No More Pizza Parties! The Real Way School Counselors Can Fix Attendance

Students refusing school isn’t new... but what’s happening now is different.

Across the country, nearly one in three students is missing ten percent or more of the school year.

And while everyone’s blaming “attendance apathy” or “bad parenting,” the truth is a lot more complicated.

In this episode, I talk about what school refusal really is- and what it’s not.
You’ll learn the four hidden drivers behind school avoidance, how to spot them, and exactly what school counselors can do (without becoming the attendance police).

We’ll also talk about the conversations no one wants to have, like what to do when it’s the parent keeping the student home, or when a student says flat-out, “I just don’t want to go.”

This isn’t another pep talk about attendance incentives.

It’s a grounded, evidence-based roadmap for helping kids come back to school- and want to stay there.

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⭐️ Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us!  As mentioned in the episode, use code OCTOBER 25 for a limited time.⭐️

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Where to go next, depending on what you need today...

NEW → Grab my free ​Secret Series for School Counselors​- Six short stories about what no one’s willing to say in school counseling

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Problem Behind Absences
• 2:51 Attendance As A Safety Signal
• 4:01 The Four Drivers Of Avoidance
• 6:30 Building Bravery Over Avoidance
• 9:46 Confidence For Performance Anxiety
• 12:16 Shifting Security From Home To School
• 15:26 Making Home Neutral And School Rewarding
• 18:11 Rebuilding Agency When Families Disengage
• 21:18 Coaching Parents And Reducing Accommodation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Imagine this. You're a school counselor. That's hard to imagine, isn't it? Uh, you're a school counselor and you've just received an email. It came from a teacher about a student. We'll call him George. And George used to be a star pupil, but lately he's missing more and more days of school. His parents are saying that he's just not feeling well randomly, but you know something else is going on. This scenario might feel really familiar because it's happening everywhere. Nearly one in three students is now missing 10% or more of the school year. But the question that we've been trying to answer in schools isn't the right one. We've been asking, how do we make them come to school? When really what we should be asking is, why don't they want to? The truth is, when you look deeper, you realize that school refusal often isn't about laziness or defiance. It's a signal or an alarm that something underneath the surface isn't working. And it's up to us to figure out what that is. Stick with me. Hey school counselor, welcome back. Today we're tackling one of the biggest challenges you're probably facing on your campus. Kids who won't come to school. But instead of more attendance letters and consequence charts, we're gonna look a little deeper. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a bit of rebellion, you've got to be in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. You've probably been on one of these calls with a parent when they say something like, He just won't get out of bed. There's nothing I can do. Or a teacher is messaging you saying they're out again and no one has called or messaged me to tell me why. You already know what's what. It's another case of school refusal. And while the pandemic may have exposed some of the cracks in students' motivation to attend school, what we're seeing right now is so much bigger. We are watching an entire generation of students wrestle with anxiety, loss of structure, and shifting perceptions of not only safety, but of industry. According to Maynard and Team 2023, chronic absenteeism has doubled since 2019, with nearly one-third of students missing 10% or more of the year. But research also shows that school refusal is actually most often a behavioral manifestation of anxiety, fear, or safety perceptions and isn't oppositional at all. So instead of asking, how do we make kids attend school? We should be asking, why don't they feel like they can? And here's where so many schools are getting it wrong. We have historically treated attendance like a compliance issue when it's actually a safety signal. When students stop showing up, they're not being defiant per se, they're communicating danger. And our job as school counselors isn't to enforce attendance, it's to decode it. And if we're going to decode it, we need a good framework. Lucky for us, Kearney and Silverman 1999 actually identified four main drivers behind school avoidance. And that model has been confirmed over and over again in decades of research since it was published. The four main drivers of school avoidance are avoiding uncomfortable emotions like anxiety, dread, or shame, escaping evaluation or social judgment, seeking connection or attention, and accessing rewards outside of school. Most cases of chronic absenteeism are a blend. But even in the blends, there's usually one factor that's driving the bus. And once you know which one you're dealing with, the plan changes entirely. Now, what I'm about to share next isn't theory, it's actually what's working in schools right now. These are real strategies pulled from not only the research, but from the case consultations inside our School for School Counselors mastermind, where school counselors test ideas and share what's actually holding up in the real world. So as you listen, think about which part of this hits closest to home for you, because that's where you're going to be able to jump in with a solution tomorrow. Let's start with the most common roadblock first: students avoiding feelings like anxiety, dread, or shame. Now we're often told that we need to be extra gentle with these students, that we should remove triggers, maybe think about shortening the day or lightening the workload somehow. But every time we do, we accidentally reinforce the fear. Avoidance