By Molly Hebert Loyd
There is a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that has been stuck in my head for a while now. The line, by a sailor, adrift at sea and dying of thirst, goes like this: “Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.” Surrounded by the very thing he needs, the sailor is dying of thirst.
That is precisely where we stand in America’s chronic absenteeism crisis.
We have never had more data. National datasets track absence rates across every state, district, and demographic. District data systems flag a child after three missed days. AI-driven platforms, predictive analytics, and real-time dashboards can tell us who is going to be absent, and which neighborhoods and grade levels are most at risk. And on, and on, and on.
And yet, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Return 2 Learn Tracker, chronic absenteeism which surged nationwide from 15% before COVID-19 to 28% in 2022, remains elevated at 24% nationwide.
I worked in Edtech for nearly two decades before joining Concentric Educational Solutions. I believed deeply in the power of technology to improve education, and I still do. But when I shifted to Concentric’s human-centered work, I saw what the dashboards never showed me: the why behind the absence. Not the data point. The actual issues keeping our students from coming to school.
The doors our advocates knock on tell the story behind the data in the charts and tables. Behind them, we find families navigating immigration uncertainty, terrified that contact with a school system could lead them to being exposed immigration authorities. Our advocates meet children struggling with hunger because of their parent’s job loss and teenagers navigating mental health crises alone because they don’t know where to go for help. They get to know students with no consistent way to get to school because bus routes have changed or the walk doesn’t feel safe.
These are children, not cells in a spreadsheet. And no algorithm can solve their problem and bring them back to a classroom.
Our crisis is not a shortage of information. It is a surplus of information paired with a deficit of action on the things the information keeps pointing to.
We pour resources into notification systems and early warning tools. Those tools are necessary, but we have been far less willing to invest in the harder, slower, more human work of addressing what the warnings warn us about. Immigration status. Housing instability. Food insecurity. Untreated trauma. Mental health needs that are now so common that we’ve normalized them.
When a child misses school because her family just received a deportation notice, an automated text is not a solution. When a student stops showing up because cant’ go home and is too embarrassed to come in yesterday’s clothes, an attendance alert is not helpful. The data tells us these students are absent. It cannot do the work of addressing why.
The “50% Challenge”, the national campaign to cut chronic absenteeism in half within five years led by Attendance Works, represents exactly the right ambition. But ambition measured in percentages requires action measured in relationships.
To meet the urgency of this moment, Concentric is launching the 90-Day Summer Pilot Program, a focused, expert-led engagement designed to achieve measurable results before the new school year begins. This pilot moves beyond reactive attendance tracking to proactive student reengagement, giving districts the capacity to rebuild relationships, identify root causes, and realign systems of student support through hands-on, on-the-ground outreach throughout the summer months. Led by noted subject matter expert Dr. Ivory Toldson, this initiative tackles the hidden barriers preventing students from reengaging in school.
Through more than 17,000 home visits at Concentric, we have learned this: families don’t disengage from schools because they don’t value education. They disengage because systems have treated their complexity as an obstacle rather than a context. When someone shows up at their door with genuine curiosity, not a truancy notice, the conversation changes. And often, the attendance changes.
I am not arguing against data. I am arguing for what happens after the data is in the hands of the adults in a position to help a child. If we identify which students are missing and limit our response to cold, automated outreach and are unwilling to address the actual issue keeping kids from the classroom, then we are the sailor, surrounded by an ocean we cannot drink.
The children our data flags are not attendance rates. They are kids. It is time to actually help them.
About the author
Molly Hebert Loyd is the Chief Executive Officer of Concentric Educational Solutions, which partners with school districts to reduce chronic absenteeism through human-centered outreach, trauma-informed care, and data-driven support.
