Attendance White Paper

FORGING OPPORTUNITIES FOR REFUGEES IN AMERICA White Paper Beyond Counting Absences: A Community-Based Model for Preventing Chronic Absenteeism Among Refugee Students September 2026 Executive Summary Forging Opportunities for Refugees in America, or FORA, is undertaking an intensive effort to drive chronic absenteeism among the approximately 120 refugee children we serve below 7 percent for the 2026–27 school year, with a goal of zero within two years. We are hardly the first to recognize the importance of attendance. Decades of research have established the relationship between attendance, academic achievement, educational engagement, and graduation.¹,²,³ Nor are we proposing a competing theory of attendance. Our approach is grounded in Attendance Works’ architecture, the national nonprofit whose research and tiered framework for preventing chronic absenteeism we rely on throughout this report: foundational supports that create positive conditions for learning, Tier 1 universal prevention, Tier 2 personalized early intervention when an individual student’s attendance history or emerging pattern requires more support, and Tier 3 intensive intervention for students facing the most severe or persistent attendance challenges.⁴ What we are proposing is not so much a reframe as an application. For children who have always had access to school, chronic absenteeism is generally understood as lost access to an education already available to them. For some refugee children, however, consistent access to formal education is itself new. They may have been barred from school, displaced repeatedly, or lost years of education before entering an American classroom. Applying chronic-absenteeism prevention to these children is therefore not only about restoring attendance. It is part of establishing meaningful educational access in the first place. That application changes neither Attendance Works’ architecture nor its tiers. It changes the intensity with which we believe the universal foundation should be built for this population. Attendance Works urges practitioners to understand why children miss school, organizing common causes into four broad categories: barriers to attendance, aversion to school, disengagement from school, and misconceptions about the impact of absences. It recommends confirming those causes by listening to students and families and aligning interventions with what is getting in the way.⁵ Our scholars, all of whom have fled because of war, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, arrived as English Learners and economically disadvantaged, and all are Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education, or SLIFE. Almost all were denied an education in their homeland, such as the Rohingya from Myanmar and Afghan girls. They are not simply children whose education was temporarily delayed by migration. Many missed years of foundational literacy, numeracy, academic routines, and habits of formal schooling that American schools assume children of their age already possess.⁶ For some scholars, consistent school attendance is not a routine that has been interrupted. It is a routine they were never given the opportunity to develop because formal schooling itself was 1