feeds anxiety. And our job isn't to protect kids from being uncomfortable. Our job is to help master those feelings. So what do we do? We build bravery. And we can do it in several ways. We can use cognitive behavioral microtechniques, like name and reframe. What's the thought that's keeping you from coming to school? And what's a more true thought that we could try? We could give students a worry window, two minutes of air time for all the anxieties, then we shift the focus on how to be successful at school. Those are going to help students build bravery and a sense of competence instead of running away. We could also use questions from solution focused brief therapy. And if you're a podcast listener from way back, you'll remember episode 63. It was called What School Counselors May Not Realize About Solution Focused Counseling. It was a really good primer on how to get started in solution-focused techniques. But in this approach, we would ask kids things like tell me about a day when you did want to come to school. What was different? Or you're a three out of 10 for wanting to be at school today? How can we bump it up to a four? Now, to be clear, solution-focused counseling isn't as simple as just asking these isolated questions, but they will get you started off on the right foot. Collaborative problem solving developed by Ross Green. You may recognize his name from things like Lost at School or The Explosive Child. And I talked about his approach in episode 88. It was called Empathy and Action Using Collaborative Problem Solving in School Counseling. We would say something like, I'm noticing mornings are really hard for you, but the school still needs you here. Let's find something that works for both of us. In any of these approaches, we're not teaching comfort. We're teaching courage. We're teaching kids that they can overcome those barriers and that they are capable. And at the end of the day, that's going to go a whole lot further than minimizing expectations. Now, our second group of students are the students who aren't afraid of school. They're just afraid of being seen in it. They fear failure. They fear peer scrutiny. They don't want to be seen as anything less than, right? So when we pull them from oral presentations or we give them some similar accommodation, it might feel like we're being kind, but really what we're doing is keeping them trapped. They don't need a rescue operation. They need proof that they can succeed. So let's engineer some early wins for these folks. Let's pre-practice presentations or group work in our offices. Let's practice peer interactions so they know how to handle whatever it is they're worried about coming around. Let's work to normalize imperfection, that it's not always about winning the race or doing things perfectly or having a certain persona around campus. Gonzalez and Team 2018 found that interventions targeting perceived competence directly improved not only attendance, but self-efficacy. Confidence is the antidote to avoidance. Now, in our third group of students, and we usually see this in the younger set, students are refusing school not to rebel, but to try to stay safe. They're anxious, they're craving connection. And while we like to defer to parents and assume that they know best, that's not always true. Because when a parent's anxiety is driving these decisions, it's often serving to deepen the child's fear. So we've got to shift security to the school. We need to provide warm personal greetings, even if these students are late. We need to welcome them by name, and we need to remind them how excited we are that they got there, regardless of how late they show up. We can give them some meaningful roles on campus. Perhaps they're a greeter, a helper. Maybe they're the fish feeding captain. Maybe they serve as a peer mentor to someone else on campus. And then we need to coach parents to hold a calm and consistent line at home. We need to teach them to be almost boring in their responses to their child's cries of not wanting to go to school. I'm sorry you don't want to go, but you're safe there. I'll see you after school. And that's it. Now that sounds easy on the surface, but I can tell you there have been so many parents who have experienced extreme difficulty with holding that line, right? Because they had other issues at play too that were preventing them from being so matter-of-fact. So we've got to coach them. And sometimes we have to encourage them more than we have to encourage their children. We can also help set some boundaries. We can create attendance contracts with parents. We can define criteria for staying home: fevers, vomiting, things like that. Other than that, you need to be at school. And we can provide immediate check-ins when students are absent. Research shows that that immediate person-to-person contact goes a long way in mitigating attendance concerns. Your power as a school counselor here is coordination. You can keep the tone compassionate but firm and encourage the parents toward the best outcome. And then our fourth group of students are the ones who find home more rewarding than school. We tell ourselves that these kids just need more motivation, right? But that is not the issue. When staying home feels better to a child, the environment itself is reinforcing the avoidance. That makes things precarious for us. We have to work with parents to keep students' days neutral. No gaming, no tablets, no fun, no extra freedom. That in itself is a huge battle, right? If you've been in it, you know what I mean. But we have to consistently communicate this with parents, even when it feels like we're shouting into the void. We also need to make attendance matter to students at school, where they get choices within their school day. They see the relevance of what they're learning or the relevance of the content to their goals, and they receive recognition for being there. For older students, we can use things like motivational interviewing, where we talk about what do you want five years from now? And how could showing up to school help you get there? And then we could go