Jose Almazan is Director of Admissions, Attendance, and Dropout Recovery at United ISD. “Our staff is provided with up to date attendance data and especially with absence data relevant to truancy,” says Almazan. 

The real value and benefit of this is that, “We can quickly identify students and document the reason for their absences,” he explains. “Long gone are the days where we extract reports with limited parameters and have to calculate or determine by hand what stage of intervention implementation the students are at.” 

Is Real-Time Data the Key to Success? 

“This system provides each attendance officer a daily list of students with the correct absences and places them on a stage of intervention,” says Almazan. “Depending on the stages, each officer can now implement a prescribed truancy prevention measure to address the individual needs of the student.” 

“Real-time data is key to the success of any truancy program. Because daily attendance/absences are dynamic in nature, we never know who is going to be absent on any given day.” 

“When our average enrollment in our schools is over 900 in middle schools and 2500 in our high schools, we need some type of program that can do all the calculations and tells us who has met the parameters for intervention,” he says. 

Calculating The Results We Need 

“The main advantage is that we have full technical support from the developers when needed,” says Almazan. 

“By far, the RaaWee team has an outstanding record with us. From day one, their technical support has been outstanding in developing the software to calculate the results we need to provide assistance to the chronically absent students.” 

After all is said and done, Almazan sums it all up: “The real benefit has been: better attendance in our schools, proper identification of needs to get students engaged in school— and all of this culminates into additional funding possibilities,” he adds.