From Silence to Synergy: How Mountain View Changed What Attendance Outreach Means to Families

Mountain View School District faced a challenge many school districts can relate to: too many of its 4,700 students were absent.

District staff were determined to reverse the trend. Attendance teams invested countless hours into family outreach.

“We were making anywhere from 50 to 60 phone calls a day,” said Diego Reyes, Student and Family Services Technician at the district.

But effort didn’t correlate with connection.

“Sometimes, those (calls) weren’t even reaching the families,” Reyes said. “Oftentimes, when we would finally get in contact with families, or we were able to get some sort of response, it was a little bit too late.”

Staff were stretched thin chasing down families who were hard to reach. Meanwhile, many students were moving closer to the “chronically absent” line that no one wanted them to cross.

That’s the tension at the center of our recent webinar, From Silence to Synergy: A Blueprint for Building a District Attendance Culture That Parents Love: How does a district respond when attendance outreach happens, but the message still isn’t landing?

Watch the 30-minute on-demand webinar to hear how Mountain View changed the pattern.

Read on to learn about Mountain View’s attendance outreach challenges and the changes they made that finally delivered results.

Diego Reyes

Student and Family Services Technician

Mountain View School District (CA)

Alex Meis

VP, Attendance Strategy

ParentSquare

Families heard a warning, not an invitation.

Mountain View had a communication problem hiding inside its attendance problem.

Families were getting letters and calls about absences. But some weren’t hearing, “We’re here to help.”

“They were ignoring us, trying to avoid us,” Reyes said. Families saw the outreach as, “We’re in trouble,” not as an invitation to problem-solve with the school.

Language barriers led to misunderstandings.

In Mountain View’s predominantly Latino community, many families received attendance letters in English.

“The parents see a letter in a language that, for the most part, they can’t understand,” Reyes said. “And then, of course, you throw in the caveat that the student might not fully translate it the way it’s supposed to be translated.”

Those language barriers made it difficult for district leaders to gain buy-in from families. Instead of asking for help, many parents simply ignored the outreach.

Many students needed help, not just the obvious ones.

Students with severe attendance issues were already on everyone’s radar. But Reyes realized that another group of students needed attention: those who weren’t chronically absent yet, but were quickly approaching the dividing line.

“Of course, you have your students that are taking priority,” Reyes said. “But the ones right below them, the students teetering between chronic and still in a good sense in attendance, those are the ones that we were losing track on. That’s where we had more and more students falling toward chronic truancy.”

How outreach changes led to a turnaround.

After seeing that their significant efforts still weren’t reducing absence issues, the district’s staff knew they had to change how they were addressing attendance.

A few key efforts sparked positive results:

These changes helped move Mountain View’s attendance data in the right direction. According to Reyes, the district’s attendance rate immediately after the pandemic was 93%-94%. By September 2025, the attendance rate was up over 94% districtwide; at the time of the webinar in May 2026, Reyes estimated the attendance rate to be 96 to 97%.

There was also a remarkable shift in how families responded: parents started calling their schools to report when their students had good attendance. Attendance is now something to celebrate, not just something to explain.

Get the full story in our on-demand webinar.

Watch the on-demand version of the webinar today to hear the specifics on how Mountain View improved attendance. You’ll hear about: