Moving the Needle on Attendance

Welcome back and happy 2026!

Since the pandemic, chronic absence from school--missing 10% or more of the school days in a year, for any reason--has skyrocketed nationally, and Chicago Public Schools is no exception. But Chávez Elementary School in the Back of the Yards neighborhood has bucked the trend. In 2025, only 7% of Chávez students missed that much school, compared with 40% of students across CPS as a whole.

In late December, the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed from Principal Barton Dassinger that offered a textbook example of how school staff can improve attendance. At Chávez, Dassinger and his team review school attendance first thing every morning, calling families immediately rather than waiting until the end of the day. If a family can't be reached by phone, staff make home visits. Adults at school work with families to troubleshoot problems, from transportation to child care to fears of immigration enforcement. Many experts recommend this kind of proactive, data-informed approach to attendance, and Rhode Island recently became the first state to create a public, real-time dashboard tracking attendance in every Ocean State public school.

But Dassinger also noted a strength of the Chávez approach that is far less often mentioned in solutions to poor attendance: teacher stability. For many years, the school has been blessed with a remarkably stable faculty, including several teachers who are Chávez alums. As Dassinger noted, "When students see the same adults year after year, they feel grounded." It's an important part of building school-family connections, one that affluent and suburban families have historically been able to take for granted. Chávez also offers a robust suite of after-school programs, which can help build children's interest in and attachment to school.

Reducing absenteeism is a big issue in school districts across the country, but Chicago's school board has not spent a great deal of time on it. Politics and finances consumed much of the Chicago Board of Education's bandwidth last year. Will 2026 be different? At least one board member, Angel Gutierrez, has mentioned boosting student attendance as a top priority. In November, board member Che "Rhymefest" Smith held a "community education session" on the importance of regular school attendance, featuring a student panel.

ICYMI: News from Late December

While you were enjoying the holiday, Board Rule was keeping tabs on all the doings, including the last-minute vote to raise property taxes. That vote was taken during a special meeting held on December 29, the deadline for a tax increase. Less than 12 hours before CPS gave public notice of the meeting (on Christmas Eve), Fox32 reporter Paris Schutz broke news of the meeting with this image from an email sent to board members by Fae Rabin, chief of staff to the board.

Yesterday, WBEZ reported that the board is launching investigations into how this information got to Schutz and into how the names of the finalists in the superintendent search reached the media. Board president Sean Harden told WBEZ's Sarah Karp that the board office and the CPS legal department will investigate what happened, and if they determine that board members were responsible for these leaks, they could be fined.

A super-search aside: the story also says the board now intends to have a permanent CPS leader in place "by next school year."

Sustainable Community Schools. Chalkbeat Chicago took a deep dive into student outcomes at the 20 schools that made up the initial group of Sustainable Community Schools, which got off the ground in 2018. They found that students in SCS schools did not outperform those at 29 comparable schools that applied but were not accepted, nor those in a larger pool of 300 schools with qualifying rates of economic disadvantage. Notably, the initial cohort of Sustainable Community Schools posted higher rates of chronic absenteeism than both comparison groups, although an internal CPS analysis found that students who consistently attended after school programs at the SCS schools had lower rates of chronic absenteeism than their same-school peers.

In a companion story, Chalkbeat found that schools and their community partners have left more than $6.6 million unspent since 2018. The reporting indicated that nonprofit, community-based partners have sometimes struggled to staff positions and manage vendor reimbursements. Nonetheless, CPS brought 16 more schools into the SCS fold this school year.

At the same time, there's an argument to be made that increasing funds for community schools could be a smart response to shifts in federal support for community-based after school programs. For many years, CPS schools relied heavily on federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants to fund after-school programs. But that money is now in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which froze grants last summer, then unfroze them, then canceled tens of millions in grants in mid-December. Three of the 16 schools newly made Sustainable Community Schools this year previously received 21st Century grants.

Mark Your Calendar

Jan. 8 (tomorrow!) the board will hold a public hearing on charter school renewal applications. Charters renewing this year include: Academy for Global Citizenship, Acero, Chicago Collegiate, Chicago Math and Science Academy, Christopher House, Intrinsic, and the University of Chicago Charter School network. The hearing will be held at the board office, 42 W. Madison, at 4 p.m. and will also be livestreamed on the CPS YouTube channel. Speakers can register here.

Jan. 12 is the deadline to apply to join the school board's Special Education Advisory Committee. You can learn more and find a link to apply here.

Jan. 14 is the board's next Agenda Review Committee meeting, at 10:30 a.m. Speaker registration will open at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 12.