The GLR Campaign–working together with America’s Promise Alliance, Attendance Works, Civic Enterprises and Points of Light–is releasing a toolkit that explains the problem of chronic absence and offers a variety of ways to improve attendance through better messaging, parent engagement, community efforts and data crunching.

The toolkit, Count Us In! Working Together to Show That Every School Day Matters, was developed in connection with the effort to recognize September as Attendance Awareness Month. It offers strategies that work not only at the start of the school year, but throughout the year to improve attendance.It includes

• Why it’s importance to focus on attendance and chronic absence
• How schools and communities can deliver the mesage to parents, students and the media
• How the entire community can come together to address this problem
• How we can identify and help students at academic risk due to poor attendance.
• What can different stakeholders do

In connection with the release of the toolkit, Attendance Works has debuted a new video that details the chronic absence problem and provides concrete examples of positive, community-based approaches to turning around poor attendance