When people talk about attendance, they’re usually talking about 1 of 2 things: students missing school or employees missing work. We tend to treat them as separate challenges but the more I think about it, the more I see different sides of the same issue.
Thriving Schools sits at an interesting intersection. We work to improve student health and well-being, while also partnering with school districts and education agencies that are employers themselves. That vantage point has made something increasingly clear: many of the same conditions that make it difficult for a student to get to school also make it difficult for a parent or caregiver to get to work or fully engage.
That connection becomes easier to see when we look at the experience of a family.
How one absence ripples across school, work, and health
During a stretch of extreme heat, a child wakes up struggling with an asthma flare. A parent stays home from work or rearranges their day, juggling calls to the pediatrician or nurse line between meetings to determine whether the child needs an urgent care visit.
A bus route is delayed or a train line suspends service. The student misses first period. The parent arrives late at work.
A middle schooler begins experiencing anxiety. At first, it’s a few missed days. Then it’s regular visits to the nurse’s office for a stomachache, requests to come home early, and increasing difficulty getting out the door each morning. A parent spends time coordinating care, communicating with the school, and trying to balance their child’s needs with their own work responsibilities.
Different systems see different symptoms
What the school sees? An attendance problem. Health challenges remain the top reason that students miss school. Children with asthma or behavioral health challenges are 2 to 4 times more likely to be chronically absent than their peers.
The employer? A productivity problem. Employee engagement and productivity are closely linked. Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy roughly $10 trillion annually in lost productivity.
And the healthcare system? Perhaps a series of appointments, nurse line calls, and repeat requests for work or school excuse notes.
What the family experiences? One problem.
A single set of circumstances can create consequences across every system a family touches: missed instruction and lost learning time for the student; missed work and reduced focus for the parent; and potentially greater healthcare needs if the underlying issues remain unaddressed.
Families do not experience life in fragments
As a working mom myself, I know firsthand that families don’t experience life in fragments. We don’t navigate school challenges from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and health challenges from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., with work challenges somewhere in between. The realities we face move with us throughout the day. In my experience, that’s where systems can sometimes miss each other. Schools, workplaces, and healthcare often organize separately. Families organize around getting through the day.
Schools have long-tracked attendance because it is closely connected to learning, belonging, and long-term academic outcomes. Employers pay close attention to attendance too, because when people can’t consistently show up and fully engage at work, it affects teams, productivity, and organizational performance.
Sure, the measure matters. But the number alone doesn’t tell us everything about why someone isn’t showing up. Attendance is a vital sign: not a diagnosis, but an observable and actionable signal that tells us to pay more attention.
Because whether absence shows up in a classroom, a workplace, or a pediatric clinic, it may be pointing to the same underlying challenges affecting a family.
Acting earlier on what absence tells us
Through our Attendance as a Vital Sign solution, Thriving Schools is focused on the student side of the equation: helping schools, pediatric care providers, and other community partners recognize absences earlier, better understand the health and social factors contributing to missed school, and connecting students and their families to support before the issues escalate.
Getting students to school isn’t the responsibility of schools alone. It requires healthcare organizations and community partners to recognize what attendance may be telling us and work together to respond. And I think there is a broader question to explore at some point: if attendance can help us better understand what is happening in the lives of students, what might the parallel signals in the workplace tell us about the adults who care for them?
I could talk about this all day, but if you have 45 minutes, I want you to leave with one idea: attendance should not just be an outcome we track; it should be a signal we act on. Hear more on the latest episode of the Health Views podcast, where I joined Elizabeth Cook of Attendance Works and Kaiser Permanente’s Deb Friesen, MD to explore why attendance may be one of the clearest signals we have about what families need to thrive.
