Now that the official Count Day is behind us and we are heading into the second quarter of the 2022-2023 school year, I want to express the importance of daily attendance. Count day determines funding for our staffing and programs, but attendance throughout the school year is one factor that helps determine a student’s academic success. Education research consistently shows that students with higher absenteeism rates have lower scores on annual state tests.

According to a report by Attendance Works, a national non-profit dedicated to reducing chronic absence and promoting student academic success, before the pandemic, eight million students were chronically absent (missing 10% or more of the school year). That number has more than doubled since most schools and districts have returned to in-person learning. Left unaddressed, chronic absences will dramatically increase the number of students struggling with reading, writing, and math and escalate dropout rates. We know that students in our D11 schools with attendance rates greater than 92 percent are three times more likely to meet expected math growth!

As our leadership team and the Board of Education work to build our community's trust, I have shared my desire for central administrators to lean in and work together to support students, school administrators, teachers, and support staff. We will lean in even further to help families get children to school regularly. We will be identifying community partners who support this initiative so they may join in our journey.

To lay the foundation of regularly attending school, D11 starts children with robust early childhood education options as another way to grow the academic success rates of our students. We are very excited about our ever-expanding preschool population. Next week, we will start opening new preschool classrooms, celebrating this expansion with a ribbon cutting at Chipeta Elementary School. We are paving the way to achieve our goal of clearing preschool waiting lists long before the state introduces universal preschool. We shouldn’t have to put a preschooler on a wait list while we face a declining enrollment trend in our school district. These future D11 students highlight that creative thinking centered around the needs of students and the community can turn us into a growing enrollment district!

We know students learn more when they are in school and engaged. We are working hard in partnership with our staff, families, and community partners to get them excited about learning early in their academic journey, keep them engaged throughout their time with us, and connect them to the future of our great city through the workforce, college, and career readiness options.

Respectfully,

Michael Gaal, Superintendent