Attendance equals success for school and work: business partners promote benefits of showing up every day.

• Author: Slaten, Russ
• Position: EDUCATION

To be a great employee, one must start with the basics. One of the most unmistakable traits of an ideal employee is near or perfect attendance. In school, the same principle applies. The Anchorage School District--with the help of United Way of Anchorage and many community and business partners--has the goal of reaching a 90 percent attendance rate for every student in the district by 2020.

"Attendance is one of those key behavioral ingredients in making sure kids succeed in school--and ultimately in the workforce," says June Sobocinski, vice president of Education Impact at United Way of Anchorage. "We've discovered through analysis of data and research with our many partners that if you can increase attendance rates, what follows is an increase in reading proficiency, math proficiency, and high school graduation rates, which sets up the right behaviors for workers."

Attendance Figures

United Way of Anchorage and its partners-- known as the 90% by 2020 Partnership--analyzed Anchorage School District data to assess the correlation between attendance and math proficiency. In the regression analysis sample, all students were proficient in math in the third grade with about 85 percent of the students attending school at least 90 percent of the time. In eighth grade, the students who were still proficient in math saw attendance rates with a little more than 80 percent of students going to school at least 90 percent of the time. For the eighth graders who were not proficient in math, only a little over 60 percent of students were attending school at least 90 percent of the time.

The partnership further investigated Anchorage School District data to find a correlation between attendance and graduation rates. In February 2014 the analysis discovered that of the 387 students in the 2013-14 graduating cohort who dropped out, only 23 percent had good attendance freshman year.

Finally, a task force of the partnership focused on workforce readiness conducted the 2014 Workforce Readiness Survey to identify the skills and personal qualities necessary for the workplace and to gather perceptions from local businesses on recent high school graduates working entry-level positions. The Anchorage Chamber of Commerce administered the survey, which garnered responses from 213 human resource directors and business owners in Anchorage. The survey asked employers to rate recent high school graduate applicants and workers on their personal qualities, interpersonal...