By Shepria Johnson
Ask a room full of educators what’s keeping their students from showing up, and the answers will have very little to do with what happens inside a classroom.
Unstable housing. Health issues within a family that force a student to assume caregiving or household responsibilities. A bus route that changed or disappeared without warning. A mental health struggle that went unaddressed for so long that walking back through a school door feels impossible. Food insecurity that makes paying attention in class impossible.
Educators are intimately familiar with this list, an understanding that is validated by recent research. Often, they have seen them all. And most of them will tell you that these are not problems schools can solve on their own.
A Shared Challenge, Not a School Failure
For too long, chronic absenteeism has been treated as a measure of how well a school is doing its job. And while schools absolutely have a role to play, this perspective puts the weight of a community-wide problem on the institution least equipped to carry it alone.
School is where the absence is recorded. That’s not the same as where it begins.
Homelessness, mental or physical health crises, transportation barriers, and food insecurity don’t begin inside our schools. They arrive with our students at the school door every morning, already fully formed. And the most dedicated teacher or counselor in the world cannot be a housing caseworker, a mental health counselor, and a social worker all at once.
Schools need more partnerships to support them in meeting these challenges.
The Resources Exist. The Connection Often Doesn’t.
This is what gives me genuine hope: most communities already have what families need.
Housing assistance programs. Mental health services. Food banks. Transportation resources. Family advocacy organizations. The landscape of help, in most cities, is real. Families in crisis are not without options.
What often breaks down is the connections between those options. A family addressing multiple crises at once may be working with several different caseworkers from as many different agencies, none of whom are in contact with each other, and none of whom have spoken with the school. Each organization is doing good work. But good work in parallel isn’t the same as meaningful work together.
No family should have to become the project manager of their own crisis. In the midst of a crisis, tracking down services, explaining your situation from scratch to each new contact, and hoping that somehow the pieces will add up to stability seems impossible. Unfortunately, when families are left to do that alone, children often fall through the gaps. Not because nobody cared, but because nobody was connected.
What Real Coordination Looks Like
Genuine coordination doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t emerge from a single meeting where everyone agrees in principle to collaborate and then returns to their separate work. It has to be built deliberately with formal agreements, shared information, clear accountability, and regular communication.
Most importantly, it requires people who are specifically positioned to work across systems on a family’s behalf. Not just referrals to other organizations, but individuals who can identify what a particular family actually needs, understand what’s available across the full landscape of community resources, and navigate between institutions that were never originally designed to communicate with each other.
When that kind of role exists the difference is tangible. An eviction threat stops being an invisible reason a child disappears from class and becomes something a coordinated team can actually address together. The school understands what the family is facing. The right partners are engaged. The family isn’t starting from zero every time they encounter someone new.
It’s not a complicated idea. It does, however, require every organization at the table to prioritize the family’s wholeness over institutional boundaries.
Accountability That Belongs to Everyone
One of the more meaningful shifts that happens when communities build these partnerships is a change in how organizations think about their own success.
A housing agency’s primary mission isn’t school attendance. A mental health provider isn’t evaluated on whether their clients’ children are making it to class. That’s understandable. Every organization has its own scope, its own funders, its own metrics.
But when partners sit down together and look at the same families across time, something important happens. The connection becomes undeniable. And the question naturally shifts from “did we complete our service?” to “is this family actually doing better?”
That’s the kind of shared accountability that makes systems of care sustainable. Not blame, but genuine shared investment in outcomes. Every partner asking: are the children we collectively serve showing up? Are the barriers being removed, or just documented? Is what we’re doing together working in ways that matter to the families themselves?
This also means honoring what families and students know about their own lives. The most effective partnerships treat community members not as recipients of services but as essential voices in shaping them.
When It All Comes Together
The turnarounds I’ve seen were never the result of one exceptional program or one dramatic intervention. They were the result of someone finally seeing the full picture of what a family needed and making sure all of it happened at once.
A student missing for months returns to school because someone identified the things that needed to happen simultaneously, and coordinated them. A bus pass. A conversation with a landlord. A weekly check-in call so nothing slipped. None of those things alone would have been enough. Together, they were.
That’s not extraordinary. It’s what coordination looks like when it’s working.
The communities that make real progress on chronic absenteeism won’t do it by adding more programs to an already crowded landscape. They’ll do it by weaving what already exists into something more coherent: a genuine system of care where every organization serving vulnerable families understands that child’s presence in school as a shared measure of collective success.
Every empty desk represents a child, a family, and a set of circumstances that no single institution can fully address. But a community that decides to face those circumstances, with structure, with trust, and with real accountability to one another, can.
About the author
Shepria Johnson is the Regional Director of Student Engagement, Concentric Educational Solutions. Through her work, she assists school systems across the country in their efforts to battle chronic absenteeism.
