Strategic Learning & Leadership Advisor; Designing Systems Where People Thrive Why students are drifting, disengaging, and choosing new paths — and why the response, across almost every cause, starts in the same place. Superintendents across the country are asking the same question: “Where did they go?” For some students, the answer is concrete — they moved to virtual school, enrolled in a microschool, or chose an alternative pathway. And for the students who are disengaged o

The complexity of chronic absenteeism calls us to dig deeper into the roots of thriving. In Part 2, we looked at how to measure connection — making visible where relationships exist in a school and where they don't. In this piece, we go a step further: what does it actually take to build those relationships intentionally? It's a question the Search Institute — a nonprofit research organization that has spent nearly four decades studying what young people need to thrive — has

Part 5 of a Series: Beyond Attendance The students who have become inaccessible to the systems meant to support them and what it takes to find them. In Part 4, we looked at two patterns that live inside your building and your data: the disengaged student, present but already disconnecting, and the drifting student, whose absences are accumulating in front of you. Both are, at least, visible. Both are somewhere someone can still reach. This piece is about the students who aren

Before we can re-engage the students we are losing, we have to understand where and how we are losing them, and why the signal almost always arrives later than the story. What the Data Shows and What It Doesn't When it comes to chronic absenteeism, the number that tends to trigger urgency is the accumulating absence count — a student’s approach toward that ten percent threshold, approximately eighteen days in a 180-day school year, where a student is formally classified as ch

A low-lift, high-impact Tier 1 practice that reveals where connection exists in your school — and where it doesn’t. In Part 1 of this series, I asked the question that sits underneath every chronic absenteeism report: Why not here? I argued that the pull toward school — or its absence — is the real story. That attendance is the signal, not the problem. And that before we can build the conditions that bring students back, we first have to be able to see where relational connec