Finding Students Before They Fall Through the Cracks

Schools have more student data than ever before. Attendance rates, grades, behavior referrals, assessment results, and credit accumulation can all tell us something about how a student is doing.

But identifying a problem is not the same as solving it.

In the final conversation of our attendance series, longtime educator and Michigan Department of Education EWIMS lead Bersheril Bailey shared a story that illustrates the difference.

As a high school administrator, Bailey once had a 17-year-old student walk into her office carrying a dropout slip. When she pulled up his records, she discovered that after three years of high school, he had earned only three credits. As their conversation continued, the student eventually revealed something even more troubling: he could not read.

Bailey was left with a difficult question: How does something like that happen?

Unfortunately, students can spend years in schools while warning signs accumulate around them. A failed course here. Increasing absences there. A behavior concern. Another missed assignment. Each piece of information exists somewhere, but without a system for bringing those pieces together, a student can slowly drift further from success.

That is the problem the Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System (EWIMS) is designed to address.

Bailey describes EWIMS as an evidence-based, seven-step process that helps schools identify students who are off track, understand why they are struggling, select appropriate interventions, and monitor whether those interventions are actually working.

That last piece matters.

Bailey reflected on student-support teams from earlier in her career that would identify a struggling student, discuss possible solutions, and then move on to the next student. What was often missing was the return trip: Did we actually implement what we said we would? Did it work? Is the student doing better?

EWIMS pushes schools toward a different cycle: identify, understand, intervene, monitor, and adjust.

This approach also represents an important shift in how schools think about attendance.

Bailey remembers earlier approaches that relied heavily on consequences. If students understood what would happen when they missed too many days, the thinking went, surely they would start attending. At one point, students who missed ten days automatically failed a course. The approach was clear and punitive.

It also didn't work.

A better approach asks what is underneath the absence.

One student may lack transportation. Another may be avoiding school because of bullying. Another may need an adult who notices when they arrive each morning. Bailey points to strategies such as Check-In/Check-Out and mentoring because they create something remarkably simple but powerful: a student knows someone is expecting them.

As Bailey explains, students need to know there is somebody who cares—and somebody who will notice when they aren't there.

Perhaps that is the lesson that connects our entire attendance series.

Attendance data should be a flashlight, not a hammer.

The purpose is not simply to identify which students or families have failed to meet an expectation. The purpose is to illuminate where students are struggling early enough for schools, families, and communities to respond.

Because the most important question isn't simply, “Who is absent?”

It is: “What is this information telling us this student needs—and what are we going to do about it?”