Overview
The Attendance Assistant turns your school's attendance data into timely, personalized outreach, automatically reaching parents or staff the moment a student gets flagged. Attendance is often the earliest signal of a bigger wellbeing or engagement issue, so catching it quickly matters both for the student and for keeping them enrolled. The assistant is built to surface those patterns early, keep every family interaction on brand, and give your team back the hours they'd otherwise spend on manual outreach.
Getting the most out of it starts before you ever log into the platform. This guide will help your team think through which situations matter most, what tone your families should hear, who should handle escalations, and how much you're ready to automate on day one.
Read through it together, talk it out as a team, and once you're ready to bring it to life, we're here to help!
Why think this through first?
More efficient configuration sessions: once you've thought through your attendance strategy and how you want parent communications to look, setting up the alerts will be quick.
Fewer early misfires: language and timing get real discussion before they ever reach a family.
Team alignment: the attendance office, student support teams, deans, and school leadership are on the same page before any alerts go out.
A natural on-ramp: every question below maps directly to something you'll configure, so nothing here is wasted thinking.
Part 1: What attendance situations actually need outreach?
There are lots of different attendance situations you can configure, but each school is different in terms of what's a priority and when an attendance issue becomes a concern.
Start by thinking through the following questions, which will help guide the alerts we configure later on:
What does your current attendance outreach process look like? What would you change about that process if you could?
At what point do absences become concerning?
Do tardies or early dismissals change how your staff respond, or do they only matter once they're frequent?
Should excused and unexcused absences trigger the same outreach, or does that distinction matter to your team?
Where do most of your current escalations already start? Is there a situation your staff already handles informally that outreach could catch earlier?
Part 2: What would each trigger actually look like?
For each attendance situation, the assistant needs a few specifics. You don't need exact language yet, just a shared sense of what you'd like the alert to look like:
Is this a single check-in, or a way to detect a pattern? Alerts can be used for two distinct purposes. The first is essentially to check in with parents if a student isn't at school, to make sure everything is okay. The second is to flag an emerging pattern of absences or tardies to parents or school staff. For example, a dean might want to be alerted as soon as a student has reached 5 unexcused absences in a year.
Which attendance statuses actually count? Tardies and unexcused absences are the big ones. Decide as a team whether other attendance signals, like missed sections (e.g., missing 5 algebra classes) or early dismissals, are additional triggers you'd like to track.
How many occurrences should open a case, and over what window? How many absences need to occur before it starts to look like a concerning pattern? This will be different for each school, but we recommend having one alert that flags an early signal and a second alert that flags a more serious, established pattern.
Should this run in real time, or on a schedule? Same-day alerts, meant to check in and make sure a student is okay, are usually scheduled at a set time of day to make sure we have the correct data from your student information system. We encourage you to think about what time of day you start to be concerned that a student isn't there. This may differ from one division to the next, and that's totally fine. Pattern-based triggers are more flexible. They can run whenever you'd like the alert to go out, whether that's sometime in the afternoon or the evening.
You don't need to lock in exact numbers yet, but having a rough answer for each of these means your configuration session is spent refining, not originating.
Part 3: What should families actually hear?
This is the part worth the most discussion, and probably the one that will require checking in with the most teams. You may want to pull in someone from the communications team to make sure all messaging is aligned with your school's brand, voice, and tone.
You can control the exact opening message that goes out to families and staff with these alerts, and we can incorporate merge fields to make the communication feel customized and tailored to the recipient.
Before anyone drafts language inside the product, workshop a possible opening message out loud, as if you were the family receiving it. Ask:
Does it clearly identify your school, so it doesn't read as a generic or automated blast?
Does it ask exactly one question, not several, so a reply is easy to give?
Does it stay factual and supportive, with no discipline, policy, or medical language baked into the first message?
Does it avoid promising a specific staff callback unless that's genuinely what will happen?
Should this message go out via email or via text?
It's also worth discussing tone at a higher level: is your school's voice generally warm and brief, or more formal and direct? Do you serve families who need multilingual or SMS-friendly wording? For multilingual families, the assistant automatically replies in whichever language the family uses, but sending your opening message in two languages can be a nice way to make those families feel included from the very first text.
Voice and tone examples
It's often easier to recognize your school's voice than to describe it. Below, the same three outreach moments (a same-day check-in, an early pattern flag, and a request to talk after repeated absences) are written in a few different voices. Read them out loud as a team and see which one sounds like your school.
Warm & personal
Same-day: "Hi, this is the Attendance Assistant from August Academy. We noticed Johnny wasn't in school today. Is everything okay?"
3 unexcused absences: "Hi, this is August Academy's Attendance Assistant. Johnny has now missed 3 days this month without an excuse, and we wanted to check in before it becomes a bigger pattern. Is there anything going on we can help with?"
5 unexcused absences: "Hi, this is August Academy's Attendance Assistant. Johnny has now reached 5 unexcused absences, and we'd really like to find a time to talk about how to support him getting back on track. Would you be open to a quick call?"
Brief & direct
Same-day: "This is August Academy Attendance. Johnny was marked absent today. Can you let us know why?"
3 unexcused absences: "August Academy Attendance: Johnny has reached 3 unexcused absences this month. Please let us know if there's a reason we should be aware of."
5 unexcused absences: "August Academy Attendance: Johnny has reached 5 unexcused absences. We'd like to schedule a time to discuss next steps. Please let us know what works for you."
Formal & neutral
Same-day: "This is an automated message from August Academy Attendance. Our records show Johnny was absent today. Please reply with the reason for his absence."
3 unexcused absences: "This is an alert from August Academy. Our records show Johnny has accumulated 3 unexcused absences this school year. Please reply with any relevant context."
