15 years of showing up: What it means for ParentSquare to sponsor the 2026 Attendance Awareness Campaign

By Alexandra Meis, Vice President of Attendance Strategy, ParentSquare

This year, ParentSquare is a proud sponsor of the 2026 Attendance Awareness Campaign, providing support to Attendance Works in the annual initiative it has led since 2013. This work matters more now than ever: six years after the pandemic first disrupted the K-12 community, the national chronic absenteeism rate still hovers around 23%.

But whether we look at data from before, during, or after the pandemic, one thing hasn’t changed: family engagement has a powerful impact on whether a student shows up. For me, sponsoring this campaign feels like more than a good partnership; it feels personal. My path in this field traces back to Attendance Works, and to one person in particular: Hedy Chang, the organization’s CEO, president, and founder. 

I first met Hedy when I was a graduate student at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, working toward my Master of Public Administration. During that time, I also embarked on my journey to start an organization focused on improving attendance by way of family engagement. I remember sitting with Hedy, asking a myriad of questions. Why are districts so focused on truancy and not chronic absenteeism? What about period attendance? Tardiness? We need to know the exact moments a student disengages so we can help. 

At the time, I don’t think I fully understood how rare it was to be in the room with someone who was actively building a field, not just studying one. Hedy and the Attendance Works team weren’t describing attendance work as it existed. They were describing what it could be, and then going out and making change at local and national levels alike. 

Nearly 15 years is long enough to watch an idea move from the margins of education policy to the center of it. It’s long enough for a term like “chronic absence” to go from something you had to explain to something written into state accountability systems. Today, chronic absenteeism is a standard metric. Many districts track it. States report on it. Researchers build on a shared body of evidence about why kids miss school (both unexcused and excused days) and what actually helps bring them back. Hedy and the team at Attendance Works didn’t just study the problem; they gave the field its language, its data infrastructure, and its sense of shared purpose.

What’s always distinguished Attendance Works, beyond Hedy’s leadership, is the discipline behind the mission itself. The organization has built its work around a clear vision: that all students must attend school regularly and participate in learning to reach their full potential. Rather than treating absence as a matter of blame or punishment, Attendance Works has consistently pushed the field toward a problem-solving approach, one grounded in data monitoring, understanding root causes, and building real partnerships between schools, families, and communities. That framework, developed and refined over 15 years, is the reason the field has a shared playbook. 

What I didn’t expect, sitting in a classroom at New York University all those years ago, was where that path would eventually lead. Today, I have the privilege of leading attendance strategy at ParentSquare, working with districts across the country to turn the framework that Attendance Works helped build into daily practice. Through our ParentSquare Attendance Plus platform, we help districts spot emerging attendance concerns early, coordinate interventions across staff, and, most importantly, reach families with something that complements the traditional compliance letter: a positive, caring message. We’ve seen firsthand what the research has long suggested: a message that says “we missed your child today” changes behavior in a way that a truancy notice never will, and districts using Attendance Plus have seen attendance gains of 2% in a single year.

I care deeply about where this field is headed next. As we support the 2026 Attendance Awareness Campaign, I’m grateful for where it started: years of showing up, literally and figuratively, for kids who need someone to notice when they’re not in the room. That work turned an idea into evidence, evidence into policy, and policy into practice that now reaches classrooms across the country. Hedy shifted the narrative, and she did it with persistence and real passion. What Attendance Works has built was never just a metric or a framework, but a field full of people, myself included, who took from that work the simple idea of showing up for kids, in whatever way you can.

Every message ParentSquare sends on behalf of a district, every family that gets reached in a language they understand, every attendance clerk who spends less time on spreadsheets and more time on the student in front of them is one piece of the work Hedy started. There’s still a lot of work ahead. As we keep pushing to improve student engagement and attendance, I’m grateful that Hedy and the Attendance Works team are leading the charge. 

Keep going with us

I’m joining Hedy Chang and Liz Russo, Director of Student Services at Mansfield ISD (TX), to talk about what partnering with families actually looks like in practice. Liz will share how Mansfield reduced chronic absence while strengthening community relationships. I hope you’ll join us for this free webinar. 

Start Strong on Attendance: Partnering with Families to Stay Connected

Thursday, August 27, at 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET

Register