Attendance Awareness Month
Campaigns, The Mentoring Effect, Awareness
September 2015
This September marks the third a
nnual Attendance Awareness Month campaign —an opportunity to rally your community, advocates, policymakers, volunteers, funders and supporters around the importance of attendance and its role in academic achievement! To support the goal of increased interest and engagement in school, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership has worked with the campaign organizers to designate the week of September 14, 2015, as Mentoring Effect & Attendance Week!
We have released a promotional toolkit with mentoring-specific social media messages, graphics and more for all campaign convening partners, collaborating partners and supporters to help amplify our message that quality mentoring can be instrumental to attendance and academic success. Download this resource and join the conversation this September!
On September 16 we held our “Attendance & Mentoring Effect” Twitter chat with Attendance Works! MENTOR’s Director of Knoweldge Management, Mike Garringer, and Attendance Works! Director, Hedy Chang, answered questions and engaged in a dialogue on mentoring’s impact in promoting academic success and encouraging youth to attend school every day. You can view the chat Storify online now.
Mentoring and Increasing Student Attendance
We know through MENTOR’s The Mentoring Effect report and America’s Promise Alliance’s Don’t Call Them Dropouts report that mentoring is proven to help keep students connected to school. Absences – excused and unexcused – add up, resulting in too much time lost in the classroom. In fact, missing just 10% of the school year, just 18 days or two to three days per month, in the early grades can leave many students struggling throughout elementary school. By 6th grade, missing that much school is strongly linked to course failure and even eventual dropout. Every school day counts and everyone can make a difference: educators, afterschool programs, businesses, parents and mentors.
For example, studies of formal mentoring programs have shown:
- Students who meet regularly with their mentors are 52% less likely than their peers to skip a day of school.
- Students who meet regularly with their mentors are 37% less likely than their peers to skip a class.
- Students at-risk for not graduating were 36% more likely to aspire to enroll in and graduate from college if they had a mentor.
The Attendance Awarness Month campaign is spearheaded by Attendance Works, a national and state initiative that promotes better policy and practice around school attendance, and America’s Promise Alliance, Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Points of Light and United Way Worldwide and is supported by a growing list of other organizations. MENTOR is proud to join the Afterschool Alliance, Big Brothers Big Sisters, City Year, The Council for a Strong America, No Kid Hungry, FamilyWize and a diverse range of other organizations as a collaborating partner of Attendance Awareness Month.