It’s National Attendance Awareness Month. Let’s Talk About It.

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We’ve been making this argument in rooms for years, usually on instinct and field experience. It is a different conversation when there’s a causal study on the table.

We keep treating chronic absence like a motivation problem. For a lot of families, it is a logistics problem.

The cleanest evidence we’ve seen

Researchers in Michigan used the 1.5 mile walk zone cutoff as a natural experiment. Students living just inside the line got a bus. Students living just outside did not. Same schools. Same neighborhoods. The only meaningful difference was a ride.

For economically disadvantaged students, being eligible for the bus cut the probability of chronic absence by 2 to 4 percentage points.

Not a pilot. Not a survey. A causal estimate, published in Education Finance and Policy (MIT Press).

“Transportation eligibility increases attendance rates and lowers the probability of chronic absence.”

Danielle Sanderson Edwards, author of the study

Meanwhile, in the field

Now hold that next to what is actually happening. In the 2025 State of School Transportation survey, 26% of school and district leaders said they responded to driver shortages by cutting or shortening bus routes.

We are removing the intervention and then funding a program to replace it.

The cheapest fix on the list

If your district or school’s attendance plan and your transportation plan are written by two different people who never sit in the same meeting, that is your gap. It is also the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

Put them in the same room this month. Attendance Awareness Month is a good excuse.

What would change in your district if the transportation director had a standing seat at the attendance table?

See how Go Together helps districts build a multimodal SchoolPool program, explore solutions for school districts, or request a demo.

Sources:

#AttendanceAwarenessMonth #YourPresenceMatters #ChronicAbsenteeism #StudentTransportation #K12