ResolvED Insights

Ideas for Resolving Conflict, Strengthening Relationships & Building Better Systems

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Insight

What happens after the parent workshop ends?

We spend a lot of time and resources bringing parents into workshops, handing out info sheets, and trying to spark deeper engagement in their kids' education.

But what happens the next day? Parents go right back to the juggle of work, childcare, and everyday life. Without a way to actually practice what they’ve learned, most of that information just fades.

That’s why I built the ResolvED Family Engagement & Parent Leadership Academy. Instead of a one-off training, parents learn in short, flexible bursts so they can actually apply these concepts to real situations in their schools.

More importantly, we don't just track who showed up. We measure what actually shifts—from parent confidence and leadership to real family influence at the school site.

Because attendance isn't the finish line. It's the starting point.
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Insight 

Attendance Is a Family Engagement Problem Too

Attendance Is a Family Engagement Problem Too
We talk about attendance a lot.
Too often, the conversation sounds like this:
“Why isn't your child coming to school?”
But that's not always the question we need to ask.
A family might say:
  • “The bus.”
  • “My work schedule.”
  • “My child won't get up.”
  • “We don't have a car.”
And those answers can all be true.
But they may not be the whole story.
The research on attendance and family engagement is telling us something important: attendance isn't simply a matter of whether parents care about school. The relationship between families and schools matters.
A 2026 systematic review of 37 studies on family-school partnerships and attendance found that communication was one of the most common elements in interventions associated with improved attendance. It also found that stronger attendance efforts tend to involve supportive family-school relationships, shared expectations, and families having a meaningful role in addressing barriers.
Another study found that teacher communication practices were associated with 18% lower odds of chronic absenteeism among children in public pre-K.
And this isn't just about having more communication.
It's about having better communication.
Research from the American Institutes for Research found that families prefer attendance messages that are simple, informative, accessible, and not judgmental.
Even relatively simple communication can make a difference. An IES-funded randomized evaluation involving approximately 26,000 elementary students found that adaptive text messaging reduced chronic absence, with reductions of 2–7 percentage points depending on the messaging strategy and student group.
So what does this mean for schools?
It means we probably shouldn't start with:
“How do we get parents to make their children come to school?”
We should also ask:
  • “Do families know what support exists?”
  • “Can they easily find it?”
  • “Do they feel comfortable asking for help?”
  • “Do we understand what's actually getting in the way?”
  • “Are we hearing from the families who aren't showing up to our meetings?”
That last question matters.
Because a school can have parent engagement activities and still not actually be engaging many of the families experiencing the greatest barriers.
A coffee meeting at 9:00 a.m. isn't necessarily family engagement for a parent who starts work at 7.
An attendance letter isn't necessarily support for a family that doesn't know who to call.
And telling a parent that attendance matters doesn't solve a problem the school hasn't taken the time to understand.
So how do we fix it?
Not with one more program.
Not with one more flyer.
And not by putting all of the responsibility on families.
We need a system for listening, learning, acting, and reporting back.
That means schools can:
1. FIND IT
Look at attendance patterns and ask families what is actually happening underneath the numbers.
2. ASK IT
Make it easy for families to ask questions and find out what support already exists.
3. TRY IT
Work with families to test small, realistic changes rather than assuming the solution before understanding the problem.
4. CHANGE ONE THING
Use what families tell you to make one concrete change—and then tell families what changed because they spoke up.
This is the idea behind Every Day Matters, the first workshop in the ResolvED Parent Engagement Ecosystem.
Parents aren't being asked to sit through another lecture about why attendance matters.
They're learning how to look underneath the first answer, ask better questions, find out what their school can actually offer, and identify what might need to change.
And schools aren't just getting another attendance activity.
They're getting an opportunity to learn something they may not be able to see from an attendance dashboard alone:
What is actually getting in the way for families?
Because the attendance number tells you what happened.
Family engagement can help you understand why.
And once you understand the why, you have a much better chance of knowing what to do next.
That's the shift:
From “How do we get parents to fix attendance?”
to
“How do we build a school-family partnership that makes regular attendance more possible?”
That's a very different conversation.
And I think it's one schools need to have.