Build shared districtwide and schoolwide responsibility for multilingual learners' attendance through a multitiered approach with a strong foundational tier¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The brief recommends that a collective commitment to English learners' attendance begin with "adopting a multitiered approach, with a strong focus on the foundational tier," which creates positive conditions for learning. Foundational-tier strategies include building trusting relationships with students, partnering with families in their home languages, holding multilingual orientation sessions, conducting home visits, using student surveys, maintaining two-way attendance messaging in home languages, ensuring home-language access to internet and school portals, and connecting students with enrichment opportunities such as after-school programs and summer learning.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Two-way communication with families must be maintained in their home languages, including home-language access to reliable internet service and school portals

Constraints¶

• The brief presents these practices as promising approaches grounded in cited work, not as effects tested within the brief itself

Target Learners¶

• English learners and their families across elementary and secondary grades

Target Learning Goals¶

• Attendance, engagement, and social–emotional and academic success

Related Strategies¶

• Partner with community-based organizations to deliver critical services, since districts and schools alone cannot reduce chronic absenteeism
• Implement a tiered, prevention-first approach to reducing chronic absence that invests in positive conditions for learning
• Create positive, culturally inclusive, welcoming schools using strengths-based practices such as newcomer welcome centers, attendance cafés, and home-language-as-asset approaches
• Administrators sustain high-quality Tier 1 Core Instruction by creating conditions, structural supports, and a sitewide culture valuing dual-language learning

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Gisela Ariza, Attendance Works; Hedy Chang, Attendance Works. (2024). Supporting Success: Attendance Solutions for Multilingual Students. WestEd. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED663795