New in SchoolStatus for Back to School 2026: Attendance, Digital Forms, and More

Across all of our products, we’ve made huge improvements to make this back-to-school the best one yet. Highlights include new daily attendance notifications, support for time-based attendance tracking, and a new way to consolidate athletic and extracurricular conversations into a single communications solution.

Take a look below for everything new.

What’s New in SchoolStatus Attend

SchoolStatus Attend helps districts reverse chronic absenteeism. This back-to-school season, that means connecting with families after a single absence, seeing a clear picture of missed learning time (not just full-day absences), and documenting a student’s full story.

Start the Conversation about Absenteeism Earlier with Daily Attendance Notifications 

The earlier families know about absenteeism, the better. New Daily Attendance Notifications send a message when students are marked absent. Families can reply with why students missed school, and that quick exchange helps districts surface absence reasons earlier. A companion report will give district leaders a quick view of their most common absence types, facilitating targeted districtwide interventions.

Time-Based Attendance Tracking in SchoolStatus Attend 

How districts across the country track attendance is changing. In states like Ohio, attendance is tracked by the hour to get a better idea of how attendance impacts academic progress. SchoolStatus Attend now supports time-based attendance tracking, making it possible for districts to meet state mandates, get a clearer picture of absenteeism, and trigger automated interventions at exactly the right time.

State mandates aren’t the only reason attendance tracking gets complicated. Districts also have to account for varying schedules: a school site running a different calendar than the rest of the district, or block schedules at some secondary schools. Previously, it was hard to accurately track attendance when schedules varied so much from school to school. Now, leaders can understand attendance across every school site, no matter its schedule.

Refine Notes: AI-Assisted, Court-Ready Attendance Documentation

The notes districts keep about student attendance are legal documents, so tone and word choice matter. The new Refine Notes feature uses AI to help ensure documentation is court-ready. Attendance officers can make notes more concise, clearer, friendlier, or more formal with a quick click, and can accept or edit every suggestion before anything saves to the student record.

Note: All AI features in SchoolStatus are opt-in. If you’d like to use this feature, please reach out to your Customer Success or Implementation Manager. 

A Redesigned Parent Portal for Easy Access to Attendance Interventions, Positive Messages, and More

SchoolStatus Attend sends messages to families, both digitally and physically, when students cross absence thresholds. While families can always view previous outreach on their phones, email inboxes, or by re-reading the physical letters, the newly redesigned Parent Portal gives them a single place to view outreach so they know exactly where their child stands and how they can help improve attendance. 

What’s New in SchoolStatus Connect

Attendance is only one piece of the puzzle. Consistently connecting with families on the topics that matter most also requires connected data that helps educators know which families need extra support, a single place to view all communications for families, and the ability to facilitate in-person communication when it makes sense.

At-Risk Dashboard: Grades, Attendance, and Behavior in One View

District data is often sprawled across multiple systems, which makes it easy to miss students who need more intensive support. A missed day of school doesn’t ring an alarm bell as one data point. But a missed school day, a failing grade, and a sharp increase in behavior incidents tell a different story. The At-Risk Dashboard brings together grades, attendance, and behavior into a single view, so district and school leaders can intervene when students need an extra hand. The connected data also helps educators craft better messages, showing families how various data points affect each other, for example, how more missed school days could be driving a sharp decline in grades.

Joinable Classrooms for Clubs and Athletic Teams

So much communication with families isn’t from classroom educators. The basketball coach may need to share an update on the next game. The chess club sponsor wants families to know the new chess boards came in. Previously, this kind of communication had no real home in SchoolStatus Connect. Joinable Classrooms changes that, making it easy to create groups of students and families that reflect every organization in a school or district, so every group communicates through the same trusted channel families already use for the classroom.

Show Off Your Brand in Automated Emails

Families know district brands. So, we’ve put the school or district logo on every email sent through SchoolStatus Connect. Communication should be more recognizable, making it more likely for families to complete next steps and reply to important messages. 

Faster Classroom Announcements in SchoolStatus Connect

Classroom educators need to get information to families on their lunch breaks, while students are completing a quick “Do Now,” or during passing periods. The improved classroom experience lets teachers create an announcement without navigating away from the class page. Educators who teach multiple classes can also create an announcement once and post it everywhere it needs to be seen, so information reaches families faster.

Quickly Check On Connection Health 

The new Connection Health snapshot on the SchoolStatus Connect homepage shows every district leader and classroom educator, at a glance, the announcements and activities sent over the last seven days, their read rate, and how long ago the last communication went out. That snapshot allows everyone to act on real numbers. A principal who notices that few announcements went out last week can send a quick reminder to staff. A teacher who spots a low read rate can take a closer look at their message content to see if it’s resonating with families.

What’s New in SchoolStatus Forms & Flows 

Back to school means lots of forms. This year, families should have a better time completing them all with our newly redesigned form experience. We’ve also made it easier to understand your community with survey questions. 

A Better Experience for Completing Forms

Completing a form is now a breeze. We’ve redesigned forms to make them cleaner and easier to complete, a real difference for the enrollment, health, and permission forms families rush to finish during back-to-school. They’re also a bit more fun to look at, with the option for an image at the top.

New Survey Questions to Help You Understand Your Community 

Surveys play an important role. Districts may want to understand how families best respond to communication. A principal may want to understand how staff viewed the last professional development session. To make sending out surveys easier, we’ve added a new question type to SchoolStatus Forms & Flows. Create a form, add survey questions, and send it out digitally. Once forms are completed, you can quickly analyze the data to determine how you want to proceed.

What’s New in SchoolStatus Boost 

While observations and instructional coaching usually aren’t the main focus on day one, the right infrastructure to ensure they run smoothly is just as important. We’ve updated SchoolStatus Boost to make sure instructional coaching is properly tracked and observations include the right documentation and better feedback.

More Flexibility for Instructional Coaches to Reflect the Reality of Educator Development 

Coaching cycles can be fluid. We’ve updated SchoolStatus Boost: Coach to help instructional coaches adjust coaching dates (even after a cycle has started) to ensure they accurately reflect the activities coaches and educators are completing together. This small change should help districts fully understand the impact of each cycle on teacher development. 

OneDrive Integration for SchoolStatus Boost

We’ve had a long-standing integration with Google Drive, allowing educators and observers to add lesson plans, student work, and family engagement logs. We’re expanding our integrations to include OneDrive, too, so educators already standardized on Microsoft 365 can quickly add documents from the platform they use every day.

Better Forms for Better Feedback 

We’ve overhauled the QA forms in SchoolStatus Boost, where observers go to provide feedback to classroom teachers. Now it’s easier to record quantitative data, view records to understand growth over time, and align feedback with previously set goals, making it simpler to deliver feedback that helps teachers grow in their practice

We’re excited for you to check out everything new in SchoolStatus. Have questions about using these new features in your district?