ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Allentown School District has unveiled a plan to launch a data dashboard next year to track and improve student attendance.
“Making information around our attendance available to everyone will really help to create a call to action for stakeholders,” Kathryn Zimmermann, ASD’s director of data and performance management, said Thursday.
Zimmerman is a strategic data fellow with Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. She is working with ASD through a partnership the district has with her fellowship program.
Each day that a student misses, is an opportunity that they miss to learn..."Kathryn Zimmermann, ASD’s director of data and performance management and Harvard strategic data fellow
Zimmerman is creating tools to help the district and its partners “more clearly and purposefully” use and monitor data.
Her work with ASD is focused on developing a data infrastructure for the district to track its progress toward the goals laid out in its strategic plan, “Lighting the Way: A Blueprint for Innovation and Excellence 2030.”
The district’s strategic plan has a goal of increasing the percentage of students who attend 90% or more school days each academic year and reducing chronic absenteeism.
Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses 10% or more school days.
“Each day that a student misses is an opportunity that they miss to learn, connect with others and get support from our school staff that can’t fully be made up later on,” Zimmerman said.
Attendance essential for student success
Research shows that chronically absent students struggle across grade levels with academics, such as math and reading, Zimmerman said.
They also exhibit behavior issues and face economic hardships later in life, she said.
Zimmerman is working on building an attendance dashboard that will be made publicly available on the district’s website in coming months to track how the district is doing as it relates to attendance and absenteeism.
The dashboard will allow users to sort through data by school, grade, student group, gender and more.
She showed school directors an unfinished version of the dashboard at Thursday’s school board meeting.
On average, 90.4% of the district’s 16,114 students have been present at school on any given day this school year, the dashboard showed.
Zimmerman also said 29.8% of students are chronically absent so far this year, and that number likely will grow as the year goes on.
Last school year, 36% of students were considered chronically absent by the last day of school.
Transparency to help foster solutions
Having the dashboard information publicly available in early 2026 will help ASD be transparent about attendance trends and collaborate with community members on strategies to get students to school consistently, Zimmerman said.
“We’re going to actually dig into some of the root causes as to why these things are happening."Carol Birks, Allentown superintendent
“We’re going to actually dig into some of the root causes as to why these things are happening,” Superintendent Carol Birks said.
Birks said families have the answers ASD needs to improve attendance. She said she and her administration will talk to parents about attendance at advisory council meetings.
Additionally, Zimmerman said the district already is focused on implementing school-based attendance teams, efficient transportation routes and parent engagement practices to reduce chronic absenteeism.
Allentown School Board President Andrene Brown-Nowell said she’s excited to see the attendance data dashboard take shape moving forward and how it will help the district reach its goals.
“We’ve been saying for the past couple years that we want to become a data driven organization, and I think that this is the first step,” she said.
