School attendance is essential to academic success, but too often students, parents and schools don’t realize how quickly absences, excused or unexcused, can add up to academic trouble. Chronic absence— missing just 18 days per school year— can leave third graders unable to master reading, sixth graders failing courses and ninth graders dropping out of high school. The impact is the greatest on low-income students who lack the resources to make up for the lost time in the classroom.

Join us this September for the launch of Attendance Awareness Month. It’s a chance to rally  your community around the importance of attendance and its role in academic achievement. We’ll formally launch the effort with the release of an online toolkit and a webinar on April 9 from 1 to 2:15 p.m. EDT. Register here.

You can participate in Attendance Awareness Month in a variety of ways, including:

• Organizing parent summits, letters and outreach to families
• Arranging contests, celebrity visits and other incentives for students
• Calling for proclamations from  mayors or superintendents
• Developing public service announcements for national or local media
• Advocating for improved  data tracking to identify students with at-risk attendance
• Organizing community-wide attendance campaigns

The Attendance Awareness Campaign is organized by five national organizations: America’s Promise Alliance, Attendance Works, the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Civic Enterprises, and Points of Light Institute, and is supported by a growing list of organizations.