Eagle Mountain-Saginaw Independent School District

Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD: 1.5% attendance lift, $2M funding recouped

Location

Fort Worth, TX (northwest of the city center)

Type

District of 29 schools, K–12

Students

~24,000

When improvement becomes a strategic goal

In Texas, school funding tracks daily attendance as a key funding indicator. Every percentage point gained is revenue recouped. For Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD, a 24,000-student district in northwest Fort Worth, the math was clear: improve attendance by 1%, and the financial impact could reach more than $2 million.

But money wasn’t the only motivator. As Superintendent Dr. Jerry D. Hollingsworth puts it, students learn a whole lot better when they’re in classrooms and seats. Test scores improve when kids show up. Attendance isn’t just a compliance metric, it’s the foundation for everything else the district is trying to accomplish.

Before the district had a dedicated attendance solution, campuses relied on the student information system’s (SIS) limited communication features and a third-party call-out that told families their child was absent, but didn’t ask for feedback, didn’t create a record, and didn’t empower staff to intervene early. The tools available to campus attendance teams weren’t designed for the level of coordination and proactive outreach the district needed.

Kirk Murdock, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw’s Chief Technology Officer, had been with the district for more than two decades. He’d watched attendance tools come and go. He and Matthew LeBlanc, Executive Director of Communications, who joined the district four years ago, knew they needed a better solution.

Closing the data gap and empowering campus teams

Matthew LeBlanc, who leads communications for the district, describes the transformation in three parts: “It closed a huge data gap that [campus teams] were facing. It allowed for effective communication regarding attendance. And it provided them tools and direction of how to do it effectively. It was empowering.”

Before Attendance Plus, truancy notifications and attendance letters were a manual, time-intensive process. Staff had some automated rules set up, but still had to trigger them, approve them, and track responses outside the system. It was consuming hours and leaving gaps.

When Kirk brought Attendance Plus to the campus attendance teams, the response was swift. The tier system (green, yellow, orange, red) aligned with the intervention framework the district had already rolled out, and existing contactability within ParentSquare was high, so staff knew they could reach families. And the platform kept a record of every contact, every intervention, and every message sent. Families respond directly, confirm reasons for absences, or ask for support, all through the same platform they already trusted.

“They got instantly sold, but then when they saw all of the benefits with the attendance record keeping, the data visualization, the notes, the calendar, those were all really impactful for the campuses. Previously, multiple systems were used.” Kirk said.

The calendar graphic, illustrating a student’s attendance, became one of the most-discussed features. Attendance clerks could look at a student’s attendance pattern and immediately see the red days clustered together, or the trend of every Monday and Friday absent for the last two months. That visual shortcut made pattern recognition instant, compared to scrolling through a .CSV file export of dates and codes.

Kirk anticipates this feature will be even more impactful when it rolls out to parents in fall 2026: “When families can access attendance data, just like our staff, that’s going to be a real eye-opener.”

Campus teams also started experimenting with positive outreach, sending messages to students with strong attendance or improvement trends. The feedback from families was immediate and enthusiastic. From the campus perspective, one of the biggest wins was that positive engagement made the harder conversations easier when students did move into higher absenteeism tiers. 

“The positive outreach has really helped our campuses. Where they’ve praised the kids that have been showing up. Campuses are appreciative of the foundation ParentSquare provides, through the communication piece and through Attendance Plus,” Kirk said.

Building a culture where students understand why attendance matters

Matthew noticed something unexpected: students started talking about attendance differently. Not because they were being called out for absences, but because they were understanding why showing up mattered.

“I definitely notice an awareness factor among students of how important it is to show up to school, which gets back to the tool and the messaging from it—both going home, but then also supporting the efforts at school,” said LeBlanc. “To hear students understand why it’s important that they be there really makes a huge difference. There is a culture building among the students  around why it’s important to be in school, which is very encouraging. That was not there last year.”

Parents have also shifted. After the pandemic, many families adopted a mindset that missing one day here or there didn’t matter. The messaging and data visibility from Attendance Plus helped re-educate parents that even missing a little bit of school makes a difference.

The shift became visible at the board level too. Board members—several of whom are still parents with kids in the district—started commenting unprompted in open session about responding to attendance messages through ParentSquare. Kirk and Matthew looked at each other during one meeting, realizing the platform had become part of the subconscious rhythm of how families engage with the district.

“When we do our attendance report to the board every month, board members have said, ‘I’ve responded to my attendance messages in ParentSquare!’ Those were unprovoked, unprompted. It’s becoming part of the subconscious, which is where we needed it to live,” said Kirk. 

Reporting monthly to the board, and staying consistently in the green

Eagle Mountain-Saginaw reports attendance data to the board of education every month. The format tracks attendance improvement week by week, comparing the current year to the prior year. The district’s goal was a minimum of a 1% improvement, but shooting for 2–3%.

For most of the year, the district has been consistently in the green, showing positive month-over-month gains. The two exceptions had explainable reasons: one week included a senior skip day, and another saw a slight dip tied to seasonal illness.

As of May 2026, the district was tracking a 1.5% year-over-year improvement, with projections to reach close to 2% by the end of the school year. For a district of 24,000 students, that translates to an estimated $2 million in recouped funding.

What Eagle Mountain-Saginaw did that other districts can replicate

Eagle Mountain-Saginaw’s success didn’t come from a single feature. It came from alignment between the district’s strategic goals, the tools they gave campus teams, and the high contactability they’d already built through ParentSquare.

Here’s what other districts can learn:

For Eagle Mountain-Saginaw, Attendance Plus gave campus teams a viable tool they’d been empowered to make work. The district had been searching for a while to find something to help with attendance. They found it, and the results showed up in the data, in the culture, and in the budget.