Dr. Baron Davis is the Founder of The Noegenesis Group, a Sr. Advisor at Digital Promise, and Superintendent in Residence at the University of South Carolina. When he spoke at the Wayfinder Winter Summit, he highlighted an urgent need to rethink the chronic absenteeism crisis plaguing K-12 school districts nationwide.
His presentation delivered a clear message: efforts to curb chronic absenteeism are seeking to treat a symptom of a larger underlying problem with student belonging. Outlining the collaborative, systems-level work happening at districts across the country to address the complex reasons behind absenteeism, he concluded that the most powerful interventions are those aimed at helping students feel seen, valued, and included at school.
“I don’t think students just skip school. They avoid environments where their needs aren’t met.”
As he spoke, Dr. Davis encouraged educators and leaders to look inward at school-based systems and practices that could be enhanced or reconfigured to ensure schools provide students with the conditions they need to thrive. He recounted a popular elementary school science project: sprouting lima beans under different conditions to learn which ones supported the fastest and most sustained growth. This metaphor serves as a simple but powerful reminder to schools and districts struggling with chronic absenteeism that, if we want to see students show up and succeed, we must create the conditions to enable them to do so.
A huge piece of the chronic absenteeism puzzle is repairing the disconnection many students feel from their school environments. Unfortunately, student-reported data from the past several years on their feelings toward school paint a bleak picture of the situation.
According to a 2024 Walton Family + Gallup survey of Gen Z students:
According to the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey:
Harvard’s report On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges revealed that:
Meanwhile, the research-backed connection between belonging, academic success, and student well-being couldn’t be clearer. Students who feel a strong sense of belonging at school demonstrate improved outcomes in school and in life.
A Walton + Brady study cited by Dr. Davis showed that:
While shedding light on a challenging situation, this research also points to a major opportunity. For those who invest in student belonging, a self-sustaining improvement loop is possible. Belonging improves attendance and reduces behavioral referrals. Improved attendance and reduced referrals increase instructional time. Increased instructional time improves academic outcomes.
The belonging-driven improvement loop doesn’t just benefit currently enrolled students, either. The financial impact of the attendance crisis means less funding for schools and districts—an average of about $65 lost per absent student, per day, amounting to $10.7 billion in lost funding in the US annually. Considering the inverse of this, the payoff of improving school attendance through belonging efforts now could have long-term benefits for future generations of students, securing funding for the types of material and human resources needed to build ideal circumstances for learning and growing.
Read more about student belonging and achievement:
When students are absent, schools seek to understand why. Efforts to understand the underlying causes of absenteeism intensify once absenteeism reaches or exceeds 10 absences per year, a level officially recognized as chronic. However, Dr. Davis notes that too often, these efforts toward understanding rely on deficit thinking, exploring everything a student might be missing in their life outside of school, rather than looking at what the school is providing and how that might be at odds with what students truly need.
And what do students need? While the answer depends on many factors and will differ by student and context, there are several steps that school districts can take to understand students’ needs and align campus offerings more closely with them. The following are four that Dr. Davis has mentioned.
School districts have plenty of tools for measuring and monitoring attendance. But if attendance is a symptom of a problem, then what measurement tools are working to uncover the root causes? For some districts, the answer is none, or not the right ones.
“Conditions data is important. What impacts outcomes are just as important as the outcomes.”
School districts need to be able to identify and track indicators of student belonging and well-being to address the reasons behind absenteeism. These tools need to be implemented as regularly as attendance trackers. Data from them can inform instructional practices, school- or districtwide policies, and family engagement strategies.
Learn how to measure human skills with Wayfinder:
Positive student-teacher relationships have a demonstrated impact on student achievement and attendance. Schools can encourage and set up systems for mentorship that empower accountability and care. If a student knows that they have an adult on campus who is there to see if they are present—not to punish them, but to see what they need if they’re not—then they have at least one strong emotional tie to school that can provide motivation to show up and be at their best.
Mentorship is not always easy, though, and young people are keen at detecting disingenuousness. So, it’s important that these mentoring relationships grow authentically and organically. Forcing the wrong mentor on a student can do more harm than good, so schools establishing mentorship programs need to make time and flexibility available to build impactful mentoring relationships.
Read more from Wayfinder:
Showing students that their perspectives and feelings are valued is a simple yet powerful way to foster and strengthen belonging. Student choice isn’t just good instructional practice for classrooms; it also extends to schoolwide initiatives.
Schools building or rethinking their intervention programs should seek to understand from students themselves what successful intervention really looks and feels like. Begin with a listening session, or a series of sessions, with a group of students struggling with attendance. Include adults on campus who are close to these students—mentors, advisors, counselors, coaches, or other staff who have worked closely with them. Rather than asking students why they’re not at school, ask when, where, and around whom they feel that they belong at school. Ask what might be making them feel unwelcome, uncomfortable, or uninterested in being at school.
Try to understand and validate the thoughts and feelings students share in these listening sessions. Resist justifying or pushing back at this stage. The goal is to listen, learn, and—importantly—act on what students share. Use students' comments to inform your intervention support efforts and programs. This not only demonstrates the value of these students’ input on campus but can also get to the root causes of their school avoidance and that of students who may have similar experiences.
Read more tips on promoting student voice + agency with Wayfinder:
Educator well-being has a profound impact on students. The stresses of being a teacher can leak into the classroom, worsening school climate and learning conditions across campus. Conversely, educator wellness efforts have a documented ability to reduce stress and improve cognitive flexibility, and these outcomes are associated with downstream benefits for students’ academic self-perception. Additional studies have found that teachers’ personal, social, and emotional wellness impacts their ability to facilitate effective student well-being programming.
In short, the adults on campus tasked with improving belonging and attendance cannot pour from empty cups. Schools need well-being practices in place to help ensure that staff have the emotional intelligence and capacity for helping students who are struggling.
Schools have less control over the well-being of the adults their students spend time with at home, but these adults still play an important role in creating effective interventions to promote student belonging and attendance. For students who rely on their families to get to school, understanding barriers to attendance directly from families themselves is crucial. Even for those students who can get to school on their own or who are reliably brought to campus but don’t make it to class, family engagement can be an additional strategy for understanding student needs and building responsive intervention supports.
Read more about staff engagement:
Numerous school districts across the country have made strides in improving attendance since the return from virtual learning in 2020-2021. From family letters to student mentorship and community organizing, educators have employed a variety of strategies to help students reengage with school. In his presentation with Wayfinder, Dr. Davis highlighted two great examples of districts who have centered belonging as part of their absenteeism reduction efforts:
Read more attendance strategies and success stories from Wayfinder:
Download Chronic Absenteeism Today and the State of Chronic Absenteeism 2026 Guide, both featuring case studies from districts that have experienced exceptional outcomes from their attendance improvement programs.
Any initiative can be daunting at the beginning, but as Dr. Davis explained, there are many ways a school or district can kick off a successful student belonging campaign:
As districts continue to uncover the reasons behind absenteeism and focus on the belonging-related conditions that may be driving it, they are also making an important shift that students can sense—a focus on care over coercion. Getting students into class is only one piece of the puzzle; getting them to reengage with school meaningfully is another entirely. Those who center belonging and human connection in their efforts to improve attendance will see transformative results that don’t just get students back into seats but reintegrate them back into caring school communities.