A Shared Approach to Attendance: What’s New in Attendance Plus

As districts head into another year, improving attendance remains an important priority. But your attendance staff can’t do it alone. While school attendance staff may have access to data and interventions conducted, improving attendance takes a village, including families who can share what’s happening at home and teachers who can provide day-to-day context. 

For the 2026–2027 school year, ParentSquare Attendance Plus is making it easier for everyone to play their part. New capabilities give teachers and families a more active role in attendance, automate more of the administrative work for staff, and provide deeper insights into attendance patterns. 

Together, these updates help schools bring the right people and information into the attendance process—without adding more work or another system to manage.

Bring teachers and families into the process

Teachers are often among the first to notice a pattern in student attendance, but they don’t always have a way to act on it. Now, teachers using Attendance Plus can view attendance trends for students on their rosters without going through the attendance office, with the ability to add notes and message families.

Families will soon be able to see their students’ attendance information right on ParentSquare, in the same place they already look for school updates, and report absences themselves in just a few taps. And because parent absence reporting lets families report absences before they occur, schools can better prepare for student absences and support earlier conversations about accumulating absences.

Automate manual attendance tasks

Every hour an attendance coordinator spends tracking who crossed a threshold, printing letters, or updating a spreadsheet is an hour they’re losing to manual tasks that could be automated instead.

With new automated workflows in Attendance Plus, districts can now automatically send attendance letters and direct messages based on the conditions that they set, including excused or unexcused absences and missed periods. Communications can also be scheduled to send automatically on a selected weekly day and time.

Get a period-level view of student attendance

Daily attendance data shows schools whether a student was present at some point in the day, but it doesn’t always represent the full picture: A student marked present in the morning can still miss two class periods by the end of the day.

Attendance Plus now provides more detailed attendance information, including period absences, half-day absences, and tardies. Period and class-level insights can help schools identify patterns that might otherwise be missed with daily attendance, especially in middle and high schools, where students move between classes throughout the day.

Keep attendance outreach organized and accessible

Attendance Plus will include two more updates this fall to help districts build documentation and compliance requirements into everyday attendance workflows.

First, every automated attendance letter, direct message, and intervention step will be logged in each student’s Attendance Plus record, giving your attendance team a comprehensive record of outreach without having to manually document every action.

Districts will also be able to send translated attendance letters and exclude individual students from automated communications when appropriate, such as students on medical leave or those whose circumstances call for a different approach.

Built into ParentSquare

Attendance improvement is a shared effort, but that doesn’t mean everyone has the same role to play. The latest Attendance Plus updates are designed around those different needs, making it easier for everyone to contribute to better attendance in the ways they’re best positioned to. 

And because ParentSquare Attendance Plus is built into the same platform schools already use for family communication, attendance outreach can be part of a broader, ongoing connection between school and home.

If your district already uses ParentSquare, talk with your customer success manager about adding Attendance Plus to support your attendance strategy this year. If you’re new to ParentSquare, request a demo to see how it works.