Brittany Daley:
For the first month, any class that met the 95% ADA goal got to slime me. Way better than whipped cream if any principals are out there. My nose did not smell like dairy for two weeks.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Dr. Brittany Daley. Brittany is the principal of Hamilton Elementary School in City Heights, a neighborhood in San Diego, California. Hamilton has 417 students. More than 50% of them are learning English as a second language, and more than 90% of them are considered socioeconomically disadvantaged. Across the school, families speak at least 14 different languages at home. In the 2024-2025 school year, Hamilton joined the San Diego County Office of Education Improving Chronic Absenteeism Network, ICAN for short. In today’s interview, I spoke to Brittany along with Hamilton’s improvement coach from ICAN. Her name’s Julia Bridi. She’s an executive leadership coach at the San Diego County Office of Education. I wanted to talk to Brittany and Julia because of what Hamilton Elementary achieved during the 2024-2025 school year. During that year, the school cut its chronic absenteeism rate from 24% to 10%, which means they cut it in half and then some. I wanted to know how they did it, so I asked them and Brittany’s immediate answer warmed my improvement-loving heart.

Brittany Daley:
Julia taught us a lot about improvement science, which was figuring out what was working, what wasn’t working, and what’s that change that we can make to immediately gather data to see results. Julia, do you want to add anything before we go into specifics because you helped us do so many specific moves?

Julia Bridi:
Sure. Thanks, Brittany. I would say the other piece of that is yes, we used improvement science and used Plan-Do-Study-Act or PDSA cycles to really reflect on what was learning, what wasn’t working, and looked at data regularly. But we also operated from a multi-tiered systems of support. So with this mindset, we were really thinking about what could we do for all kids. Using data, we were able to identify what might some kids need in terms of supplemental supports. And in some cases, there were more significant supports with a specific group of students. And we looked at data weekly and there were clear actions that each team member was responsible for following up. And it was from growing a positive school culture and climate to thinking about which of our families need welcoming home visits, which of our families need encouragement through individual written postcards, which classrooms might we need to pay attention to and why?

Alec Patton:
In the summer of 2024, the school identified four drivers to guide their work. Julia took me through them one by one.

Julia Bridi:
Our four drivers are culture and climate, hence the incentives and fun, but it’s always, always in services of building positive relationships to encourage kids to come to school. And then, we have relationship building, so check-ins, 2-by-10s, whatnot like that. Communication, so that is nudge letter work or individualized messages and postcards, phone calls. And then, our last one is foundational structures and routines. What lives in there are your weekly meetings, your data protocols, your attendance recovery policies, your independent study practices, your health work, those kinds of things. But those are the four big drivers, and then, the changes that are connected to those.

Brittany Daley:
Those nudge letters, Julia. I love the nudge letters. I can would have us say these are strategic points during the year where you’re sending the nudge letters. And I ended up sharing the nudge letters with the district office and Julia helped me pull the data of, since sending the nudge letter, what was the improvement? I’ve been sending the same letter every year and it’s so much words. This one was a bar graph like here’s how many absences your child had, here’s the average absences at the school, and here’s how you can get help and support, like we’re here for you. People were flocking to talk about attendance, and I’m like, “I’ve been sending letters for four years,” but no one ever wanted to talk about it. So it was awesome because I learned a lot from that as well.

Julia Bridi:
Well, I think too, it wasn’t just sending the letters. There was this Dojo message, “Hey, families, you’re going to be getting these letters. If you have any questions, come and see me.” I think at some point there was opportunities for parents to talk about the letter with their teacher whom their child is most proximal with. So it was more than just the letter being sent home. There were some other surrounding things that I think maybe helped enhance parents receiving the letter to better understand the message. And we’d been talking about attendance all year.

Brittany Daley:
That’s true. And actually, after our final nudge letter, which I think we sent right after spring break, so that would’ve been April. At that time, we still had about 70 kids that were one absence away from being chronically absent. And so, we went down by 30 and kept everyone down. And the attendance team, this is when the team was so great, they came up with, they’re like, “Hey, this round of nudge letters, let’s actually attach a half sheet of paper.”

Julia Bridi:
That’s right.

Brittany Daley:
And it had, my student will come to Saturday school. My student needs an independent contract because they were in the hospital for these days or sick for these days, or my student’s going to try and earn this incentive, and the parent would actually check off which one they wanted to do. The kid brought it to the office and got a prize. And then, we talked to the kids, “Hey, you’re going to get this letter. Your goal is to tell an adult or caregiver in your life about the letter and make a choice.” And so, like anything in ICAN, we started off with the most simplest version. Let’s just write a postcard and see what happens to a strategic group of people. And then, as we did it multiple times, we were able to get more strategic or more thoughtful with what we were doing to get better results.

Alec Patton:
So it was just this past year that you joined ICAN, is that right?

Brittany Daley:
Yes. We participated just for the ’24-’25 school year.

Alec Patton:
What month did you start?

Brittany Daley:
We had our orientation in July, and so we spent three days with the other ICAN schools orienting ourselves to the goals of the program and planning for our initial launch of the strategy when school came back. And then, we completed on the last day of school. Julia and our attendance team, we were talking up until literally the last day of school, the last hour, making sure we could help students and families.

Alec Patton:
And Brittany, tell me about your first impressions coming into ICAN, that orientation.

