During the pandemic, for this large Texas district, attendance concerns that already were present, multiplied. “We needed to do something different to provide some sort of resource and technology solution to campuses that was much more efficient, user friendly, and allowed us as an organization to be more consistent in how we were addressing these concerns,” says Rebecca Clark, Executive Director Student Services at LISD. The district chose RaaWee. “It’s been night and day, in terms of the ability to access real-time data about what students are experiencing, which students are experiencing chronic absenteeism issues, and to respond to those.” According to Clark, “It’s almost like, not only did we not have a technology system, but we didn’t even have good operating processes just in terms of who does what, and when, and how. This has helped us better quantify the totality of the concern. I don’t think that before this we even understood how many students we needed to have eyes on and to be intervening with,” she says.

With RaaWee, Clark increased district truancy filings by over 1,000%. “We were able to identify who the kids were that are not meeting compulsory attendance rules, and to implement the interventions that the laws require. We’ve already started to turn the ship around for our extreme attendance cases.” With RaaWee, they’ve implemented over 40,000 attendance interventions, including behavior plans, parent meetings, district warning letters, counselor interventions, or home visits. “Those are some examples, but this system prompts the campus, saying: ’We recommend that you do a home visit, or, ‘It’s required that you now send a letter.’ The system is designed to put all that in front of the campus so they know exactly what they should be doing at that step with the student, and we can track it. Before, I couldn’t have told you at all how many truancy or attendance interventions our district or the campus did. I had no way even to know that data, other than anecdotal. Now, I know how much every single campus did and how much we did as a district.”

Measuring How Effective We Are

“That’s nice to have and understand that kind of data, and to measure how effective we are. Saleem [Qazi, RaaWee CEO] has actually built in some reports that actually start to look at effectiveness of individual interventions based on the students continued attendance pattern,” Clark adds. “I would say, this is a great tool for any district to consider if they want timely, actionable data about student attendance, truancy, and intervention.”