TL;DR:

Troup County School System had eighteen schools generating eighteen different versions of the same attendance letter, and no shared view of which students needed support. In August, before anyone logged the new year’s first attendance code, the district moved every school onto one shared system. Two years later, chronic absenteeism dropped from 16.6% to 12.2%, a 25% reduction, and Family Liaisons traded hours of letter-writing for actual conversations with families.

One Decision That Changed Attendance Across Eighteen Schools

Eighteen schools. Eighteen different attendance letters. Eighteen different rules for who got one, when, and in what language. Troup County School System (TCSS), a southwest Georgia district with about 12,000 students across 18 buildings, had one job and eighteen ways of doing it.

This was a systems problem. When TCSS moved every school onto one system, attendance improved over the next two years.

The Cost of Eighteen Different Systems

Each school generated its own attendance letters. Each school decided on its own who got one and when. Family Liaisons spent hours every week creating, printing, and mailing individual notices. That time came straight out of the hours meant for actual conversations with families.

The district also lost visibility every time a student transferred between schools. In a district this size, that happens all the time. But attendance history didn’t travel with the student, so each transfer wiped the slate clean. A family could move buildings and start over on a blank record. Their kid’s 18 missed days at the last school didn’t come with them. Eighteen days is more than three and a half weeks of missed instruction. None of it counted anymore once the transfer went through.

Liaisons and administrators were doing exactly what their systems asked of them. The systems themselves just weren’t built to talk to each other.

One Shared System, Set Before the Year Started

TCSS moved to SchoolStatus Attend in August, before anyone logged the first attendance code of the new year. That timing helped the district sets its baseline for the full school year: the absence thresholds, the letter templates, the rules for which students trigger a flag and when. TCSS built a shared system before setting their baseline, so every school started the year on the same playbook instead of eighteen separate habits built up over years.

Candice McGhee, TCSS’s Director of Preventions and Interventions, described the shift in plain terms:

Visibility replaced complex report generation with an immediate, clear list of absent students, giving administrators a starting point instead of a search.

What Family Liaisons Do With Their Time Now

The letters still go out. The system sends them by mail and digitally, translates them when a family needs one in another language, and builds each one from the student’s own record instead of a generic district-wide notice. What changed is who does the work of getting them there.

Staff time now goes toward the work that really makes a difference: one-on-one conversations, follow-up calls, and intervention plans built around the student in front of them. And those plans still tie back to the district’s PBIS and MTSS frameworks.

Over two years, TCSS’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped from 16.6% to 12.2%. That’s a 25% improvement, meaning the number of students missing too much school shrank by a quarter. It came from making sure every school sent the right letter, on time, every time.

This is the real impact of centralizing what looks, from the outside, like paperwork. A liaison who used to spend her afternoon stuffing envelopes now spends it on the phone with a family whose kid missed too many Mondays, working out what’s really going on. The letter still goes out. The conversation brings the student back.

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