Dallas ISD is putting serious money on the line to get students back in their seats.
On Thursday, trustees signed off on up to $5 million in one-time spending aimed squarely at shrinking the district’s chronic-absence problem. Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde told the board that about 24 percent of students are now chronically absent and warned that small, slow gains are not enough to change where students end up academically. District officials say the new funds will blend personalized outreach with new technology systems, and that specific vendors have not yet been selected.
Board action and district message
According to KERA News, trustees approved the spending plan at a Dec. 18 meeting, where Elizalde told the board that “minor incremental improvement is not going to change our student outcomes.” The report notes that the $5 million is expected to cover both person-to-person outreach and digital tools to track and re-engage students who are not showing up. The district has not yet chosen a vendor or vendors to run the work.
How big the problem is
The situation in Dallas is not an outlier. The Texas Education Agency’s recent data shows that roughly 19 percent of students statewide are now considered chronically absent, a steep climb from pre-pandemic levels of about 11 percent, as The Texas Tribune reported. Research from Rice University’s Kinder Institute has tracked the same post-pandemic pattern and highlighted outreach-heavy strategies such as canvassing families, home visits and case management as tools some Texas districts are using to pull those rates back down.
What Dallas Is Doing
Trustee Bryon Sanders praised the board’s move, calling attendance outreach “one of the most important things happening in public … actually, any education right now,” as reported by KERA News. Dallas ISD already operates attendance-intervention efforts that include family advocacy, truancy prevention and home visits, and district leaders say those programs could grow with the fresh funding.
The district’s own attendance resources describe a mix of home visits, family advocacy and campus-level targeted interventions focused on students who are missing the most school. The new money could allow Dallas ISD to add staff and intensify that outreach at high-need campuses, according to the district’s description of its existing efforts on Dallas ISD.
Where it fits in the budget
This attendance push is arriving in the middle of a much larger and more complicated money conversation. Trustees are weighing a multibillion-dollar bond proposal while sorting out long-term priorities for facilities, technology and safety, a workshop covered by The Dallas Morning News showed. During that meeting, board members pressed administrators to post more detailed budget and bond materials online before trustees reconvene in January so they can judge this one-time attendance investment alongside other big-ticket needs…