Brittany Daley:
I loved it. There was an excitement around attendance that was really refreshing. I think sometimes people invest a lot of energy and when you don’t get the result you desire, it can be discouraging. So I think there was a really fresh perspective that was exciting. One thing I really appreciated about having Julia as my coach in the ICAN network was it was very personalized. So every school that I was around tried something different and had a different starting point. But Julia came in and said, “Hey, what have you been doing? What are your strengths?” So we were able to look at all the work we’ve done with family engagement. Okay, let’s leverage that in our attendance plans.
We had done some really intentional work around teaching teachers how to talk about attendance or how to get to the root of attendance. And so, our first steps were to learn about the ICAN program to look at what assets we already had and how we could leverage that. And then, I think the next step was we created a goal during those three days and there was an ADA goal. So what did we want our average daily attendance rate to be? Which we said at 95 and previously we had been at 92.3.

Alec Patton:
Quick note so we’re all on the same page. ADA stands for average daily attendance. Now, back to Brittany.

Brittany Daley:
And then, we set a goal to cut our chronic absenteeism from 24 to 12%. So we wanted to cut it in half. And then, basically our first steps were getting the word out. And something that I really appreciated about ICAN was we were encouraged to look at every stakeholder group. So how do teachers and staff members participate in this? How are students empowered through this, families, community members? And that was how we launched the work. And there was just joy, excitement. You at least had an action step that you could work towards and a strategy. And then, Julia was also great. She mentioned MTSS. We’ve been working on MTSS the past few years.

Alec Patton:
Real quick, for those who don’t know. MTSS stands for multi-tiered systems of support. Back to Brittany.

Brittany Daley:
Not making attendance a separate thing from any strategy or initiative, but how do you embed it? And that was something that Julia and our attendance team and myself thought of all year, how do we make it a part of our system so it can continues way past ICAN is our hope.

Julia Bridi:
If I can add to that too, one of the things that we really did is we prioritized attendance simply by scheduling an attendance meeting weekly. And we really were thoughtful about, or Brittany, you were really thoughtful knowing who your players are at your school site about who needs to be around the table. So our attendance team included Brittany as the principal, included the school nurse, included the community liaison, included the school clerk as well as the school secretary who have such important information about our families because they welcome them every day, they feel the phone.
And so, all of those people coming together created this synergy and this equity of voice and this buy-in to support this work and make sure that it was done by all levels of the system. And I think too, we really learned we can’t just do attendance as a team. This is everybody’s responsibility. And so, that really spilled into classroom teachers having ownership and being responsible for many of the attendance strategies and interventions. It was hard work. There was a lot of monitoring, there was a lot of data, things that failed. But I think there was no one who didn’t know we weren’t working at attendance at Hamilton Elementary.

Brittany Daley:
And Julia, it was really cool because at the beginning of the year when we made the commitment, one thing that our attendance team talked about is if we’re about it, it needs to be a part of everything we’re doing. So I added an attendance portion to our PLC agendas. I added an attendance portion to our PDs, to our staff meetings, to our MTSS meetings, to our family Fridays. So it was in every system possible. And at the beginning, there was some resistance, but after a couple months, teachers were competing. We had a long list of people trying to offer Saturday school. Teachers were using their lunch break to do home visits and write postcards and call families. And so, it was really cool to see how quickly people became invested in the work. And through the weekly systems, every stakeholder group, students, families, staff members, community knew if we were progressing and meeting our goal or not. So everyone was motivated.

Alec Patton:
You talked about the assets that already existed. You want to talk about the blue chairs?

Brittany Daley:
Sure. So three years ago, after my first year being principal, we bought a blue chair for every single classroom, an adult sized blue chair because if you’ve ever been an adult trying to sit in a kindergarten or UTK chair, you know you don’t stay for very long. But we bought an adult sized chair, put it in every single classroom and made a statement that this is a space where you’re always welcome.
As a family member, if you’re an uncle, an aunt, a grandma, a grandpa, a soccer coach, a karate coach, a mom, a dad, a cousin, an older brother, older sister, whoever you are that loves and supports our kids, that blue chair was in that classroom for you. And there was always an open invitation for you to come be a part of the learning, if you’re curious about it, if you are resistant to it, any of that, we wanted to welcome into this space and just make our school more open to people. And I think your school is like your home. So people don’t typically invite themselves into your home. So it was our responsibility to extend the invitation and invite people into our home so that it could become everyone’s home.

Alec Patton:
I bet some teachers had some feelings about that.

Brittany Daley:
Yeah, I wasn’t too popular when I got those blue chairs. And then, I also started doing events like, “Hey, we’re going to do a phonics lesson in front of all the families,” and now people love it. But back then, they were kind of like, “You go first.” I’m like, “Okay.” So I did a lesson in front of more than 200 parents in the auditorium. So it’s been a journey, but it’s been a beautiful one.

Alec Patton:
When you were thinking it’s the summer, we’re going to launch this initiative to cut our chronic absenteeism in half, what were the lines of communication that you knew you would be able to take advantage of and use?

Brittany Daley:
We put our entire school on ClassDojo, which I love it because every parent pretty much or caregiver has access to Instagram or Facebook. So it’s like that for schools. So we’ve been doing that for a few years and every single person down to our facility team, cafeteria managers, speech pathologist, counselor, every teacher, everyone’s on ClassDojo. And so, we had started sharing data on there, a lot of graphics, which helped us a lot with attendance because we shared a lot of visual data with everyone weekly. So we had that. We also had a lot of on campus, we had Family Friday, we have a literacy night, coffee with the principal. We have a family center and it’s open and we have Thursday art activities where people can just come talk, ask questions. So we tried to capitalize on our in-person moments. We had a newsletter. Attendance became a staple in our newsletter. It had not before ICAN actually been in my newsletter.

