Attendance USA Conference
The Office of School Partnerships is proud to co-sponsor the 2025 Attendance Conference on May 20–21, 2025 at the Marriott East Hotel in Indianapolis. The conference will serve as the official and national launch of Attendance USA, brainchild of Indiana-based Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, national and international scholar on attendance and absenteeism.
Attendance USA has one task: Unite to attack attendance. It aims to join attendance players, researchers, and organizations to solve the attendance problem rather than let our silos be the problem.
Jamie Merisotis, CEO of Lumina Foundation and more than 20 U.S. scholars, leaders, and policy experts representing institutions such as Harvard, IU, Columbia, UT Austin, John Hopkins, Ohio State, University of Tennessee, UC Davis, Butler, and others will collaborate to offer a path forward.
Learn more about the conference and register by following this link.
Q&A with Carolyn Gentle-Genitty and James Brown
We sat down with two of the Attendance USA speakers to get a sense of the scope of the issue and the difference this conference will make.
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty is the professor and founding Dean of the Founder’s College at Butler University. She is an internationally renowned leader and scholar in truancy, absenteeism, and social bonding.
James Brown is associate professor in the IU School of Social Work. His scholarship has examined school bullying from the perspective of multiple stakeholders.
Q: What makes student attendance and absenteeism a critical issue today?
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: Our schools provide crucial services beyond academics—healthcare, nutrition, socio-emotional support—thus making absenteeism especially detrimental. When education is divorced from care, students become vulnerable, diminishing both their immediate and long-term potential, ultimately impacting the country’s future workforce and economic health. Unsupervised children are correlated with increased daytime crime, future delinquency, and diminished workforce preparedness making absenteeism an important topic we must address.
Q: What are the underlying causes of absenteeism?
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: Root causes are complex, ranging from poverty and developmental health issues to broader structural factors, such as the U.S. economic model requiring children to be in school during parents’ working hours. Transportation challenges or parental job instability directly exacerbate student absences, highlighting the essential yet under-recognized caregiving role of schools. The economic structure here in the U.S. compared to some international systems often fails to support children adequately, inadvertently increasing absenteeism.
Q: How do you define student absenteeism?
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: It’s critical to clarify that attendance is purely a numerical tally—present or absent—while absenteeism encompasses reasons behind those absences. Reasons could range from transportation issues to sickness, and distinguishing these reasons provides crucial context. Thus, so-called chronic absenteeism is a problematic term as it lumps positive reasons for absence (e.g., medical appointments, college visits) with negative ones, obscuring the true nature and context of student absences.
Q: Where does bullying fit within this framework?
James Brown: Bullying creates environments students wish to avoid, drastically affecting their willingness and ability to engage in school activities consistently. Bullying involves intentional harm, a power imbalance, and repeated occurrences or credible threats.
Bullying behaviors should be viewed as indicators of potential mental health issues rather than merely disciplinary problems. Bullies often exhibit signs of deeper psychological distress, including a higher likelihood of future antisocial behavior, criminality, and interpersonal relationship struggles.
Q: What are the downstream effects of absenteeism on individuals and society?
James Brown: The social impact is profound—students disengaged from school are more likely to engage in daytime crime, experience future delinquency, and struggle with employment. Economically, absenteeism results in billions of dollars in lost productivity due to diminished workforce readiness and ongoing mental health challenges carried into adulthood by both victims and bullies.
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: When children miss school, they lose more than just classroom instruction—they lose access to vital resources such as healthcare, mental health support, nutrition, and safe spaces for socialization. This separation of care from education leaves students vulnerable and compromises their developmental trajectory, ultimately undermining economic growth and societal cohesion.
In the long run, as James alludes to, absenteeism erodes the talent pipeline essential for economic stability and innovation. If children do not receive the consistent care and education they need, the nation’s capacity to compete economically and maintain healthy communities diminishes. It is critically important to address absenteeism comprehensively, not merely as an educational concern, but as a fundamental national economic and societal imperative.
Q: What effective interventions have you found?
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: In Indiana, we've implemented evidence-based interventions and socio-emotional support through partnerships like the Fight for Life Foundation. Advanced analytics identified peer relationships as a crucial predictor of absenteeism, allowing targeted, supportive interventions that significantly reduced absences.
James Brown: We've also seen success with collaborative strategies involving students, parents, teachers, and mental health professionals. The Responsibility Thinking Process is particularly effective, helping students identified as bullies understand the emotional consequences of their actions, encouraging empathy and behavioral change.
Q: How important is family involvement in addressing absenteeism?
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: Our collaborative research strongly indicates that family stability is the leading measure of success for student attendance. When students have a consistent and stable set of caregivers guiding their development within a single household, we see a significant reduction—or nearly complete disappearance—in attendance issues. The conference aims to solidify family stability as our common measurement goal, helping everyone move together towards clearly defined outcomes.
James Brown: Parents of both victims and bullies must be engaged to address underlying issues effectively. Viewing bullying as an opportunity for socio-emotional growth rather than merely a disciplinary matter can profoundly impact student behavior and attendance outcomes.
Q: What outcomes do you expect from the Attendance USA Conference?
Carolyn Gentle-Genitty: This conference is important to frame our direction clearly. It’s not just a conference; it's really the launch of something historical. The goal of Attendance USA is to create the first entity that brings scholars, practitioners, and partners together, providing a unified voice and cohesive understanding of attendance issues domestically. The conference aims to unify the voice of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers across the U.S.
A tangible outcome of the conference will be a manifesto on attendance and absenteeism. This document will outline key practices and recommended actions for individuals working in this field. We have gathered scholars, researchers, and practitioners from across the U.S. who will collectively contribute to crafting this manifesto, to be shared publicly on May 21.