Beyond Attendance: The Roots of Thriving

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 done significant work to operationalize. For me, exposure to that work first came through the door of developmental assets, early in my career, in a setting that made the research impossible to ignore.

That setting was a K-12 residential school in Rochester, New York, serving students with significant mental health and behavioral challenges — young people who had been placed out of their homes, disconnected from their communities, and were, by almost every measure, the students most likely to drift, disengage, and disappear.

As part of our training, we were introduced to the Search Institute's research on what they called the 40 Developmental Assets — 20 external, 20 internal — and a finding that has held steady across almost four decades of research on those 40 assets and hundreds of thousands of young people:

Students with more robust developmental assets simply do better.

Academically. Socially. Relationally. In their ability to navigate risk. Students with fewer assets struggle more. Not because of who they are — but because of what surrounds them, and what has been built within them.

That wasn't a revelation in the abstract. In that building, with those students, it was simply true. You could see it.

Connection and developmental support are not 'nice to have.' They are the conditions that allow everything else to work.

Two Frameworks, One Foundation

The Search Institute has continued to evolve its research over the decades. While the 40 Developmental Assets framework remains foundational, their more recent work on Developmental Relationships offers a complementary and equally important lens.

Together, they create a fuller picture of what young people need — and how adults can intentionally provide it.

Think of it this way:

The 40 Developmental Assets help us see the ecosystem around a young person. In the Search Institute's own framing, external assets point to the people, places, and conditions that surround youth — the supports, boundaries, expectations, and opportunities shaping their daily lives. Internal assets point to the competencies, values, and identities growing within them. The framework asks: what is the environment we are building around this young person, and what are we cultivating inside them?

The Developmental Relationships Framework focuses on something different — not the ecosystem, but the soil. The quality of the interactions that allow assets to take root and grow. It asks: how are adults actually showing up in the moments that matter?

These are not competing frameworks. They are different entry points into the same truth: young people thrive when the conditions around them and the relationships within them are intentionally, consistently, and developmentally aligned.

What makes the Assets framework worth trusting is not just its longevity — almost 40 years of research on 40 assets. It's that they were getting at something — the primacy of emotion, relationship, and safety in learning — long before neuroscience had the language to confirm it. What Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and others have since demonstrated about the brain's social and emotional systems being the foundation of learning, the Search Institute was already observing in the lives of young people decades earlier.

And the Developmental Relationships Framework, though newer, is built on that same foundation — extending it from what surrounds young people to how adults engage with them in the moments that matter most.

What Developmental Relationships Actually Look Like

However a school arrives at the recognition that connection needs to be more intentional — through the relationship mapping practice we explored in Part 2, through attendance data, or simply through paying closer attention to who is and isn't engaged — the Developmental Relationships Framework offers a clear and research-grounded starting point for what to build toward.

The Framework identifies five elements that characterize the relationships most likely to change trajectories for young people:

Express Care — Show me that I matter to you. Be dependable. Listen. Believe in me. Be warm.

Challenge Growth — Push me to keep getting better. Expect my best. Hold me accountable. Help me learn from failure.

Provide Support — Help me complete tasks and achieve goals. Navigate systems with me. Advocate for me. Set boundaries that keep me on track.

Share Power — Treat me with respect and give me a say. Include me. Collaborate. Let me lead.

Expand Possibilities — Connect me with people and places that broaden my world. Inspire me. Introduce me to people who can help me grow.

What strikes me about this framework — every time I return to it — is that most caring adults are already doing most of these things, for many of their students, much of the time. The framework doesn't ask you to become a different person. It asks you to become a more intentional one.

But intentionality matters — especially when it's hard. The students who are easiest to reach tend to receive the fullest expression of all five elements. The students who are most challenging — the ones who need these relationships most — are often the ones for whom the natural pull toward connection is weakest.

When it comes to expressing care, perception matters as much as intention. We may believe we are showing care — and mean it genuinely — but if it is not perceived that way by the student, it misses the mark.

Care expressed in a language a student cannot hear is not yet connection.

Some elements are harder than others. Sharing power is one that schools consistently struggle with — it can quietly become conditional. Show me respect and then I will give it back. Earn it first. But the framework is clear: respect is the starting point, not the reward.

Providing support is another. Too often it gets filtered through assumptions about what a student should already be able to do — or worse, it requires the student to ask for it first. The students least likely to ask are almost always the ones who need it most.

And here is what the research is unambiguous about: when young people experience these five elements together, they are more likely to thrive. More likely to engage. More likely to show up.

In the context of chronic absenteeism, that last part matters enormously.

Back to the Teacher

In Part 2, I wrote about a teacher who changed my trajectory — first in math, then in history. She slowed down when the system kept moving. She met me where I was. She was caring and challenging in exactly the right proportions.

I didn't have the language for it then. But looking back through the lens of this framework, she was doing all five things.

She expressed care — she made me feel known. She challenged growth — she held me accountable without letting me off the hook. She provided support — she navigated my confusion rather than moving past it. She shared power — she took my experience as a learner seriously, rather than treating my struggle as something to manage or move past. And she expanded possibilities — not just by drawing me into new discoveries, but by showing me that my own story about myself — "I can't do math" — wasn't fixed. She expanded what I thought was possible for me.

She wasn't following a framework. She was following her instincts as an educator who genuinely knew her students, supported by a school culture where that was highly valued.

The framework simply names what she already knew how to do.

That's what the best frameworks do. They don't replace good judgment — they make it transferable. They give leaders and educators a shared language for the work, so that what one great teacher does intuitively can become what a whole school does intentionally.

A Place to Start: Reflection and Action

Chronic absenteeism will not be solved simply with attendance campaigns. It will be addressed through the quality of the relationships young people experience in school every day — and that is something schools can build systematically, not just one student at a time.

The research is clear. The frameworks are proven. What remains is the harder work of translation — from principle to practice, from awareness to action.

A few questions worth bringing to your leadership team:

• When you think about the students most likely to drift or disengage, what do you know about the quality of the adult relationships in their lives — not just whether a connection exists, but what that connection actually feels like to them?

• Which of the five elements — Express Care, Challenge Growth, Provide Support, Share Power, Expand Possibilities — does your school do most consistently? Which provide the greatest opportunities for growth?

And one concrete place to start:

At your next staff meeting, ask every adult to draw a T-table — two columns on a single page. Have them identify a student they are struggling with. On one side, have them write the student's challenging behaviors and traits. On the other, reframe every single one of those traits as a potential strength. The student who argues constantly has the makings of a skilled advocate or debater. The student who won't sit still brings energy that could drive hands-on learning.

That reframe doesn't solve everything. But it matters — because how we see a student shapes how we show up with them. And how we show up is exactly what the Developmental Relationships Framework asks us to examine.

Take that same student. Ask every adult to consider which of the five elements they are currently bringing to that relationship — and which are absent. Then ask: what would it take to go deeper?

The T-table clears the lens. The framework gives you something to build with.

That conversation, in my experience, is where the real work begins.

Part 4 turns toward two of the patterns named in Part 1 — the drifting and the disengaged. Students who are still technically in the system but slipping away in different ways. What do they look like — and what might it take to re-engage them?

Jen Perry partners with district and school leaders on the questions that sit underneath the data — how to build systems where students and adults are genuinely engaged, connected, and prepared for what comes next. Her work spans strategic planning, attendance and re-engagement, understanding behavior, and workforce readiness, grounded in developmental science and practical enough to move. Reach out if any of this resonates — or if your system is ready to go deeper.