Clear Creek ISD officials are seeing attendance rates throughout the district rise to over 96%—a rate it has not seen since before COVID-19.

What you need to know

While the district did not include attendance data for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, attendance rates were over 97% in the 2016-17 school year, and dropped to nearly 92% in the 2022-23 school year.In order to keep attendance at a high rate, district officials developed an attendance tier dashboard, which gave each campus daily information on which students weren’t attending school.

Why it matters

The attendance rates—also known as average daily attendance, or ADA—are used to determine state funding for CCISD.

Since districts across Texas receive funding based on ADA, higher attendance means districts could receive more funding, compared to districts with low attendance rates, according to the Texas Education Agency.

District officials said attendance is “the heartbeat” of a healthy school.

“We know that every day counts, and we know that attendance is something that we took for granted in our district for several years,” said Holly Hughes, CCISD’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We had students who came to class and had great attendance, and we found that over the years of COVID that we had quite a change in our culture and our attendance patterns.”