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Two years ago, Warm Springs Elementary achieved Adequate Yearly Progress in all areas but one: attendance, which was 91 percent (92 percent needed to reach the target). There are various reasons for the lower attendance, explains Principal Dawn Smith, but the reality is that families need to travel long distances during the day to do business and to obtain basic medical, financial, and other services, and often need to take their children with them.

Smith knows involving families is crucial. "We talked with parents, got suggestions to make attendance better, and implemented those ideas. What doesn't work," she says, "is to send home an official letter outlining the consequences." Instead, she and her staff talk with the families and/or send personal letters home that express their concern that students will fall behind if they don't attend school. "We tell parents that their most important role is to get their children to school," Smith adds. Teachers also send "Coming Week" letters home to families that describe the core subject plans for the week, scheduled assessments, scoring rubrics for state work samples, demonstrations of the "hows" behind math processes, and specialized homework to support the week's lessons. In this way families know what their children are missing when they aren't in school, to show that extra homework will not make up for the missing days.

Positive publicity for increasing attendance numbers is another strategy. They are posted everywhere in the small community: at the post office, tribal center, and grocery store, and at the school's front entrance. The school's Web site has a running banner that tells the attendance for each day, and the monthly attendance (for September 2003 it was 94 percent). Students are honored each month for perfect attendance at monthly award assemblies, and receive certificates and "book bucks" (school dollars that buy new paperback books at the school). That award (by parent suggestion) will now include a new school logo shirt that will have iron-on emblems for each month they earn the award.