Attendance Action Center
Administrator Coaching Questions
A quick-reference card for hallway and office conversations. Print it or keep it on your phone.
When a staff member brings an attendance concern
Keep scenarios anonymous
Do not enter student names, student IDs, dates of birth, addresses, parent names, phone numbers, email addresses, or other personally identifying information.
Only enter
Attendance counts, percentages, patterns
Grade or school level
Barriers and interventions
Non-identifying circumstances
Aggregate site information
Decision-support and professional guidance — not a student information system.
When a staff member brings an attendance concern
Ask
- What are you noticing?
- What pattern do you see?
- What does the student say?
- What does the family say?
- What barrier have we identified?
- What did we try?
- Did we actually implement it?
- What happened?
- What worked?
- What are you asking the next team to help solve?
Why these questions
- They move the conversation from absence counts to barriers.
- They surface whether a strategy was real or only intended.
- They make the referral request specific instead of general.
- 'Unknown' is a valid barrier status — it triggers information gathering, not escalation.
What should happen next?
- Close with: who owns the next action, and when do we review it?
- Name who owns the next action, and when it will be reviewed.