and tools…

Nationally, more than one million youth drop out of high school each year. One in four young people do not graduate with their age mates. Thus, in recent years, national leaders have directed sustained attention to what they term the "dropout crisis," particularly in high schools that are graduating less than two-thirds of their…

Ganado Primary School on the Navajo Reservation has formulated and implemented an attendance improvement plan which has provided encouraging results. Formulation and implementation of the attendance improvement plan were initiated after reviewing the 1980 attendance registers which indicated the average length of enrollment had been 169 days with…

This handbook provides guidance to school administrators in setting up an effective school attendance system. After brief introductory sections on the importance of good attendance and on how to recognize whether excessive pupil absences are a problem, the third section discusses how to organize the attendance services: outlining objectives;…

Dropout prevention is emerging as the most important new issue in education. Broad demographic trends predict a continuing growth in the population of at-risk youth, those most likely to drop out of school. The overall goal of any dropout prevention activity is to reduce the number of at-risk students. This issue is devoted to what research and…