Baking a better system: How recipe cards solve chronic absenteeism

Every family has a story about a cherished cake. The one grandma made… moist, rich, topped with a swirl of frosting that tasted like home.

The only problem? Grandma never wrote the recipe down. She “just knew.” And so, after she was gone, the cake disappeared with her. Despite best efforts, no one could quite recreate it.

In education, we often find ourselves in a similar situation. We see a campus or a district do something extraordinary (a breakthrough in student engagement, a dramatic turnaround in attendance, a leap forward in literacy) and we celebrate it.

But then we move on. The strategy goes unrecorded, and we’re left with the memory of what worked, but not the method.

At Pflugerville ISD, we’ve been tackling chronic absenteeism with a sense of urgency and a spirit of innovation. Over the past year, we reduced district-wide chronic absenteeism from 20% to 16%. In our highest-needs feeder pattern schools, the rate dropped from 32% to 23%. These improvements are measurable, replicable and (most importantly) documented.

We didn’t stumble upon success. We followed a process. And while our story is unique to our context, the structure we used can serve as a recipe card for other districts. Here’s what that looks like.

Recipe card: A Step-by-step process

• Step 1: Leadership & Team Formation. Establish a cross-functional task force that includes district leaders, campus staff, families and community members. Assign clear roles and responsibilities, from data leads to outreach coordinators.
• Step 2: Data Collection & Triangulation. Pull together attendance data, student demographics and behavior records. Supplement this with surveys and focus groups. We partnered with ThoughtExchange to collect much of this data. Triangulate the data to identify patterns and isolate the most critical barriers to attendance.
• Step 3: Identify Barriers and Insights. Use the data to understand the human story behind the numbers. In our case, we saw transportation gaps, mental health challenges and a lack of belonging show up again and again.
• Step 4: Develop and Implement Interventions. Design solutions that match the specific needs you’ve uncovered. For us, this included personalized outreach via EveryDay Labs, creating school-based attendance teams, offering incentives, and most importantly, fostering a culture where every student feels seen.
• Step 5: Regular Monitoring and Adjustment. Create a rhythm of accountability. Hold reviews at the campus and district levels. Use data. Empower teams to iterate.
• Step 6: Evaluate and Scale Success. Measure your key performance indicators (attendance rates, family engagement, behavior incidents) and share your results. What worked should become institutional knowledge, not individual memory.

Attendance is the plate

Why does this matter so much? Because in Texas, our funding is tied to attendance. Students not in school mean fewer dollars to invest in programs, supports and staff.

But more importantly, when students are in school consistently, we see a decline in behavioral issues, an uptick in learning and an increase in their sense of belonging.

Attendance isn’t just a number, it’s a signal. It tells us whether students feel safe, seen and supported. It is often the first outward sign of deeper issues, from housing instability to school climate concerns.

Conversely, when attendance improves, discipline referrals often drop, classrooms become more stable and the entire learning environment elevates. If we want to improve academics, reduce office referrals, and create healthier schools, we must start by getting students in the building.

Attendance is not one more thing on the plate; it is the plate.

Which brings us back to grandma’s cake. Great leaders keep recipe cards. They take what is often instinctive and transform it into something teachable. That is the work of district leadership, not just doing the hard things, but capturing how they were done so others can do them too.

At Pflugerville ISD, our cake isn’t perfect, but it’s being baked with care. And now, the recipe is written down.