5 unexcused absences: "This is an alert from August Academy Attendance. Johnny has accumulated 5 unexcused absences this school year. Please reply to schedule a meeting to discuss his attendance."
Caring & supportive
Same-day: "Hello, this is August Academy's Attendance Assistant. We noticed Johnny is out today and just wanted to check in. Is he doing alright?"
3 unexcused absences: "Hi, this is August Academy. We've noticed Johnny has missed 3 days recently without an excuse, and we wanted to reach out early. Is everything okay at home, or is there something we can help with?"
5 unexcused absences: "Hi, this is August Academy. Johnny has now missed 5 days without an excuse, and we want to make sure he has the support he needs to get back on track. Could we find some time this week to talk?"
Casual & conversational
Same-day: "Hi there, this is August Academy checking in. Johnny wasn't marked present today. Everything okay on your end?"
3 unexcused absences: "Hey, this is August Academy checking in. Johnny's hit 3 unexcused absences this month. Just want to make sure everything's alright and see if there's anything we can do."
5 unexcused absences: "Hey, this is August Academy. Johnny's at 5 unexcused absences now, and we'd love to grab some time to chat about how we can help. Does that work for you?"
SMS-friendly & concise
Same-day: "August Academy Attendance: Johnny was absent today. Reply with a reason when you can."
3 unexcused absences: "August Academy: Johnny now has 3 unexcused absences. Reply and let us know if there's anything we should know."
5 unexcused absences: "August Academy: Johnny has 5 unexcused absences. Can we set up a time to talk? Reply with a day/time that works."
Community-minded
Same-day: "Hi, this is the Attendance Assistant at August Academy. We noticed Johnny didn't make it to school today. We just want to make sure everything's okay, and hear back when you get a chance."
3 unexcused absences: "Hi, this is the Attendance Assistant at August Academy. We've noticed Johnny has 3 unexcused absences so far, and we'd love to understand what's going on so we can support him getting back on track."
5 unexcused absences: "Hi, this is the Attendance Assistant at August Academy. Johnny has reached 5 unexcused absences, and we'd like to sit down together and figure out how to get him back to school regularly. When would be a good time to connect?"
Part 4: Who picks up the conversations when they get escalated?
The Attendance Assistant can handle simple back-and-forth with parents about attendance-related issues, but it's configured to hand off anything sensitive to a human being. The useful exercise here is mapping what already happens today.
Walk through what your team currently does when a family responds to attendance outreach with something like:
A request for someone to call them back
A transportation or housing barrier
A safety, bullying, or ongoing wellbeing concern
A question about an injury or illness
A question about attendance policy, discipline, or an extended leave
For each, ask who actually owns it at your school right now (the front desk, a counselor, the nurse, a dean) and whether that's who should own it going forward. That mapping becomes your escalation configuration almost directly.
Part 5: How much would you like to automate on day one?
This is less a technical question than a trust question, and it's worth being honest about as a team.
Using a new technology can be daunting, which is why we recommend schools use the human-review option when they're first getting up and running. Toggling on human-review means no message will go out to families or staff until it's been reviewed and a staff member manually clicks send. This is helpful while you're tweaking your language, to make sure every message sounds exactly how you'd like it to.
If your team does want something to send automatically from the start, talk through which situation feels low-risk enough to allow it. An early pattern-based alert to school staff is a good candidate, since the message is simple and the stakes are low.
Part 6: What happens when a family doesn't respond?
Silence is its own outcome, and it's worth deciding in advance what it should trigger.
Talk through how long is reasonable to wait before doing anything, and what should happen once that window passes. Twenty-four hours is a common starting point for the wait itself. Should staff simply be alerted to follow up in person? Should the assistant send a gentle follow-up message? Should it escalate automatically, or should the case just close? Some schools want more than one step (a follow-up at 24 hours, an escalation at 72 hours), while others prefer a single action at first. Either approach is reasonable. What matters is that your team has agreed on it before a real family goes quiet.
Come to your configuration session with
By the end of this exercise, your team should be able to walk into your configuration session with:
A rough shape for each trigger: whether it's a same-day alert or a pattern-based alert, which attendance statuses count, and roughly what threshold you'd like to use
A first-message draft your team is comfortable with
A shared understanding of who escalations go to, and for what
A decision on review versus automatic send, at least for your first trigger
A sense of how long to wait, and what should happen, when a family doesn't respond
None of this needs to be final. Your August team will help you turn it into working settings and refine anything that doesn't feel right once you see it in the product. The goal of this exercise is simply to make sure the thinking happens as a team, so everyone is on the same page.
Tips and tricks
Read every draft out loud, twice: once as staff, and once as if you're the parent reading it on a hard morning. Tone problems are obvious out loud in a way they aren't on a screen.
Pressure-test your threshold with real names. Pull five actual students who would have triggered each rule last month, and check whether the outcome feels right for each of them, not just in the abstract.
Loop in your front office before the session. They usually already know which "does this count?" question is going to come up first, because they field it informally today.
Design for the typical case, not the exception. Build your first trigger around the common scenario, and let escalation instructions handle the edge cases instead of overloading the trigger itself.
Assume translation and SMS constraints, even if you don't have a formal policy. Short, literal sentences travel better across languages and screen sizes than clever phrasing does.
Don't shortcut the review-everything phase. Even schools confident in their language find something worth adjusting in their first batch of real cases.
Keep a running doc of language you've tried. You'll iterate on tone more than you expect once real replies start coming in, and it's easier to compare drafts side by side.
Don't worry about overwhelming families. A dedupe window keeps the same student and trigger from firing more than once within the period you set, so you can catch a pattern early without stacking alerts on top of each other for the same issue.
We're always here to help! If you have any questions as you're doing this exercise, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]