“The RaaWee System has been a huge help to ESUHSD, allowing us to monitor and track truant students so that we can intervene earlier and more frequently,” says Jennifer Casel, Student Services Coordinator at 24.500-student East Side Union High School District in San Jose, CA. “Overall, we saw a decrease in the number of total student days absent across the district, which translates into roughly $840,000,” she says.

Making a Measurable Difference

In conducting the research, there was a lot of investigative and exploratory collaboration. In school terms, RaaWee did their homework. “Yes, we shared information,” says Zepeda. “And at the beginning, when we first met with RaaWee, I made it very clear that they obviously were the experts in the systems, the technology and use of, and putting together the system—whereas, we were the experts in school attendance.”

The Making of an Effective & Efficient Product

Having access to real-time data for interventions management and attendance tracking, the district has experienced significant improvement, having 12,500
lesser full-day absences in the first year using TDPS, meaning they’ll bring in even more in ADA funding as a result. Is that even correct? “Absolutely!” says Jennifer,
explaining: “We send letters out to families once per week, allowing them an opportunity to be informed on a more frequent basis when their child is accruing unexcused absences. The regular monitoring has also enabled us to intervene earlier and provide students and their families with academic programs that might be a better fit as well as prevent some students from becoming chronic absentees.”
In sum, the system is an “Early intervention to aid in getting students back to school so that we minimize the loss of instructional minutes,” she says.

Benefits to using a system solely dedicated to truancy and dropout prevention? “The system is set up and dedicated to prevention and intervention; there are no
special reports we have to customize through our Student Information System and we have been able to automate the process of sending letters to families. We used to send notification of truancy to families monthly and then were only able to focus on those with the the greatest number of unexcused absences as we lacked the manpower to efficiently manage the overall process.”

So, Any Words of Wisdom?

“Start using it today! It took us a while to onboard our site teams and utilize all the features since we were coming from a ‘home-grown’ system that didn’t have all
the functionality in the RaaWee solution, but once we were up and running, it was so easy to manage. We’ve added functionality for the coming school year
(monthly certificates for perfect attendance; an alert for 4+ consecutive unexcused absences to site admins) and I cannot wait to see how that will positively affect
our attendance rate,” says Jennifer. “The team at RaaWee has been exceptionally easy to work with—so helpful customizing reports or other features for ESUHSD. Customer service is impeccable, they’re a joy to work with!” Reviewing reports monthly with Associate Principals, a noticeable site-level change: the ‘save rate’ between each of the notices of truancy (1, 2 and 3) mailed home. “Fewer families receive notice 2, once notice 1 has been mailed. Notice 1 is mailed after 3+ unexcused absences of 30 minutes or more, and encourages families to check in with their child’s school site if they need additional resources or support,” says Jennifer. “I cannot emphasize enough how easy it is to work with the RaaWee team; they are just as focused on ESUHD’s attendance as I am it seems!”