Last month, I had the exciting opportunity to attend the Neighborhood Walk at the Promise Neighborhood and Full-Service Community Schools Conference. The networking event brought together Promise Neighborhood and Full-Service Community School grantees across the country to share effective strategies for tackling the ongoing challenge of high chronic absenteeism rates following the pandemic. It was inspiring to see how afterschool programs emerged as one of the several successful approaches organizations are prioritizing to boost school-day attendance.
Many of the afterschool opportunities grantees mentioned, such as mentoring and enriching learning experiences, align with the program qualities that the Afterschool Alliance identified as essential to re-engaging students and supporting attendance in their newly released issue brief, “Addressing Chronic Absenteeism: How Afterschool Programs are Building School-Day Engagement and Improving Attendance.”
