Chronic absenteeism is rarely just a scheduling problem. By the time a student has stopped coming to school consistently, something else is often already at play — at home, in the community, or in the student's relationship with school itself.
Districts across the country are wrestling with this. But a growing number of school leaders have moved toward approaches that center the student and family — going to them, understanding what's in the way, and working to address it.
At the February 2026 Large Unit District Association (LUDA) conference in Illinois, Carl Holloway, Administration at Manual High School in Peoria Public Schools, shared the approach his team has developed over years of outreach work with chronically absent and at-risk students. What follows draws on those insights — not as a recap of his session, but as a practical framework for district leaders looking to move the needle on attendance.
Start where the student and family are — literally
The most consistent theme in effective re-engagement work is deceptively simple: you have to go to them.
For many chronically absent students and their families, the barriers to attendance are physical and immediate — a chaotic home environment, a lack of transportation, a need to babysit younger siblings while a parent works a double shift. These circumstances aren't peripheral to the attendance question. They're often at the center of it — and they can't be addressed from a desk.
Home visits, conducted thoughtfully and with the right team, are one of the most powerful tools available. When a school staff member, a safety resource officer, and a mental health professional visit together, the visit accomplishes multiple things at once: it signals to the student and family that the school cares enough to show up, it surfaces hidden barriers that would never appear in attendance data, and it creates the foundation for the trust that re-engagement depends on.
That team composition matters deeply. Students and families are more likely to open up — and more likely to trust — when they see people who reflect their community, understand their lived experience, and are genuinely committed to building a relationship. Outreach staff who can meet families where they are — culturally and geographically — tend to be the factor that determines whether a relationship forms at all.
Address what's actually in the way
What's keeping students home is rarely one thing. In Peoria's experience, a single home visit might reveal a student managing a toddler sibling before school starts, a family facing eviction, or a young man who won't walk out the door because he doesn't have a clean pair of shoes. These aren't peripheral issues. In many cases, they're what's actually in the way.
Effective re-engagement strategies treat basic needs and academic support as equally important, because they are. This means having pathways to connect families to childcare, rental and utility assistance, food resources, transportation, and hygiene items — not as charity, but as the practical scaffolding that makes showing up to school possible.
For student parents — a population that is easy to overlook — Peoria has developed programming that coordinates morning pickup, childcare, and an educational setting simultaneously. Of thirteen young women who participated in one such program, ten graduated. Those outcomes reflect what can happen when a district treats meeting students and families where they are as a core strategy — not a workaround.
Build trust before you build plans
For students who have cycled through juvenile facilities, missed months of class, or come to see school as irrelevant to their lives, the relationship with a trusted adult is often the deciding factor in whether they re-engage at all.
This means showing up at the juvenile detention center on a Saturday. It means going to court. It means being the person who doesn't turn their back when a student is struggling. And it means being honest about progress — not demanding a student go from an F to an A in four weeks, but celebrating a student who pulls a C when he's been failing all semester, and building from there.
Trust isn't incidental to this work. In Peoria's experience, it's what makes everything else possible. Students who feel safe at school, who know they have an advocate in the building, are more likely to walk through the door — even in the middle of difficult circumstances. Peoria has seen students show up on some of their hardest days specifically because they knew school was the safest place they had.
Pair the outreach with wraparound support
Individual effort from a dedicated staff member can start the process. But the students and families who achieve lasting re-engagement typically have access to a broader system of support.
Peoria's Wraparound Center model brings together family support services, mental health, food, transportation, clothing, furniture, and utility assistance under one roof — with a referral network that extends well beyond what the district can provide directly. Students transitioning from a juvenile facility to a classroom don't have to navigate that system alone. There are smaller alternative settings for students who aren't ready for a full classroom environment. There are tutors, mentors, and therapists for students who need a specific kind of support.
The outcomes that have followed this model are measurable. Peoria Public Schools has seen a 62% reduction in student absences among students receiving services, a 44% reduction in chronic absenteeism, and a 68% reduction in suspensions — results that reflect what happens when a district treats attendance as a symptom and invests in treating the cause.
What this requires of district leadership
This kind of work depends on a culture that supports it. Carl Holloway credits Peoria Public Schools superintendent with creating the conditions for this work — leadership that embraces nontraditional approaches, invests in outreach staff who work evenings and weekends, and understands that the students who need the most help will not always make it easy to help them.
For district leaders, a few practical implications emerge.
The staff doing this work need to be people who have genuine relationships with the communities they're serving — not people making phone calls from a desk and marking students absent when no one answers.
The systems need to be built before the crisis. A wraparound center, a referral network, a community of trusted partners — these are not things you stand up after a student has been gone for 60 days. They are the infrastructure that makes early intervention possible.
And the goals need to be realistic. A student who goes from zero days to four days a week is a win. A student who raises a 44% to a 65% is making progress. Setting students up for failure by demanding immediate transformation is its own form of disengagement.
When students and families feel known, supported, and genuinely welcomed — not managed or monitored — they show up. The districts that are seeing the strongest re-engagement outcomes are the ones that have built systems around the whole family: addressing the barriers at home, connecting to community resources, and sustaining the relationship long after a student walks back through the door. That is the strategy. And it works.
If you'd like to hear directly from Dr. Myskeshia Mitchell, who leads Peoria's wraparound model, her on-demand info session on reversing chronic absenteeism is available here — she shares how the system came together and what the outcomes have looked like.
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