Alec Patton:
And Julia, what did you notice about Hamilton when you started working with them?

Julia Bridi:
One of the things that I noticed right away was Brittany’s incredible leadership voice. She really cast a vision that we are going to do this and we’re going to commit to this. And she really celebrated along the way too like, “We’re going to do this, we’re going to commit to this, we’re going to talk about this. And if you are around this table and when you’re around this table, you’re a valued member.”
So she really set up some nice conditions so that everybody was successful in the wins and they felt it. They felt part of the team and that was really critical. I would say too, this particular team, rain or shine, they met. They met. There was not this, we got too busy or something else happened. Things are always happening at a school site and school sites are always busy. But if you want something to grow, you have to prioritize it. And Hamilton really set up the attendance priority, rain or shine, even if Brittany couldn’t be there because she was called off site, this attendance team met.

Brittany Daley:
Can I add one thing real quick? So another cool moment that I think Julia and I saw pretty quickly was ICAN has a rubric for analyzing different elements of how the attendance team worked. And so, we started projecting one of those every week and asking all the team members, “Where would you rate us and what would we need to do to get to the next highest category?” And we were functioning pretty efficiently from the beginning, but the first area we looked at was does everyone bring their unique skillset to the team? And that’s where Julia helped me a lot as a coach was her and I actually sat down after our first attendance meeting and went through everyone on my attendance team, what’s their unique lens and what’s their unique strength? And then, we started having that be what they brought to the attendance team to start.
By the end of it, we all learned each other’s strengths and we were able to take what we learned from people and emulate what they would do. But in the beginning it was like, great, you know the resources in the community, you bring that. You know all the parents from these grade levels, you bring that. So I thought that was a really cool process that we saw really quickly and I’m grateful for that.

Alec Patton:
That’s super interesting. How did you decide initially who was on the attendance team?

Brittany Daley:
I think I invited a lot of people, and at first I thought that was a flaw, but I looked at the data of my previous year and in our attendance systems we code, was it an illness? Was it a family emergency? Was it a parent that we couldn’t get in contact with? So I looked at if that was the root of the attendance issue or reason, who is someone that would have an expertise to leverage that. So illness was our number one category for absences. Hey, my school nurse is a great person to be on the team because she can help them come up with a plan. And that was one of our most successful things we did in the first quarter was creating health office protocols and sharing that with staff, students, and families.
And then, some students were going through family challenges of a lot of different types, changes in family structures, economic challenges, hey, who’s a great contact for that? That would be my counselor. So I looked at what was the root of why kids weren’t coming to school and what I believed to be the root and who would have the expertise to respond to that. And then, I invited some extras too because why not? But that was who I started with.

Alec Patton:
When you said you invited, an invitation coming from you in this context, was anyone saying, “Ah, no, that’s not for me?” Or was it like, “Oh, I just got an invitation from my principal. I’ll definitely be there.” Where are we on the volunteer to voluntold?

Brittany Daley:
By invitation, I meant you’re showing up here because this work matters, and I think every person on the team was in a different place. So actually our attendance clerk, and she would say this herself, she was not gung-ho about it because she had been investing for multiple years, putting in time and effort, but not seeing the results she wanted. So she was like, “I’ll show up, but I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
And then, our nurse was, when she first showed up, she was excited to be there, but she’s like, “I don’t know how to look at data.” By the end, she was coding attendance charts and she was reporting out on how to strategically assign responses and intervention. So she was willing, but she was like, “I don’t have expertise. How am I going to contribute?” The counselor was more like the attendance assistant, like, “Hey, I’ve been trying, but these letters I get from the district, they don’t work.”
My secretary was just jazzed about everything because she loves incentives and fun and relationships. So she’s like, “Again, I don’t know if we’re going to cut it in half.” No one thought we were going to be able to get to 12%, no one on the team. But then, I remember at that first meeting when I said that was the goal, they’re like, “Yeah, we’re not going to get it, but at least if we get close, that’s good.” And I’m like, “No, we’re going to get it.” But everyone showed up because invitation was a loosely defined term at that time. It was more like, I’ll see you here at this time. There’s lunch provided.

Alec Patton:
That’s key. That’s huge. And this was during the summer?

Brittany Daley:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
How many times did you folks meet before the school year started?

Brittany Daley:
Oh, my goodness. So we went for three days to the county office back-to-back for the launch. And then one week after the launch we met with our coach, and actually that was just me and the coach and we, me and Julia, and we debriefed and reflected on how it went and what my next leadership moves were. Then, after that, we met as a team and we immediately went over who do we need to make contact with now? So we pulled our initial starting point for intensive or extra needs and responses was kids who were chronically absent the year before.
So the year before, we had 105 kids who were chronically absent. So we had a meeting where we went over each one of those kids who’s doing the home visit when before school. We have a welcome popsicle party the Friday before school starts. So we made goodie bags for all those 105 kids and we’re like, hey, if you show up to the popsicle party, this table, you get a bag and it has slime in it and it has snacks. And then, there was a little flyer about, hey, if you’re ill, this is what you can do, or here’s your kid’s attendance goal.
So we probably met four to five times as an attendance team, and I met with my coach twice after the initial three-day launch, and we left my initial coaching meeting with Julia with every single attendance meeting calendared for the entire year. No ifs, ands, or buts. We had our preliminary agenda defined and we added throughout the year what data we were tracking. But we ended our meeting being like, hey, this is our initial focus group, which was kids who were chronically absent the year before. Here’s how we’re gathering data on them. And then, we love data here. We’re a little bit obsessed. So we also agreed to have a spreadsheet where we looked at every single teacher’s attendance each week for the entire year. So we had a spreadsheet by that. We also looked at grade level, and then that helped us eventually see which were our target classes.
So we did a lot of prep work before the school year even started. And also, in those meetings, we agreed what was our launch event, how were we going to share the goal with the community? And then we also decided, and every school in ICAN was a little bit different, but we each chose what’s the system that you’re going to use to incentivize? So we had 95% parties. So for the first month, any class that met the 95% ADA goal got to slime me. Way better than whipped cream if any principals are out there. My nose did not smell like dairy for two weeks. And so, we had that information ready.

