Implementing Attendance for Success Act key topic at conference

Mission: Graduate, United Way of Central New Mexico’s education initiative, is hosting about 200 educators at the Every Day Matters Follow-up Attendance Conference, Feb. 4 from 7:45 a.m. to noon at the Albuquerque Public School Berna Facio Building located at 3315 Louisiana Blvd, NE. 

Seventy-five  school-based attendance teams from the central New Mexico region and Roswell will learn tools and techniques that will help them implement the requirements within the Attendance for Success Act which will go into effect in July.  

House Bill 236 was signed into law by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in 2019, and requires that the state shift its approach to school attendance from a focus on truancy to a more supportive approach that uses chronic absenteeism as the key metric for tracking student attendance. 

Chronic absence or missing ten percent or more of the school year for any reason, is a research-informed definition that has been shown to be strongly linked to lower academic outcomes and lower graduation rates. This contrasts with “habitual truancy,” which is defined as the accumulation of ten or more unexcused absences during a school year. 

The law stipulates varying and increasing levels of interactions will take place depending on the number of days missed. 

Schools will be required to develop chronic absence baselines  and attendance tiers for use in creating success plans.  

Organizers will share best practices from other local and national schools and from Attendance Works.  

The conference is organized by Mission: Graduate in partnership with Albuquerque Public Schools.