Showing Up to Succeed

When students miss school, they miss out – and so do their classmates. And these days, many students are missing out. According to an analysis by FutureEd at Georgetown University, 23.5% of U.S. students were chronically absent in 2023-24. That's down from a peak of 29% during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's still 50% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

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Many factors contribute to this reality. The pandemic changed many people's sense of what it means to show up. Increasingly sophisticated tools for remote learning may leave an impression that attending class in-person is no longer as essential as it may have been in the past. But, absenteeism is a strong predictor of negative outcomes – including lower grades, disengagement, weakened relationships, and even dropping out of school. In short, showing up is a key first step to succeeding in school and beyond.

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At Intellispark, we’re passionate about student success and supporting educators in helping their students to thrive. That starts with giving schools the tools they need to improve attendance so more students attend more regularly. For this reason, after two years of development and testing, we’re pleased to announce the launch of Intellispark Attendance Manager.

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Attendance Manager by Intellispark complements Intellispark Pro or Intellispark Plus with comprehensive attendance data integration, tracking, alerting, and intervention management to help your school maximize attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism. Attendance Manager integrates with your student information system to receive data about attendance and tardies at both the period and daily level. Attendance Manager helps you analyze these data to identify patterns. For example, you can easily see when a student misses the same class repeatedly or when students miss a critical number or percentage of school days within a specified timeframe.  But what makes Attendance Manager a key partner for you and your team isn’t just its ability to help you see trends, but its powerful features for taking action.

Since every school and community is a little different, Attendance Manager allows you to set key indicators of concern that matter to you. When those indicators are met, Attendance Manager can initiate communication with families, alert teachers and counselors, and set tasks for outreach from your school or district attendance team. Attendance Manager takes full advantage of the power of Flags – a core feature of the Intellispark platform – to help you define standard operating procedures for addressing attendance concerns and to document actions your team takes to meet local expectations as well as district and state requirements.

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As we do when we build any major new capabilities in our products, Intellispark worked closely with a group of schools and districts as design partners as we built Attendance Manager. This close partnership with our design partners ensures the product can support important nuances in how data are collected and reported and that we deeply understand what makes the greatest difference for educators as they tackle the important issues of attendance and absenteeism.

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Throughout the 2025-2026 school year, we worked with our design partners to monitor their results. We were gratified to see progress in many schools and absolutely thrilled to celebrate with our friends in West Virginia’s Berkeley Public Schools where the 16 schools using Attendance Manager reported disproportionate success. These schools posted a drop of more than 1.5 percentage points in the rate of chronic absenteeism and a gain of half a percentage point in average daily attendance as of Day 160. This gain translates into literally hundreds of instructional days that would have otherwise been lost.

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As Hal Van Metre, the director of attendance for Berkeley County Schools shared with us, “Intellispark makes it faster and easier to share information with families and staff, keeping everyone informed so students receive support more quickly.” Making sure that support gets to students before a missed class or school day turns into a pattern is a critical strategy for reducing absenteeism.

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With these early successes in Berkeley and other design partner schools, we’re pleased to release Attendance Manager more broadly. If your school is looking for ways to improve attendance – whether you’re starting from a strong base or working to overcome systemic challenges – we look forward to learning more about your needs and discussing how Attendance Manager may help. Contact us to learn more.

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