Alec Patton:
Was this bucket of slime, was this like Nickelodeon Double Dare slime.

Brittany Daley:
Oh, was Nickelodeon slime and those little squirters where you fill it up and you get to just launch it at people. I had over 304 kids launch slime at me. It was amazing. My skin, I looked like Shrek. My skin was dyed green for a couple days, but it’s okay because kids were at school. So that was really cool. So we came, our attendance team was prepared the Friday before school with all of those plans, and we had already done home visits and made at least one to two contacts with every student that was chronically absent the year before.

Alec Patton:
We got to go back to those home visits because you said 105 kids.

Brittany Daley:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
You did home visits with 105 families before the school year started.

Brittany Daley:
So what we did was we took the list of 105 and we looked at how close were they to not being chronically absent. Some kids were one absence away from being chronically absent. So for those students, we sent a welcome postcard to them, and then we did a cutoff, I think it was 21. I have to go back to my spreadsheet, but we basically said, if you were really close, we’re going to send you a postcard. And then, if it was 21 or more, then those were the people we prioritized for home visits. And then, the whole list of 105 was offered the goodie bag for the popsicle party. So we did home visits for I would say 71 or 2. And we’re lucky we can walk to almost every home since we’re a neighborhood school. But it was pretty intense.

Alec Patton:
Did you learn anything from those home visits that surprised you?

Brittany Daley:
I did actually. So because I would say 90 to 95% of our school feels very comfortable here, they’ll advocate for what they need. They’ll share why they’re not attending school, and it’s easier for us to help. But a lot of the people that I was going to, I actually didn’t know the real reason that they were struggling with attendance. I had met with them. I had done the typical SARB meetings for attendance, SART meetings for attendance. I’ve always had attendance incentives. But I think just coming to people in their space and going as deep as they wanted go or as superficial as they want to go, and just coming very humbly. And we did not come with the intention of saying Your child was chronically absent. We came with the intention of celebrating you and celebrating our school year coming up the year before. So it was great.
We actually wrote our script with our attendance team and Julia before we went to those home visits. So they were disarming home visits, which I think was a shift sometimes for how home visits feel because you almost feel shamed as a parent. We had parents say that they’re like, “Hey, I didn’t want to answer the door.” Because I was looking through gates, I was looking through windows. There was a 2-year-old playing in the yard. I’m like, “Take me to your mom.” So people told us, they’re like, “We did not want to answer.” But we just came saying, “Hey, how was your summer? We’re just so excited you’re here. What can we do to make your year the best possible year? Here’s this incentive your kid can earn.” And people, we weren’t even talking about no attendance are the root. And I learned a lot about things they needed. We were able to help someone get a different job with a different job schedule so they could bring their children. We helped people get bus passes. We got-

Alec Patton:
Well, you helped somebody get a different job?

Brittany Daley:
Yes. That’s only the case with one person. But we were like, “Oh, we can help you get a different job. We know some contacts. Are you open to this?”

Alec Patton:
Wow.

Brittany Daley:
And that was even before the school year started. And so, it was pretty cool because that was our list of kids that were already chronically absent. I wish I had our spreadsheet up, but every month our attendance team would specifically pay attention to that list and celebrate those kids. So we had a student in first grade. The year before, she had 52 absences. She had zero absences this school year, like zero. So it wasn’t just a little bit of a mindset shift.

Alec Patton:
Wait, give me those numbers again.

Brittany Daley:
52 absences when she was in kindergarten, zero her first grade year.

Alec Patton:
What did you do in this home visit?

Brittany Daley:
Well, it wasn’t, the home visits were a very important part of the system, but I think my favorite thing that ICAN helped me develop as a leader was a comprehensive system because if I just went on a home visit and then there was no follow-up after, I think the authenticity and the progress and the relationship of the home visit isn’t as strong. But the home visit was coupled with the popsicle party, was coupled with the personalized phone calls was coupled with the postcard. Our incentives for attendance weren’t just for students. Parents came to slime me. So there was just like everyone who comes to school was having something. And so, it was home visits coupled with that. But a lot was just relationship. We brought snacks to people’s houses. If they didn’t answer, I was like, “Okay, we’re just hanging the bag on the door. We’ll see you next week.” So we were pretty relentless.

Alec Patton:
Are there any particular conversations or moments that have stayed with you from those visits?

