A Better Way to Bring Students Back

A hand-decorated note might not be the first thing that comes to mind when people think about the impact of data. But in San Diego County, one school counselor’s creative attendance “nudge letters” reveal something crucial about why SDP alumnus Shannon Coulter and his colleagues are being honored with this year’s Strategic Data Impact Award. 

San Diego County is home to one of the largest and most complex public education landscapes in California and one that rivals the scale of many of the nation’s largest public school systems. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, countywide chronic absenteeism hovered around 15 percent. After the pandemic, that figure climbed into the mid-30s, with some schools seeing rates as high as 50 percent.  

The stakes were not only academic and social, but structural. Students who miss too much school lose valuable learning time and connection to their school communities. And in California, absenteeism also affects funding. That meant San Diego County schools were facing a problem that touched classrooms, families, and district resources all at once. 

But what made chronic absenteeism especially difficult to address was that many schools didn’t know where to start. For years, attendance responses in California had often been reactive and compliance-driven and included legalistic letters, truancy processes, and punitive messaging that could strain relationships with families.  

Instead, Coulter and his team decided to ask schools to do something harder… and more promising.  

At the San Diego County Office of Education, Coulter and the team behind the Improving Chronic Absenteeism Network, or ICAN, built a response to chronic absenteeism that is at once technically rigorous and deeply human. The opening move in the ICAN story was a decision to help schools intervene earlier and support students more thoughtfully. And now, nearly 7 cohorts on, their work brings together daily attendance data, evidence-based interventions, disciplined improvement routines, and the understanding that absence tells a story schools can learn to hear. 

From a data problem to a working model 

“Around 2019, chronic absenteeism had become a relatively new measure on California’s state dashboard,” Coulter recalled. “Schools were starting to be judged on it, but many still did not fully understand what it was or what to do about it. So, our team saw a clearly defined problem and initially thought the path to improvement might be fairly direct.” So the team set out to get the right data into the hands of school teams so they could identify students who needed support, then act on it.  

That shift was not just philosophical. It required schools to rethink what attendance work actually is. In ICAN, attendance is not treated as a narrow compliance task owned by one office or one form letter. It becomes a shared improvement effort involving principals, counselors, attendance staff, and others who know students and families well. The question is no longer simply, “Who is absent?” It becomes, “What is happening here, what support is needed, and how can we act before patterns harden?” 

As the team dug in, however, they quickly realized the work would be more complex than it first appeared. Attendance data was messier than expected, and practices varied across districts and schools.  

“What looked simple on the surface turned out to be difficult to standardize, interpret, and use well,” added Todd Langager, Director of Implementation, Improvement, and Impact at San Diego County Office of Education. “Once we began talking with schools, it became clear that the issue was not just access to data, but access to the right kind of data. And the capacity to make sense of it.” Back then, school teams were looking at reports that didn’t tell them anything useful about chronic absenteeism.  

Part of the challenge was structural. Districts were using different student information systems (SIS) and different reporting practices, which meant attendance data could not simply be pulled from one place and used as-is. The team had to collect data from multiple districts, align it around shared definitions, and build a process for standardizing it so schools could work from a common picture of the problem. Over time, they also moved from monthly updates to daily data collection, making it possible for schools to respond to much more current information. 

At the same time, the team began looking outward. They turned to the work of organizations like Attendance Works and to research from scholars like Todd Rogers about nudge letters and attendance communication. But, as Langager put it, the difficulty was in helping school teams actually use proven ideas more consistently, more effectively, and with the right students.  

That became one of ICAN’s defining commitments. Coulter describes the program as a collaborative that helps districts use real-time attendance data alongside evidence-based strategies, all guided by a strategic data calendar. In practice, that meant meeting with school teams weekly to help them select a manageable group of students who needed support, look closely at the reasons those students were absent, try interventions, and then review what happened. The goal was not simply to collect information, but to connect decisions, actions, and results. 

Building a system schools could actually use 

Early on, much of that work was quite manual. Julia Bridi, Executive Leadership Coach at San Diego County Office of Education, recalls passing out paper charts, downloading reports, and mail merging spreadsheets. “I think our first documentation systems were tally sheets and written records, which later became spreadsheets.” Over time, however, the team learned that tracking attendance alone was not enough. Schools also needed to document what they were doing with students and families so they could begin to reliably connect interventions to changes in attendance. 

