Fighting Chronic Absence during Attendance Awareness Month
Campaigns, Awareness, In Real Life
This September marks the fourth annual Attendance Awareness Month (AAM) campaign, an opportunity to rally the community, youth advocates, policymakers, volunteers, funders and supporters around the importance of attendance and its role in academic achievement! MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership (MENTOR) is proud to continue to serve as an AAM convening partner along with a diverse group of national organizations.
Studies of formal mentoring programs have shown:
- Students who meet regularly with their mentors are 52 percent less likely than their peers to skip a day of school.
- Students who meet regularly with their mentors are 37 percent less likely than their peers to skip a class.
- Students at-risk for not graduating were 36 percent more likely to aspire to enroll in and graduate from college if they had a mentor.
- Youth who had a mentor growing up are 55 percent more likely to later be enrolled in college
To amplify this important message, MENTOR has worked with the campaign organizers to designate the week of September 19, 2016, as Mentoring In Real Life & Attendance Week! We have developed an online engagement toolkit with mentoring-specific social media messages and graphics to help amplify the message that quality mentoring can be instrumental to attendance and academic success. Download this resource and join the conversation! And don’t forget to join us for our Mentoring In Real Life & Attendance Week Twitter chat Wednesday, September 21 at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT.
By participating in Mentoring In Real Life & Attendance Week you can:
- Increase awareness about how quality mentoring can be leveraged as a strategy to improve attendance and thereby improve academic achievement.
- Reach new audiences tracking issues related to education, academic achievement and dropout and graduation rates.
- Engage current audiences with mentoring-specific content tied to a broader, timely campaign.
The Attendance Awareness Month campaign is spearheaded by Attendance Works, a national and state initiative that promotes better policy and practice around school attendance. You can learn more about how to play an important role in improving school attendance all year-round on their official website.