Brittany Daley:
There are. I think honestly home visits were the thing through ICAN that I was the least excited about because it felt invasive. I wasn’t sure if people would want me there, but I was like, I’m going to try it. So we ran into one family who, when we showed up, was talking to us. They had recently immigrated here within the last year, and when we showed up, there was no furniture in their home. And so, within a week we were able to get mattresses and clothes and food and that family’s relationship with us totally changed. Our conversation at the home visit, like I said, wasn’t about attendance with that family. We just were saying, “Hey, what’s up? How are you? We miss you.” I’m playing with all the dogs I see. And through that, they just shared, “Hey, could you help me with this?” “Yep, we got you. We’ll meet that need. We’ll meet it within a week.” And then I think people trusted us.
And with attendance, a lot of what I heard the past few years when I talked about attendance is like, “Hey, as a principal, you just care about attendance for money.” And I think that’s a lot of the rhetoric is when a kid shows up, it’s X amount of dollars. And when a kid’s absent, it’s X amount of dollars. And yes, the money is important and it has implications, but I care about learning. I care about do you have friendships? I care about are you missing your tier one instruction and that’s why you’re not at grade level? So I think through our actions that ICAN help us put into our system, it was a very person-centered system. It wasn’t just about you’re chronically absent or not, it was who are you as a person? What do I know about you? How can I show up for you? How can I empower you or your family?
So that family is now a registered volunteer at our school. They volunteer for everything. They’re not chronically absent at all. I think they’ve even pressured some of the people in their kids’ class to come to school so they can win the 95% events and cream my face or whatever it is that we’re doing that month. I wore a rainbow Mohawk. And so, that was a really great moment for me, and it did shift my perspective on how home visits could be because I was willing to do whatever it took, but that was the thing I was the least excited about if I’m being transparent.

Alec Patton:
Julia, did you come to any of those?

Julia Bridi:
I did not go on any of the home visits, but we did provide the framing for how do we change the mindset of home visits. We learned in our network that that was often a strategy that was not embraced and not done with fidelity or not done at all. And we were trying to uncover why is this. And like Brittany said, sometimes there’s just some assumptions about home visits. Maybe it’s invasive or maybe fear on our end. And so, we really tried to rewrite that narrative in terms of this is welcoming. This is about relationship building. This is not about calling anybody out on the carpet. This is about we are here for you. What are your hopes and dreams?
And so, it’s just so exciting to hear how Hamilton just espoused that and embraced that kind of mindset and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s all of us do it.” It wasn’t just Brittany. It was a team of people doing it. And we’ve learned that when people go and do it, they learn the same things that Brittany has learned and they’re able to position themselves in ways of support for families like Brittany has. And now, this fear around home visits has really shifted and embraced differently, and we’re seeing families differently and families see us differently when we do this. Just the idea of just saying welcoming visits is so much different than we’re going to just go verify your address. Do you live here? Do you not live here?
Asking a family what their hopes and dreams are and what they want from us or what they need from us at school, it just breaks down so many walls. And so, people are more likely to be like, “Hey, yeah, I’m going to do what you asked. You came to my house and asked how I was.” We see them as humans and people, and it was just super exciting. But I really appreciate Brittany how you called out. It wasn’t home visits. That was like a silver bullet because there is no silver bullet in this work. It’s this comprehensive system that is intertwined and holds hands and crosswalks between other things, and it’s just this constant attention to it. And if this doesn’t work, why didn’t it work, and what might we try next? With always that efficacy, we have the power as the adults in our schools to support our families in super productive and meaningful ways.

Brittany Daley:
I pulled up our spreadsheet, Julia, and I was looking at our October date because that was when we had had two and a half months of school. So of the 105 students that were chronically absent the year before, only 32 kids had had two or more absences, which we counted as chronically absent. So there was from 105 to 32, there was that decrease. So what is 105 minus 32? Let me do that on my calculator. It was 73. So after the interventions and the home visits, 73 students who were chronically absent in October the year before were not chronically absent anymore.
I think that’s when people started to see the belief in the system, because now when you’re trying to get 400 kids to show up to school, that’s pretty overwhelming. But when you’re slowly looking at what you can do to focus your gaze, like next year, one of our focus group is literally 11 students that have one thing in common and we’re prioritizing. We did not figure that out last year, so now attendance team in ’25, ’26, that’s our focus group, and we’re going to figure out for those 11 kids. Because if we have 40 kids that are chronically absent, we’re focusing on about 25% of kids with that group of 11. Let’s figure out for that group what we can do. So it was an awesome experience.

Alec Patton:
That’s so cool. And so, in the summer, the attendance team is working really hard at this. When and how did you bring classroom teachers in?

