Student Attendance | Text Message 📲 Survey

Traditionally, when a student misses a class period during the day, their parent is notified with a robocall in the morning or afternoon which instructs them to call the school attendance secretary and explain why the student is missing. At large high schools, there are many days where these secretaries cannot answer all of the voicemails and as a result, there are thousands of records with missing data. Without knowing why students are missing it's hard for district leadership to create strategies to encourage attendance.

As a result, I created a 1 item survey that allows parents to respond to a link sent via SMS text message to explain their student's absence. Each day at a specified time in a script is run that populates a daily contact list in Qualtrics. Based on the logic assigned during the automation, a parent will receive a text message if they have a phone number on file. If they don't have a phone number but do have an email, the message will be sent via email. Parents can see the name of their student and the date of the absence when responding to a list of attendance codes and provide a brief description of an illness-related absence. Later that day the data is automatically pulled from Qualtrics and populates missing attendance codes in the student information system.

Contact upload configuration and data mapping via XM Directory

Item creation and survey logic

Distribution automation including messaging, logic, and email follow-up

Training building leadership and secretaries on best practices

Response testing and troubleshooting

Creating custom end of survey messages

We piloted the program at one school for a semester and then expanded to seven high schools for the remainder of the year. Over that time, we collected over 36,000 survey responses. During the last year, students were remote for the majority of the year resulting in an unusual amount of absences. The initial pilot school had 9 percent fewer absences than the high school average and had the lowest percentage of unverified absences. A true evaluation of the project will be conducted during the 2021-22 school year when students are in-person the whole year.