Mountain View School District

Mountain View School District: One system, eight schools, two years of attendance gains

Location

El Monte, CA

Type

District of 8 schools, TK-8

Students

4,700 students

A tracking tool that became something more

When Mountain View School District first piloted ParentSquare Attendance Plus in spring 2025, the goal was straightforward: bring eight schools into a single, shared attendance system. Each school had its own spreadsheets, its own processes, and its own way of recording absences. The data didn’t match and was cumbersome to organize.

A year later, attendance has increased by 2 percentage points. But the deeper story is how the work gets done. Attendance clerks no longer operate in isolation. Principals, community school leads, community liaisons, and health clerks now share a single line of sight on every at-risk student. And families are hearing a different tone—not just compliance notices, but proactive, empathetic messages when students show up or improve.

From fragmented processes to one system

Before Attendance Plus, Mountain View School District ran attendance through their student information system (SIS), supplemented by a third-party product. But the real tracking happened at school sites via spreadsheets, emails, and handwritten notes. When a clerk transferred campuses, they had to learn a completely different process. When Diego Reyes, the district’s Student and Family Support Services Technician, needed to pull data, he reconciled information from multiple sources, which was time consuming and inaccurate.

The day-to-day reality for clerks was repetitive: open the SIS, mark a student absent, select a reason, move on. Students slipped through the cracks because staff weren’t noticing when someone moved from green (great) to yellow (at-risk) to orange (chronically absent) on the tier system.

“Attendance started to become more of a mundane task than a proactive practice. Students could slip through the cracks because we weren’t realizing, oh, this student is now moving up to yellow, now they’re moving up to orange,” said Reyes. 

Attendance Plus changed that. Every school now works in the same system, logs interventions the same way, and pulls the same reports. The tiered visualization shifted clerk behavior from data entry to pattern recognition. When a yellow bar grows by ten or fifteen students, it signals a pattern. “Every absence has a reason,” explained Dr. Mercedes Gómez, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services. “We needed a way to see those patterns, respond quickly, and make sure families felt supported—not judged.”

The platform also gives clerks a printable record of every contact with a family. With a .CSV export in hand, a clerk walking into a family meeting has documentation, not just memory. “Our clerks are supported more than ever before when they meet with families. All attendance communications are documented and accessible in a few clicks,” said Dr. Gómez

Using the ParentSquare Attendance Team Blueprint

Mountain View started the 2024–25 school year with a small attendance team. As the year progressed, the district added community liaisons, health clerks, and building coordinators who weren’t deeply familiar with School Attendance Review Teams (SART), School Attendance Review Boards (SARB), and truancy processes, so Reyes was asked to prepare staff training. Rather than build from scratch, he turned to the ParentSquare Attendance Team Blueprint.

That decision mattered beyond the immediate training. California Education Code 48326 requires all schools to have formal attendance teams in place beginning summer 2026. Since Mountain View was already structuring its team around the Blueprint, the district arrived at the mandate ready, not racing.

From reactive to proactive: Building a network of support

One of the clearest cultural shifts has been the move toward celebratory outreach. Principals began sending positive ParentSquare messages to families whose students were attending consistently or showing improvement. Some families called the office to thank their school. Students who had been absent told staff they came to school specifically so they could receive one of the messages.

The platform didn’t change attendance on its own. What changed was that staff had a fast, low-friction way to send a positive message at the moment it was most likely to land.

More importantly, attendance is no longer one person’s job. Now data, communication history, and intervention logs live in one place, and multiple staff members can support the same student without duplicating work.

“Now it is not just on the attendance clerk to improve attendance. You have the principal, the community school lead, the community liaison, even health clerks involved,” said Reyes. “Now you have a village behind a student, not just an individual who is hounding you down because you are not coming to school.”

That shift changes how families experience outreach. Instead of one staff member calling about absences, parents hear from a coordinated team. The message families take away, Reyes notes, is that several adults at their child’s school are paying attention because they care.

What’s next? Pushing toward 98% attendance

Mountain View’s attendance goal is 98% districtwide. A 2-percentage-point improvement across 4,700 students represents a meaningful number of additional days of instruction. The next phase, Reyes says, is directing more attention toward students in the red tier—those already chronically absent—now that the foundational structure is in place.

Seeing what’s possible with ParentSquare Attendance Plus

Mountain View’s progress came from a sequence of decisions other districts can replicate:

For Mountain View, Attendance Plus is no longer “the new tool,” it’s the operating system underneath the district’s attendance work—and the foundation for the team-based model California will require by 2026. “Now there is a team where we can work together. ParentSquare has made every day a lot easier, so it gives staff a bit more flexibility to help out in the front office,” said Reyes.