Brittany Daley:
Great question. So we had one incentive that I actually weaned teachers off of. But in the beginning I’m like, hey, when you get something out of it, that’s your initial thing to care about it. So we had this chart and it had R-E-C-E-S-S spelled out recess and outlined letters. And I told teachers, “Hey, every day when you take attendance, I want you to look at is your classroom’s attendance at 95 and higher or 95 and lower? If you’re at 95 or higher, color in a letter. If you fill up your recess, you get an extra 15-minute recess and I cover your entire 30-minute recess.”
Okay, teachers were down, right? Because that’s 30 minutes of a bathroom, that’s 30 minutes of a snack, that’s 30 minutes of whatever they want to do. Kids were down because that’s extra playtime. So that’s how it started. And we did that from August until about November or December. And that was actually one of the conversations our attendance team had was is that now our most effective intervention? It was effective at the beginning of the year, and it served a purpose of investing teachers in the data, but we were ready for something more detailed, which is what we switched into after January. So that was our first step, and that was great because that was aligned to our ADA goal and just an awareness.
Then, the second thing we added was staff meeting. So every staff meeting, we pulled up the spreadsheet that the attendance team used. Everyone was looking at the same spreadsheet, every person and said, “Okay, hey, everybody, grab a postcard. 52 staff members are in this room right now. Here’s a list of kids that need a postcard. Who are you talking to?” And people were like, “Hey, I had that kid when they were in second grade. I’ll write to them.” Or someone said, “Hey, I played soccer with that student last week. I’ll write to them.” And everyone was writing to different children. So we taught people how to use postcards.
Then, the next time we talked about, “Hey, why don’t you call up a family member and talk about this?” One of the strategies that ICAN introduced was 2 by 10. So spend 2 minutes with a kid for 10 days talking about something not even related to school and see how that data improves. So then, we taught teachers that structure, “Hey, everyone, choose a kiddo that you want to do your 2 by 10s with.” So it was incremental progress, but also people are competitive. So when there’s a newsletter, a Dojo post, a sign outside of the school and your recess poster and everyone knows how good your attendance is doing, teachers started drilling down and saying, “Hey, it’s this kid and it’s always Tuesdays for this kid. Let me follow up with them.”
And then teachers were asking us, “Hey, attendance team, I know you’re meeting on Thursday. Can you look at this student of mine? This is what I tried. Let me know what you think.” So it became this just wild thing. But I think it started with choosing an incentive that helped teachers open their eyes to what their attendance data was, and there was a little carrot in it for them. But then it was getting wild because the whole school was having 95% attendance every single day, and I was covering hours of recess. So then, we had to phase that out. I’m like, we are ready for a higher expectation right now because this is certainly attainable for our community now.

Alec Patton:
You talked about the launch and figuring out the launch. Tell me about that, when that happened in the year, what happened.

Brittany Daley:
From the very first day of school, we started sending infographics with what our data was from the last year and what our goal is now. And immediately sending data on, “Hey, our whole school had a 99% attendance rate on the first day of school. Tomorrow, you get to vote on what wig I wear.” So we started with immediate results for the first month of school and then for students who were chronically absent the year prior, we said, “Hey, if you have no absences this first month of school, you and your family are invited to a breakfast.” And that was our incentive that we did for students who were chronically absent and we had 78 students attend our first breakfast. We ran out of food and we had to go buy more food because we’re like, “Yes, this is a party.”
So we launched with incentives. We had already launched the postcards. We had launched welcoming home visits. We started launching Saturday schools, which could help students who, for very valid reasons, had to have an absence but needed to make up the time. Then, it was launching our attendance team, teaching people how to read the data, and then making sure that everyone in our community had access to the data. So that’s what we started with.

Alec Patton:
This brings in improvement science a little bit, but this is like you’re throwing a lot at the wall.

Brittany Daley:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
And it doesn’t seem like all of that is sustainable. I mean, obviously the recess chart wasn’t for really obvious reasons because there’s one of you and you’ve got other commitments. How are you evaluating what to keep and what to say, “Okay, that’s not working, or it’s kind of working, but it’s not working really enough.” How are you deciding what to cut?

Brittany Daley:
We had had an attendance team agenda, and it was very focused on band-aids, not focused on systems thinking. So the ICAN agenda that Julia shared with me, and we worked off of the initial template, the third section was, “Hey, look at your incentive and see is it working and who’s it working for?” So if our system is working for the same kids who already show up at school, do we really need that? Okay, let’s pull up our list of kids who are chronically absent. Is that system working for them? If it’s not, do we still need that?
Because we had a lot of tier one things. We had attendance incentives. We have monthly Dojo parties. You earn a point every day for being here. So that’s why we cut recess because we’re like, okay, every classroom is still getting 95%, but the kids who are chronically absent are still chronically absent, and the 95% recess is not helping us know more information about those kiddos, and we’re not seeing their names pop up on the list of who’s being served by that. So ICAN actually had us log all our interventions in the computer platform by kid. So if we had a chronic absenteeism breakfast-

Alec Patton:
Oh, that’s super interesting.

Brittany Daley:
Yes, we logged, okay, these 74 kids made it to the chronic-

Julia Bridi:
Right. And so, then we were able to see for which students did this intervention work or not work, and then we could discuss why, and then we can revise and iterate what could we do next? And the intervention data would be updated every day. So we knew which kid got what and when. And then once a month, our attendance data, we had data sharing with the districts and whatnot, it would update and then it would repopulate. So when we were looking at big picture data and stuff, we could get once a month to see is this intervention working or not working? Or if we were looking at our SIS data on the weekly, we were looking at things like that too. So we were really looking to see which kids got what, and did it yield the results that we wanted it to yield or do we need to change it?

Brittany Daley:
And when we looked at that, what we found was pretty quickly we’re like, okay, we had 19 classrooms, 17 were either at the 95% goal or within a percent. We had two classrooms that every week weren’t at the goal, that every month weren’t at the goal. So then our attendance team said, “Great, instead of spending all our energy on the recess chart, let’s focus on those two classrooms.” So then, we would make specific incentives for those two classrooms, and see did that work. And so, it was really cool because by the end of the year, our last attendance incentive, our last 95% party, the entire school made it. And so, it was pretty awesome.

Alec Patton:
That seems like a nightmare for those teachers.

