SALAMANCA — Showing up is half the battle, and area school districts continue to fight that battle with students as the new school year quickly approaches.

Concerns with student attendance — or lack thereof — in recent years have been a common topic among school administrators and boards of education. Looking to share past practices and generate ideas on how to boost attendance rates, officials from several Cattaraugus County schools met Monday morning at Salamanca High School for a brainstorming forum.

Steve Brundage, attendance officer at Salamanca schools, said the idea to have local districts meet to discuss attendance came about after seeing webinars from districts in large cities with tens of thousands of students and wondering what they have in common with districts from the Southern Tier.

“I wanted to have a dialogue and see what you folks are seeing and see if maybe we could work together and have a unified front,” Brundage told the attendees gathered in the high school’s Large Group Instruction (LGI) room.

Students are expected to attend a minimum of 90% of the school days, missing no more than 10% of the 180-day school year, or 18 unexcused absences. Brundage said some students still have the mentality from the COVID-19 pandemic that they don’t need to be in the building to get their assignments done.

“They figured out they don’t need to be physically present to do well — we have some students with bad attendance who have good grades,” he said. “But we all know if you miss two days, it takes you three weeks to catch up.”

Brundage said Salamanca has tried both punitive approaches — such as detention after three tardies — and positive reinforcements — such as ice cream sundaes for those with exemplary attendance.

Aaron Miller, Title VI Project Director, said the Seneca Nation is also seeing prevalent attendance issues among indigenous students and families. He said Title VI is looking for ways to address the chronic absenteeism that is a pattern in the same families.

“I’m grateful that I’ll be able to report to our indigenous parent committee that this is going on,” Miller said of Monday’s forum. “I’d love to see it happen more than annually, whether it’s a monthly or bi-monthly.”

Chris Krantz, retired principal of Elmira and Jamestown schools, said his districts had tried many approaches over the years, some of which would work for a while but not forever. He said the two strategies that had the best effect were investing in personnel who can reach out to families and follow up with kids who are regularly absent, and telling the students the importance of attendance consistently and often — from including it in morning announcements and at every assembly or pep rally to posters on the walls.

“You have to preach it. You can’t mention it once,” he said. “Every time you have an opportunity, you have to talk about the importance of attendance.”

Officials from Gowanda Central School said they talked with many of their secondary level students about what reasons that keep them from coming to school, and lack of student engagement in some classes. Looking at what classes tended to have the most absences, they looked at what could be done to make those classes more exciting and interesting for students.

“We brought in some project-based learning and assessment, and we looked at our grading policy,” one Gowanda official said. “A lot of kids shared they don’t need to physically sit in the class to do well, and so much of the class is on the laptop.”

Transporting students to the buildings in the morning was another common trend among districts. Olean officials said they looked into having a passenger van to help pick up students who didn’t have other transportation, but it was a violation of the district’s transportation policy. They also noted that some younger chronically absent students have buses available, but they don’t take them.

Jerry Trietley, a retired Olean school employee who works security at Salamanca schools, suggested bringing local state representatives into the conversation and seeing what could be done at the state level to help combat the attendance issues.

“I think the state has to start putting some teeth behind what they want to see happen, and if they want higher graduation rates, we need kids to be in school,” he said.

Also participating in the forum with the various district officials were some Salamanca students, who offered their observations and ideas. One student said the supportive staff who are welcoming to the students make them want to come to school.

“If you have some staff who aren’t really as welcoming, it discourages me from wanting to come to school,” he said.

Another student said having extracurricular activities available to them, such as sports, helps a lot of students come to school because they know they won’t be able to participate in that club or sport if they aren’t in school for their classes. One student also mentioned having engaging lessons like is available through CA BOCES.

“Going to BOCES is a lot more hands-on rather than sitting in a classroom all day, so missing that can really put me behind,” he said.

Throughout the forum, the attendees also mentioned ideas such as end-of-semester and end-of-year prizes for students with excellent attendance; the importance of forming partnerships and communicating with families and the community as a whole; exploring options with technology to send out reminders to students and families; flex schedules that break up the week; and the impact the state’s new smartphone policy could have on attendance.