The program evolved in response. The team standardized data across districts, built dashboards that could be updated daily, and created tools that let schools track not only who was absent, but what had been tried and whether it seemed to help.  

As the system matured, the visual side of the work improved too. The dashboards were designed to help different users see what they needed to see, from high-level district patterns to the attendance history of an individual student. Bridi said the team built reports showing year-over-year comparisons, grade-level trends, subgroup patterns, and students who had been chronically absent in the previous year and were still at risk in the current one. Daily updates made the tool much more responsive, allowing teams to act on what had happened yesterday rather than what had happened a month ago. 

The platform also became more actionable. Consultant Tanya Shapiro, who helped develop the web application, described the goal as creating something that functioned partly as a dashboard and partly as a management tool for educators. Instead of simply displaying metrics, it helped users decide which students needed attention, log intervention plans, and generate materials such as nudge letters at scale. 

At the same time, they built the human side of the network: coaches, weekly team meetings, learning sessions, and a more intentional approach to helping schools shift away from reactive or punitive attendance practices. 

All of that technical work supported a larger aim: helping schools connect decisions, actions, and results. ICAN’s strategic data calendar guided teams through recurring questions across the year—which students to focus on, what support to try, and whether those efforts were changing attendance patterns. In practice, that meant weekly team meetings, regular review of attendance data, documented interventions, and repeated cycles of adjustment. 

What emerged was a rigorous system built through iteration, shaped by what teams learned in practice, and strengthened over time. In short, it was a system schools could actually use. 

When care became visible 

As ICAN took hold in schools, attendance work began to feel different. The shift was not only operational, but cultural.  

“Many schools had been stuck in reactive, compliance-driven approaches, but ICAN asked them to flip that script and move instead toward an asset-based relationship-building model with weekly attendance team meetings, positive interventions, nudge letters that say we miss you instead of threatening letters.” 

Over time, that shift began to show up in the texture of school life itself. Attendance work was no longer just about monitoring absences or responding after a pattern had hardened. These ICAN schools began to take on a more relational and welcoming approach to getting students back in school, and they treated outreach not as a warning, but as an expression of care.  

Bridi put it plainly: “This work has to be full of care and joy.” 

One especially vivid moment exemplified this shift for Coulter. “I was at a school a few weeks ago,” he recalled, “and one person on this school team had hand designed these beautiful, elaborate postcards to students, covered in handmade butterflies, to help convey that their school was just this amazing, welcoming place that you’re missing out on if you’re not there.” 

Those postcards were made by Heather Naughton, a school counselor at Linda Vista Elementary, and they capture something essential about ICAN. The program’s routines, data, and intervention structures were not just helping schools monitor absenteeism, they were doing so while creating room for creativity, humanity, and genuine welcome. Joy, in that sense, is one of the clearest signs that ICAN is built to support both belonging and accountability. 

What the data made possible 

Since 2019, ICAN has supported more than 70 schools and reached more than 45,000 students across San Diego County. And Coulter reports that in their most recent analysis, the program team found that ICAN participation was associated with 1.3 to 2.3 percentage points fewer days absent. For students, they found, that translated into two to four additional days of school compared to business-as-usual interventions. And for many students, those gains were enough to change their status entirely: roughly 29 percent of the students in the program analysis moved from chronically absent to not chronically absent during the program period. 

Those gains mattered at more than one level. They meant more time in class, more continuity in learning, and more opportunity for students to stay connected to school. They also mattered systemically. In California, where attendance shapes funding, ICAN’s gains generated an estimated $1.1 million in preserved ADA funding—resources districts can reinvest in student support. 

 “The impact is both human and structural,” Coulter continued.  

That combination is why this work stands out. ICAN did not treat data as an end in itself, nor did it ask schools to choose between rigor and relationships. It paired evidence with implementation, measurement with coaching, and analysis with care. The result is a model that shows what strategic data use can look like when it is built to help people act in ways that work on many levels. 

Strategic data impact is not just about having better numbers. In ICAN, that has meant turning attendance data into a more disciplined, more humane, and more hopeful way of helping students get back to school. That is the deeper lesson in San Diego County’s work—and the kind of impactful work the Strategic Data Impact Award was created to honor.  

Congratulations to Shannon Coulter and the San Diego County Office of Education.  

Watch the 2026 Strategic Data Impact Award video below to hear more about the work behind ICAN and the impact it is having for students across San Diego County.