Launched in 2019 by the Cleveland Browns Foundation, Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and Harvard’s Proving Ground, the Stay in the Game! Attendance Network, now managed by Battelle, works together to reduce chronic absenteeism by bringing together experts, partners and communities. Together, the Network partners with 212 districts and impacts more than 566,000 students throughout Ohio.
The Bedford City School District has been a member of the Network since the 2023-24 school year. For the past two school years, the district has decreased their chronic absenteeism rate.
“For us, we are really trying to incentivize attendance, but also just engagement and joy around learning. So, it was great to see the kids actively engaged. We had lots of smiling faces, and lots of joy,” Principal of Carylwood Intermediate School Jennifer Speight said. “Some of our students who we know are very athletically motivated worked really hard to get to school each day, to make sure they were making good choices so they could participate in those stations. And so, for us, it’s just about increasing opportunities for our kids. They can’t see things that they don’t know exists, that they don’t participate in actively, so that was a great experience for us.”
Speight said as a district, their concerted efforts to encourage improved attendance stems from the work of their social and emotional learning teams. They focus on eliminating barriers that could prevent students from coming to school, such as transportation or clothing needs. They also work closely with individual students and families to develop individualized plans to provide incentivization to come to school. The students chosen for the Gym Class Takeover had reached certain levels of attendance.
All of their efforts stem from the importance of being in school plays in the learning process, as Speight said students will not grasp concepts they need to grasp if not in school.
“Day 1 for education starts with getting the kids to school on time every day so they can be exposed to the content that they need. For our kids especially, and for many schools with the population similar to ours, attendance is going to be crucial. The systems, the routines, the exposure to content and really just expanding the breadth of opportunity available to our kids,” Speight said. “I went to a school similar to Bedford when I was a kid, you don’t know what is out there until you are able to see it. You don’t know what ladders or what rungs you have to climb up the ladder until the next one is in front of you. So, for us, getting them here every day is really crucial to improve reading scores and math scores, which we know later on ends up with scholarship dollars and everything else for our kids to tackle what they need to tackle.”