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Peabody College’s commitment to the Nashville community provides students with unparalleled opportunities for impact through engagement in internship and research opportunities. But what does this look like in practice? Emily Waechtler, an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University, shares how she helped MNPS through her internship experience and research assistant position with NashvillePeer. Carol Brown, Director of Attendance Services, describes how this research informed adjustments to MNPS’s strategies for addressing chronic absenteeism.
Emily Waechtler, Undergraduate Research Assistant
Student chronic absenteeism has become an increasingly important focus for districts in recent years, reaching an all-time high during the 2021–2022 school year as students returned to in-person learning after the pandemic. Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) is no exception. In 2024, 24% of students across Nashville were chronically absent which is defined as missing 10% or more of school. Students experiencing homelessness are overrepresented in this statistic.
Throughout the 2024-25 school year, I engaged in a capstone internship during my senior year at Vanderbilt University with the Homeless Education Resource Office (HERO) at MNPS. In partnership with MNPS schools, the HERO team supports students in the district struggling with housing including providing school clothes and transportation and helping students access public education. As part of this internship and in collaboration with Catherine Knowles, the Director of Special Populations at MNPS, I examined chronic absenteeism across students served by HERO using a mixed methods approach.
To learn more about chronic absenteeism within the HERO program, I first examined student attendance records of those served by HERO and the attendance supports students received while enrolled in the HERO program through each student’s Attendance Intervention Plan (AIP). AIPs are an intervention required by MNPS’ progressive attendance strategy (the district’s overarching plan to support strong attendance in coordinating with state law) to be created after students have missed seven days of school. As part of the process, the Attendance Lead at the student’s school meets with the student and a parent or guardian to build a support plan for the student. The Attendance Lead documents the plan and identifies the barriers that keep the student from attending school and how the family, school, and student will work to reduce those barriers. This ultimately becomes the student’s AIP.
Examining the attendance records illuminated key implementation challenges in the system. Throughout my semester, I collected information on the attendance supports and AIPs of 126 students served by HERO. Of these students, all of whom qualified for AIPs and many attendance supports, only 25% had AIPs created for them. This gap and other observations I had while reading the AIPs informed the subsequent conversations I conducted with those working in attendance around the district.
After my initial examination of student attendance and student AIPs of those served by the HERO program, I conducted 10 follow up interviews with MNPS leaders to learn more about chronic absenteeism in the district. These interviews included seven Attendance Leads at schools (five from elementary schools, one from a middle school, one from a high school), one Community in Schools representative at an elementary school, the Magistrate at Metro Student Attendance Centers (MSAC), as well as the MSAC compliance officer. I additionally observed two Multi-Tiered Support System (MTSS) meetings and a morning of court sessions at MSAC.
Going into these interviews, I had several guiding questions generally centered around the barriers that homeless students experience in attending school and, more broadly, the district’s implementation of the Progressive Attendance Strategy. I spoke primarily with Attendance Leads, who are the staff designated to lead and delegate attendance efforts and ensure the Progressive Attendance Strategy is implemented with fidelity at their school. These Attendance Leads hold different primary roles: school counselor, social worker, secretary, and family involvement specialist. I asked all Attendance Leads about their capacity, their belief in the ability for the Progressive Attendance Strategy to work, their knowledge of the barriers, and their ability to intervene. Out of the seven Attendance Leads I interviewed, only one reported feeling supported and having the time to complete the plan from the district as intended. The other six I interviewed reported struggling to complete the plan with fidelity.
In the interview with the one Attendance Lead who reported feeling supported in their role to implement the district’s Progressive Attendance Strategy, I learned that their primary responsibility was working on attendance. All the other Attendance Leads I spoke with were attempting to balance their hefty duties of being Attendance Leads with other roles they were hired for, such as serving as the school’s counselor or social worker. Some were even working outside of their paid hours to reach families when they noticed the working parents weren’t responding to their calls until after 5 pm.
Part of the progressive attendance strategy calls for Attendance Leads to delegate some of the responsibilities to other administrators at the school recognizing that implementing the plans with fidelity is too much for one person to manage. This was happening successfully at some of the schools I observed, but at others, I saw firsthand how, in a busy school with so many responsibilities held across many people, delegating just wasn’t possible. At one of the MTSS meetings I observed, school leaders discussed the progress of the attendance procedures and stated that they were so backed up that only 29 of the 82 AIPs needed were completed. During this meeting, the Attendance Lead and Truancy Compliance Officer addressed the gap and showed that the Attendance Lead had completed their third of assigned AIPs, but others, who were delegated the other two-thirds of the plans, had not completed any. To this, another administrator at the meeting said, “I’ve got a million things going on, I don’t know when I’m going to get my plans done.” Later on in the meeting, when overwhelmed by the degree their school was behind with the AIPs, the administrator said, “It’s like trying to hit a moving train, we’re never going to catch up.”
In the end, the hopeful feedback I got from the Attendance Leads I spoke to was that they all truly believed in the ability of the progressive attendance strategy to work to support chronically absent Nashville students and get them back into the classroom. The question is how to do so, which is a central research area for NashvillePeer’s Student Absenteeism Working Group. My internship supervisor, Catherine Knowles, works alongside other practitioners within MNPS and researchers from Vanderbilt University within the Working Group and they are seeking to understand the barriers student face in attending school and how the district can intervene to best support these students.
When I began collecting data for my capstone project in the fall of 2024, I also started attending Working Group meetings and sharing what I was finding about students served by HERO and chronic absenteeism policies within MNPS more broadly. Through NashvillePeer, we are able to tackle similar questions to what I was studying in a much more comprehensive way. The Working Group members collaborate closely to investigate the root causes of chronic absenteeism within the district and steps the district can take to address those root causes. By addressing both formulation and implementation across levels, the study aims to provide actionable insights that can improve attendance interventions and student supports district wide. With MNPS leaders and VU researchers working side-by-side, they are examining this problem in practice at each level, beginning with the district, then at the school level, and finally at the student and family level. Through the partnership and continued research on this critical topic, we hope to not only understand more about why students are missing school but find real solutions that the district can implement across its schools to increase attendance and lower chronic absenteeism rates.
Carol Brown, Director of Attendance Services
Adhering to the legal process and documenting the interventions is an enormous lift for Attendance Leads who also often hold other roles within their school and are balancing multiple responsibilities. The value school teams place on building authentic relationships and acting early to prevent absenteeism does not go unnoticed. That’s why Attendance Services is committed to streamlining the documentation process—reducing the burden so teams can continue focusing on what matters most: supporting students and families with high-impact strategies.
MNPS is actively working on ways to lighten load of Attendance Leads by streamlining the required documentation of interventions for chronically absent and truant students through a new district dashboard. The dashboard will allow users to move seamlessly through the documentation process by automating previously provided responses to required components of the district’s progressive attendance intervention procedures. Further, the district’s attendance office is researching ways to better utilize AI tools that could help make the documentation process more efficient and piloting a partnership with EveryDay Labs to better automate communications with families, such as meeting reminders.
At MNPS, school-level attendance teams work tirelessly to support students and families through meaningful, timely interventions. This dedication has contributed to the district’s success in improving overall attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism over the past three years—a significant achievement for an urban district serving more than 80,000 students.
Thank you to the NashvillePeer Student Absenteeism Working Group for its contributions to this post.
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