Getting kids to show up to school sounds like it should be the easy part. In reality, chronic absenteeism has become one of the most stubborn and consequential problems facing public schools across the country and turning those numbers around requires far more than phone calls and warning letters. It requires a shift in how a school thinks about its relationship with students and families.
Hemlock Public School District figured that out, and the results are now showing up in the data in a way that is hard to argue with.
The district recently announced a 9.21 percent overall decrease in chronic absenteeism compared to the same point last school year. At the end of the second marking period during the 2024-2025 school year, Hemlock’s chronic absenteeism rate stood at 31 percent. At the same point this year, that number had dropped to 21.79 percent. That is a nearly double-digit improvement in twelve months — the kind of measurable, documented progress that reflects genuine, sustained effort across an entire school community.
Where This Started
The improvement didn’t come out of nowhere. In January 2025, district leadership made a deliberate decision to make chronic absenteeism a district-wide focus. That might sound like a simple administrative choice, but in practice it means something significant. It means that everyone in the building — teachers, counselors, administrators, support staff — became part of the same conversation and pointed their efforts in the same direction.
The approach the district adopted was research-based, centered on three core pillars: student engagement, positive relationships, and reinforcing the message that consistent attendance matters. None of those ideas are new in education. What makes the difference is whether a district actually builds them into its daily practice or treats them as aspirational language in a strategic plan that nobody reads again after it’s published.
Hemlock chose the former, and the numbers reflect that choice.
What the Strategy Actually Looked Like
District leaders were specific about the tactics they used to drive improvement. The first piece was identifying at-risk students early — getting ahead of absenteeism before it becomes chronic rather than reacting to it after the fact. A student who misses two or three days in the first few weeks of school is sending an early signal, and catching that signal before it becomes a pattern of twenty or thirty missed days is far more effective than trying to intervene once a student is already significantly behind.
Strengthening family communication was another key component. Attendance problems rarely exist in isolation. They are usually connected to something happening in a student’s life — health issues, family stress, transportation challenges, a social problem at school, or simply a growing sense of disconnection from the learning environment. When schools build real relationships with families and maintain open, consistent communication, they are much better positioned to identify what’s getting in the way and address it before it becomes a crisis.
Building engaging classroom environments was equally central to the strategy. This is perhaps the most important insight embedded in Hemlock’s approach, and it’s one that the district’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction articulated clearly: attendance is not just a compliance issue, it’s an engagement issue. Students who feel connected to their teachers, their classmates, and the work they are doing in the classroom don’t need to be dragged through the door every morning. They come because school feels worth coming to.
That is a fundamentally different framing than the traditional approach to absenteeism, which tends to focus on consequences and warnings. Consequences and warnings have their place, but they don’t address the underlying question of why a student doesn’t want to be there in the first place. Hemlock’s strategy went after that question directly.
The Words Behind the Numbers
Board President Matt Wesener didn’t dance around the significance of what his district has accomplished. “This kind of progress doesn’t happen by accident,” he said. “It happens because of a shared commitment from our teachers, support staff, administrators, families, and students.”
That acknowledgment matters. Too often in education, progress gets attributed to a single program or a single person. What Wesener is describing is different — a community-wide effort where everyone played a role. Teachers built more engaging classrooms. Support staff identified struggling students early. Administrators created the conditions and provided the resources for the work to happen. Families responded to outreach and partnered with the school rather than working against it. And students, given environments where they felt more connected, started showing up more consistently.
Wesener also invoked the district’s core philosophy: “When we say ‘Kids First,’ we mean it. Being in school matters, and this improvement shows what’s possible when a community rallies around that belief.” It is easy for a school to put words like that on a banner or a website. It is much harder to demonstrate them in the actual data. Hemlock is doing both right now.
The Director of Curriculum and Instruction echoed that sentiment with a line that captures the heart of the whole effort: “When students feel connected to their school, to their teachers, and to their peers, they are more likely to attend consistently.” There is a mountain of research behind that statement, and Hemlock’s own data is now part of that mountain.
Why Attendance Numbers Matter So Much
It is worth taking a moment to explain why a drop in chronic absenteeism is such a significant outcome — because not everyone immediately understands the downstream consequences of a student missing too much school.
Chronic absenteeism is generally defined as missing ten percent or more of the school year, which works out to roughly eighteen or more days. Students who reach that threshold are not just falling behind on the days they miss — they are disrupting the continuity of their learning in ways that compound over time. Skills build on skills in education. A student who misses key instruction in reading in the early grades doesn’t just have a gap for those specific lessons; they are working with a weaker foundation for everything that comes after.
The research on this is consistent and sobering. Students who are chronically absent are less likely to read at grade level by the end of third grade — a benchmark that, as State Representative Greg Alexander recently highlighted in his response to the State of the State address, has direct implications for long-term academic success. They are more likely to fall behind their peers, more likely to disengage from school entirely, and less likely to graduate. The connection between chronic absenteeism and dropout rates is well documented and deeply troubling.
Turning a 31 percent chronic absenteeism rate into a 21.79 percent rate is not just a statistical win. It represents real students — kids who were previously missing too much school — now showing up with more regularity. Those kids are getting more instruction, building stronger relationships with teachers, staying more connected to their academic progress, and maintaining better odds of long-term success. The ripple effects of that shift will be felt for years.
The Work Is Not Done
To their credit, district leaders were careful not to declare victory and move on. Hemlock Public School District was direct about the fact that work remains. A chronic absenteeism rate of 21.79 percent is meaningfully better than 31 percent, but it still means that roughly one in five students is missing too much school. That is not a finished job — it is an encouraging start that needs to be built upon.
The district has committed to maintaining its focus on proactive communication, family partnership, and student engagement as the year continues. The infrastructure they have built — the early identification systems, the family outreach processes, the classroom culture investments — needs to be sustained and refined, not scaled back because early results look good.
That kind of institutional discipline is harder than it sounds. When a strategy produces early wins, there is always a temptation to declare the problem solved and redirect attention elsewhere. The best school districts resist that temptation, and Hemlock appears to understand that the progress they have made is a foundation, not a finish line.
The broader conversation about school performance and student outcomes across Michigan’s Thumb region continues to evolve. The Bad Axe Public Schools superintendent evaluation recently highlighted the value of stable, committed leadership in producing consistent outcomes — a theme that runs directly parallel to what Hemlock has accomplished through sustained, focused effort over the past year. And the ongoing challenges facing Deckerville Community Schools as they navigate budget pressures serve as a reminder that strong outcomes in education require not just good strategy but adequate resources and community support to execute them.
For educators and school administrators looking to understand the research behind chronic absenteeism reduction strategies, Attendance Works is the leading national nonprofit focused specifically on this issue and offers tools, data, and frameworks that align closely with the approach Hemlock has taken. And for Michigan-specific data on chronic absenteeism trends and how districts across the state compare, the Michigan Department of Education’s accountability resources provide publicly accessible information on school and district performance metrics statewide.
