Schools have plenty of other issues to deal with… students not getting to class on time should not be one of them!

At Great Oak High School where I teach, our attendance director was "blown away by the impact" when we reduced total tardies by 36% in the first year.  Using the same spreadsheet application, another high school outside our district saw a 75% reduction in tardies over two years.  Several other middle and high schools we have worked with have reduced tardies between 40% and 72% over one to three years.

These results were achieved not by imposing stricter rules and consequences on students, but by utilizing automated tools that transform attendance policy from a punitive battle into an effective supportive system. 

These five best practices have helped many of our middle and high school clients achieve immediate, substantial, and sustainable reductions in tardies.

1.  Policy Structure

Some schools count tardies on a per-period basis, whereas other schools count total tardies across the student’s full schedule.  Both accounting systems have been successful at significantly reducing tardies.  

Because first period tardies are often ride-related and have different root causes from tardies the rest of the school day when students are already on campus, some schools excluded first period tardies from discipline, opting instead for a reporting-only system for first period tardies.  

All schools reported the importance of thoughtfully selecting tardy tiers with involvement from parents, teachers, and administrators.  This spreadsheet contains the anonymized tardy tiers and interventions for three schools.  Utilizing multiple warning tiers, even after consequence tiers, has been effective at preventing tardies with very little staff time, since the warning tiers do not involve assigning discipline and merely employ software automation to send email notifications to parents and notification slips to students.

We found that a majority of non-first period tardies are preventable simply with improved parent communication and consistent enforcement of the first few tiers.  As most students self-correct their tardiness challenges in the warnings stages, staff are now able to focus on the far fewer number of students who have more substantive root causes for their tardies that require strategic staff involvement to solve.  

2. Timely Preventative Communication

Parents often complained that they were notified too late about their student’s tardies, making it difficult to intervene early.  Successful policies rely on timely enforcement and clear communication.

The key is immediate reporting and preventative messaging.

Automated systems ensure that parents, students, and teachers receive an email notification within 24 hours if their student reached a new warning or intervention tier.  Timely notifications resolve the issue where consequences are assigned without students first receiving timely warnings or supports.

Automated emails to parents and paper notification slips delivered to students clearly state the consequence for the next tardy tier.  This preventative messaging immediately after crossing the previous tier is critical, often causing most students to self-correct before formal interventions or consequences are necessary.

3. Consistent Enforcement

Due to the sheer volume of students, previously these schools could allocate staff time to deal only with the most chronically tardy students.  The result was that low and moderate tardy cases went unaddressed until they became chronic.

Implementing automated tracking and notification systems allows for a standardized tracking system across all classrooms and uniform enforcement by staff.  New tardies policies and enforcement procedures were communicated frequently to parents and students.  Because the software does the data processing, staff can run tardies every morning before school for the previous school day, and have paper notification slips in students' hands that same morning for yesterday's tardies.

4. Shifting from Punitive to Proactive Support

The greatest impact on campus culture has been shifting from solely punitive measures to multi-tiered systems of support.

When data processing is automated, staff time is recovered and reinvested into a support team that can identify and address the root causes of each student’s tardiness challenges.

Instead of just one administrator issuing punitive consequences, staff now have time to coordinate progressive levels of support from teachers, campus supervisors, counselors, attendance intervention specialists, and administrators.  By understanding students’ unique circumstances and developing solutions to their underlying tardiness challenges, staff position students to be active participants in their own solutions.  As one school noted, “Accountability with them, not to them”.  

One of the high school assistant principals shared that the administrator meeting at the 5th tardy tier caused most remaining students to stop being tardy at that point.  These meetings were numerous initially, with 39 individual student meetings in the first quarter.  However, those personal meetings were highly effective at ending most students’ tardies, and this school’s staff still spends less time overall dealing with tardies because the large majority of other tardy cases are resolved through the automated communications and strategic interventions from the very beginning.

5.  Culture of Attendance

One middle school principal reported the noticeably visible impact of the empty quad and walkways when the warning bell rang.  When students see that virtually all other students are hustling to class, they do the same. Visible effects like this during passing periods successfully shifted the culture of attendance on their campus.

Active efforts to sustain these successes are still required.  Continued messaging to parents, focused onboarding for freshmen in the first few weeks of each school year, auditory cues like playing music one minute before each tardy bell, and unannounced tardy sweeps were all cited as best practices.