Brittany Daley:
I think it’s probably overwhelming because they’re investing a lot of effort and they weren’t getting the results they wanted, but they had a lot of partners. They weren’t doing it by themselves. The attendance team wasn’t doing it by themselves, nor was the teacher. So honestly, in the beginning, we took the lift. We’re like, “Hey, we’re going to do this attendance incentive for you. Are you interested in that? Do you want to tweak anything?” And then, we managed it. And then, our kindergarten teacher, which was one of our focus classrooms all year, by the end of the year, she was like, “I called everyone. I Dojoed them every single day. I invited them to Saturday school.”
She started volunteering to teach Saturday school because the kids had a higher chance of coming. She started interviewing kids about what would you want to see at school? One kid was like, “I would like mini erasers.” She was like, “Great, I will add that to the treasure chest.” So it started off with the attendance team as a lift, but then the teacher was so into it because they saw results and they weren’t alone in the work.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. I’m very interested in what Simon Breakspear calls the Pruning Principle, making sure that you’re cutting things as well as adding. And I’m curious if there’s any things as you were looking at this, if there were any choices you made of let’s stop doing that, or let’s stop doing that incentive that really hurt that we’re like, “Oh, I really don’t want to do this but…”

Brittany Daley:
I think for me, I love to have fun. So anytime I’m not having an incentive, it hurts. So I think the recess one, at first I was like, “Oh, but teachers love it.” But then again, the point of ICAN was seeing is it the best use of resources and is it serving a needed purpose? So if I was honest, I was like, nope and nope. So I had to let that one go. And then, there was even some shifts. To be slimed in previous years for attendance, I only invited the kids, but then the attendance team told me, “Hey, why don’t we invite the parents? They’re the ones that we need to get bringing their kids to school.” So that’s always a vulnerable thing. Like, “Okay, I’m going to have 300 kids and potentially 700 parents sliming me. Okay, let’s do it.” So I think those were things that were shifts that required some thought, but they were definitely the right thing to do.

Alec Patton:
Is there photo documentation of the sliming?

Julia Bridi:
Oh, there is.

Brittany Daley:
And my Mohawk and the Silly String.

Alec Patton:
We need some of this for the show notes.

Brittany Daley:
Okay. I got to live out my childhood Nickelodeon dreams. And I think one of the biggest things, it’s not an incentive, but I think it’s important was as a principal, I love data and I had this mentality like I need all the data. But with Julia and I, and then eventually with the team, we were able to talk about what data are we gathering that’s really useful. So when we started the year, every week I was going through power school and I was calculating by grade level, grade K had this attendance, and then I was like, this isn’t really helping us. So then, we started doing by teacher, and so that was a shift.

Alec Patton:
Oh, that’s interesting.

Brittany Daley:
I didn’t even do the grade levels. I mean, sometimes I do it just because I was curious and I have a hard time letting go, but I didn’t have the team analyze it because that wasn’t resulting in goodness for kids. It wasn’t helping us make any trends. So I released that.

Julia Bridi:
Well, and the other piece, Brittany, is you trained people to help you prepare the data too. So by the end, you weren’t prepping all that data.

Brittany Daley:
True.

Julia Bridi:
Somebody else was also helping do that. I think talking about pruning, sometimes it’s about the responsibilities, not just the stuff. And so, how do we deploy and create a bigger system so that different people leveraging their strengths can help with all of that infrastructure? That was a huge change. I remember going to a meeting and the school clerk had it. She’s like, “Ms. Brittany taught me how to do it. I have it. Let’s go.” I was like, “Okay.” So sometimes the pruning is about that too. Who’s the best person to do the things in order to do the things?

Brittany Daley:
And it was also in the beginning, it was a lot of modeling the system. Okay, we know this worked. What does that mean? Okay, we know this didn’t work. What does that mean? But then similar, it was more than just prepping data. Every single person on that team was able to actualize the system without me for the last four or five months. And it was kind of weird, because I’m like, “Oh, I guess I’ll sit here, I’ll be the timekeeper.” But the team was able to run themselves, and that was a shift, and it was maybe a vulnerable shift. I was nervous about it because I want results for kids so badly. But that was probably my biggest growing as a leader through ICAN.

Alec Patton:
How did you do that?

Brittany Daley:
Julia came to our team meetings and would give me feedback on the team meeting. And then, she was my leadership coach. I mean, she coached my whole team and everything, but I could go to her and be like, “Hey, I think this person’s holding back,” or, “How do I invest them?” Or she would tell me, “Hey, you weren’t at the meeting last week and no one calculated, so next week let’s teach them how to calculate.” So a lot of my time with her was like, okay, we have this system, or we do have this system where we’re finding it, but she pushed me a lot in how to share leadership and how to keep the system sustainable through everyone knowing what to do. And that was awesome. Julia, thank you for the feedback and I love the results we got together.

Julia Bridi:
It’s exciting. Thank you.

Alec Patton:
What was hardest to give up?

Brittany Daley:
Oh, gosh. Everything. I think running the attendance team meetings for me at first was the hardest to give up because I knew that if I ran them, we would get through the agenda, we would get through our action steps. We would think in a certain depth about kids and interventions and supports. And so, when I first started being like, okay, each person’s taking one section, and I would coach them and Julia and I came up with a plan like, okay, if you’re going to do part three of the agenda, which was looking at a certain incentive and seeing if it worked, I would pre coach the team member in how to run that section. And then, when we would show up to the meeting, I would be an equal participant. I would not facilitate. And in fact, I would try and not really speak because we wanted to gather data on where people needed support.
So that was for me at first because sometimes things don’t go the path you want. But then after, I would say about a month, the traction really started and the team was really proud. They noted it themselves. Wow, we all added, we let it. You weren’t here and we still did it. And sometimes they even came up with something better that I wouldn’t have thought of.

