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Michigan's Flint Community Schools Adopts Human-Centered Approach to Fight Chronic Absenteeism

Key Takeaways

  • Flint Community Schools is working with Concentric Educational Solutions to address barriers to enrollment, re-enrollment, and attendance.
  • The approach uses trained community members, home visits, and family discussions to identify academic, social, emotional, and environmental factors affecting engagement.
  • Data-driven strategies support re-engagement: Ethnographic research and collaboration with administrators inform research-based strategies to boost enrollment and reduce chronic absenteeism.

In an effort to boost enrollment and combat chronic absenteeism, Michigan's Flint Community Schools (FCS) has partnered with Concentric Educational Solutions to help address the academic, social, emotional, and environmental factors that prevent students from enrolling, re-enrolling, or attending school.

Concentric Educational Solutions' human-centered model utilizes trained members of the community to gather real-time insights from students and families that help school systems align resources, address the factors driving disengagement, boost enrollment, and fight chronic absenteeism, the company explained in a news announcement. Its services include:

  • Home visits to families;
  • Collaborative discussions with families to identify barriers to enrollment, re-enrollment, and school attendance;
  • Custom ethnographic research to interpret the data collected during family engagements; and
  • Collaboration with school administrators to come up with research-based enrollment, re-engagement, and attendance strategies.

"Our work to return students to our schools begins with deep family engagement," said Ernest Steward, Ed.S., FCS's director of Student Services & Centralized Enrollment, in a statement. "At Flint Community Schools, we are committed to cultivating a welcoming environment where every family is an active partner in education. Our new initiative with Concentric Educational Solutions supports our efforts to partner with families to address the real barriers that keep students out of school. This commitment to connecting and collaborating is essential to building the supportive bridge back to the classroom that ensures all our students can access the rigorous academic opportunities they deserve."

"Concentric shares Flint Community Schools' deep commitment to helping every student return to school and re-engage in learning, and we are excited to support the district's efforts to reconnect students to opportunity," commented Concentric Educational Solutions CEO Molly Hebert Loyd. "We are eager to help showcase all fantastic learning and engagement opportunities available to students served by FCS. We look forward to partnering with a district that shares our conviction: that re-enrollment requires a human-centered approach that meets families where they are, utilizes community insight, and builds meaningful, lasting pathways back to opportunity for every student in the community.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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