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The Ravenswood City School District has made it its mission to reach a 96% attendance rate and school officials are getting creative to encourage students and families to come to school every day.
In 2023, the school district launched the Ravenswood Promise, an initiative to transform the local schools and “reimagine the Ravenswood educational experience.” As a part of this strategy, the district has set three priorities: language and literacy, attendance, and talent.
Across all Ravenswood schools, chronic absenteeism continues to be an issue. School administrators say that attendance rates steeply declined during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, attendance rates were consistently at 94% or above, said Elizabeth Kerridge, assistant principal of Costaño Elementary School in East Palo Alto. Then, it dropped to as low as 70% and “we’ve been clawing our way back ever since last year,” she added.
Since August, the school district has already seen 3,626 days of school missed in the 2025-26 school year. The grades with the lowest weekly attendance rates last week were transitional kindergarten with 83% and first grade with 89%.
Currently Costaño is at 90% attendance as of last school year but if it is able to decrease absences by 2,000, it would be able to boost its rates up to 93%, Kerridge explained.
The main reason students are not coming to school is due to housing and transportation insecurity and lingering concerns about sickness, she said.
In order to support families and students, the district and each school site has been working together and individually to brainstorm ways to improve attendance rates.
“It’s a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks,” said Kerridge. “It’s gonna work for someone, and that’s all that really matters. Sometimes it’s just one family at a time.”
As part of the district’s initiative, start and end times have shifted to allow for more bus routes, increasing the capacity for transportation. Belle Haven Elementary School and Los Robles Ronald McNair Academy start at 8:15 a.m. and Costaño and Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School start at 8:45 a.m., according to Belle Haven Principal Michelle Masuda.
Some schools including Belle Haven and Costaño also open school gates as early as 7:30 a.m., allowing parents who have earlier work shifts to be able to drop their children off under the care of school staff, said Lester Ramirez, a mental health therapist at Costaño.
In classrooms, school administrators are finding ways to celebrate the students who are coming to school every day through raffle entries, prizes, awards and acknowledgements.
Schools also partner with the Tzu Chi Foundation to set up student incentive programs with tokens that can be traded in exchange for items at the student store.
At Belle Haven, students who have only missed one day of school for the month are entered into a raffle for a chance to win an exclusive super panther shirt. On Wednesday mornings, the school also holds an assembly to recognize the student who had the best attendance for the previous week.
Parents and family members who get their children to school are also celebrated during a dinner hosted by the school in the winter and at the end of the school year, said Masuda.
On Sept. 22, Belle Haven posted on its social media account that it reached 96% attendance and 100% for the second grade class. Masuda is making sure to celebrate the daily victories to encourage and remind parents.
Ramirez explained that building strong relationships with parents is important for Ravenswood because it develops trust, familiarity and gets families to be more involved.
“Historically, (students and families) haven’t had the same administrators, they haven’t had the same mental health therapist that they could help build a relationship with,” he added.
The Ravenswood Promise also aims to retain 80% of its effective educators, maintaining the group of familiar faces for students and parents to see around campus.
He also said there are significant growths in academic excellence when parents are invested in their children and helping them get to school to learn.
“Students with good attendance are four times more likely to be reading at grade level and 2.5 times more likely to graduate from high school,” writes the school district.
“It’s kind of overly simplified to say that if you’re not here, you can’t learn. But it’s true, and when a student is absent 30 or 40 days a year, that’s a lot of missed lessons,” said Kerridge.
Ravenswood schools are still at the start of its journey to reach its goal but are proud to be working toward bringing positive change for its students.
“96% is an amazing district goal. As a site, we know we can reach 93% or 94% by the end of the year,” said Kerridge.”We always aim for the 96%. That’s always our goal. But our trajectory is we will get there in about two or three years, if we keep it up.”