Julia Bridi:
And just the equity of voice just grew. People who were completely silent in the meetings on the front end of the year were contributing in super meaningful ways. They had this efficacy about them that they’re like, “Hey, I can contribute. I can do the hard things too.” And that was really exciting. I think the other thing, Brittany, so you began to assign different roles for the people and then eventually you left facilitation to them, like facilitating. You’re going to do that. I’ve been modeling and you would say, “I’m going to facilitate today, but next week you are going to facilitate. So maybe pay attention to what I’m doing today to move us through this meeting.” I recognize you were really intentional around that.

Brittany Daley:
Thank you.

Julia Bridi:
So people knew that, oh, she’s showing me so that I can do it next time.

Alec Patton:
I want to know a little bit more about how that equity of voice came about, because it is perfectly possible for somebody to let go of authority and just somebody else to step up and be possibly less aware of how much they’re taking over the room than the first person was. What happened to make it possible that people were speaking up who hadn’t been talking and contributing before?

Brittany Daley:
I think the real pivot moment, because we had two or three meetings and we’re like, “Hey, they were effective.” And there was four people who talked, but there was four people who didn’t. So that’s when we brought in that rubric. And the first part of the rubric wasn’t even about interventions or your data. It was literally about team membership, the formation of your team, and how your team members interact. So that’s when we projected it at the next meeting and we said, “Hey, everybody, read this. Where are we? Are we the most proficient, the least proficient, what?” So we placed ourselves and then we said, “Okay, what would we need to do to get to the highest category? Because we were efficient, but that doesn’t mean we had all the components.”
And the first thing we looked at was every single person contributes their expertise and skills in order to support attendance. And every single person was like, “Oh, I could do that. I could do that.” So then the next week we said, “Okay, hey everybody, here’s our rubric.” We set our goal in order to move to the most proficient category was everyone adds. So we would go through our whole meeting, and then at the end of the meeting we said, “How did we do?” And people started, I think, to be more aware of it. And then also we would celebrate it. “Whoa, hey, thank you. I never would’ve thought of that idea. You brought your expertise.”
And so, through naming that for people and helping them see the spaces that they could do that, and then we reflected on it, and then we talked about that one for two months, and then we’re like, “Okay, I think we’re good. Let’s go to the next one.” And like Julia said, being very transparent that it wasn’t just about attendance data, it was about everyone being empowered to support the system and support kids. And so, we had to start calling that out because I think very quickly people got comfortable with me facilitating. But it’s like kids, when you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to call on someone random in two minutes to share the answer.” Everyone is doing that math problem and trying something. So it was the same with staff members. Great, everyone’s going to take a piece. So let’s learn together if you have questions. And people would start asking, “Hey, how did you decide to ask that question?” Or, “How did you get this data?” So we were able to just talk and learn together. And that’s how we started.

Alec Patton:
All right. We have covered a lot of ground. And also, I think you all covered a lot of ground as a school. The answer to my initial question, how did you do it? It’s like all the things.

Brittany Daley:
Correct. And it was cool having, in ICAN, there was 10 other schools doing it with us. And that was the cool thing about having a coach was everyone’s starting point was different. So some people felt that they just needed to focus on postcards and data analysis and that was what they focused on. And we got to learn about that. And some people were ready to add more or do it differently. So everyone in the room got results, but everyone got it in a very different way. The coach spent time knowing where you could push your system or where was your entry point too.

Alec Patton:
All right. Is there anything else that you want to mention before we go?

Julia Bridi:
In order to get the change that Hamilton saw, you have to make this commitment. You have to live by it. You have to be willing to fail forward. You have to make sure that you’re spreading it and you have to believe that it can be achieved. If you don’t believe it, it’s not likely to happen. And if you’re not willing to spend the time on doing it, there is no silver bullet out there for attendance. And so, for anyone out there, do the hard things and it’s not easy. Go and do the home visits and learn and love them. And it’s not going to hurt by doing these home visits. It’s not going to hurt by sending these letters out, but try something and monitor it. I think I’d say maybe start there and do it with others. Don’t do it by yourself because none of this work can be done isolated.

Brittany Daley:
And I think it’s like attendance is a mindset and mindsets take time. And so, there was some weeks where we had wins and there was some weeks where we had losses, but just the reminder that this is a mindset, it takes time. What is our next step? And ICAN was really, the frequency of the meetings helped us have that mindset about mindset because you were looking at data so frequently that you could see small changes. So it’s not like August and October, 100% of our school had amazing attendance. We were having to constantly look for wins to celebrate, even if it was one student. We had one student that we did five different home visits for, and when he started coming to school, the entire attendance team had a party, and that was one kid. There was other kids we hadn’t yet had success with. So I think celebrate the one, celebrate the many, and celebrate the one. That was helpful.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. I think that’s a perfect place to end it. Brittany And Julia, thank you so much. This is inspiring and wonderful. I love it.

Julia Bridi:
Well, thanks for having us.

Brittany Daley:
Thank you. Thank you, Julia. I want ICAN part two. Bring me back.

Julia Bridi:
Well, we’re going to talk. I’ve got a community of practice running, so I’m going to be reaching out.

Brittany Daley:
Yep, okay. We sign up.

Alec Patton:
Excellent. All right. You heard it here first.

Julia Bridi:
All right. Thanks so much, Alec. We appreciate the opportunity.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Dr. Brittany Daley and Julia Bridi for this conversation. You can find resources and slime photos in the show notes. Thanks for listening.