from there into what's one small step that you could try this week to get you going in the right direction. With younger students, we have to have a keen eye towards structure with fun. So predictable routines with small rewards, social skills groups with daily adult connection, visual schedules with privileges around campus. The goal is not punishing the kid for not having been at school consistently, it's to make school the place where their life feels like it gets bigger. And when they feel like their life is getting bigger, they're going to want to be there. Now, having it, I'm going to be real with you and I'm going to pause for a minute because I think I know what you might be thinking right now. You're thinking, okay, Steph, that all makes sense for kids who are anxious or families that are struggling. But what about the ones who just don't stinkin' care? Those are the students whose parents just say, I don't know what you want me to do about it when you call their house. Or we can't make him go. Or the students that just shrug when you say, Why weren't you here yesterday? We missed you. These are the students and families who've decided that school just isn't worth it. And it's very tempting to believe that these students or families just don't value education. But we need to reframe this a little bit because apathy is rarely about values. Apathy is usually about power. When students or parents say, I don't care, what they often mean is, I don't feel like it matters. They've tried, they failed, or they've been dismissed so many times that disengagement becomes a form of self-protection. So what do we do when students or parents have completely disengaged? We have to rebuild agency, not obedience. We reconnect before we redirect, starting with curiosity instead of demands. What's your morning like before school? When was the last time you actually enjoyed coming to school? How can you tie their attendance to the things they care about? Their friends, their jobs, their sports, their independence, so that they understand that every day they attend is building the skills that are gonna get them where they want to go. We gotta give them a sense of power with small choices. Do you want to come in my office for five minutes or do you want to head straight to class? Do you want to go to lunch in the lunchroom or do you want to come eat in a quiet place? And then we stay calm, predictable, steady, even when they test our patients, even when we feel like we do not understand where they are coming from. And we have to be prepared to work the long game. When families appear disengaged, we got to look for what's underneath. Is it transportation? Is it unstable housing? Is it mental health concerns? Is it work conflicts? Apathy is often the armor that is hiding exhaustion. So if it looks like they don't care, don't just immediately write them off. Start smaller with curiosity, relevance, power, respect, and then hold steady in the long game. Care enough for both of you until the student can meet you halfway. Saying I don't care is not a wall. Y'all, that's a wound. And we are in the business of healing, we should not be in the business of judging. And just to add an extra layer onto this, sometimes we have something called parental accommodation at play. And when you're feeling just a hint of, I don't want to go to school, and your parent immediately rushes in and says, Oh, well, that's okay. You don't have to. That's parental accommodation. That strengthens avoidance. The research says that parental accommodation worsens anxiety. And that reducing that accommodation improves both anxiety and attendance. So we may have to coach the parents as we're going through this process. We may have to tell them things like, hey, I know mornings are tough at your house. But the fastest way out of this fight is making sure they come to school regularly. Validate the parents' emotions, their potential anxieties, but redirect their action and rehearse those conversations with the parent. Just like you would rehearse it with the students, rehearse it with the parent. You don't need to be fighting them to get their students in school. You need to teach them to fight their own fear effectively. Now, is that an official stance of the school counselor's role on campus? Not exactly, but we're playing the real world game here, right? Not the mandated list of appropriate and inappropriate responsibilities. What's important to me is best outcomes for students. If that means I spend four or five phone calls with a parent coaching them through what happens next, I guess that's what that means. All right, so then let's zoom out a little bit. You should not have to be the attendance police, right? But you are the pattern interpreter. You're the connector between all of these people and all of their feelings. And you may not be able to fix every case, but you will change trajectories. And you can do that one plan, one parent, and one brave student at a time. Now, if this episode has you motivated and you're thinking, man, I could use a system for this, you're right. And that's what we build inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Every week we take challenges just like this one and we collaborate on them to determine best outcomes. And we also often create concrete playbooks that you can use for step-by-step implementation of what the research and real life actually say works. You'll get coaching, community, and the accountability that makes your professional growth sustainable without making you feel overwhelmed. Now, if you've been considering joining us, I'm going to give you a little bonus as a podcast listener because I know this time of year is so tough. And I want you to feel supported. So when you go to sign up for the Mastermind at schoolforschoolcounselors.com slash mastermind, enter the code October25. All right. All one word, all caps, October 25. And I'm going to have a special surprise for you to let you know that you've made the right decision. And I would love to work with you personally in a Zoom room. That would be a dream come true for me. And I hope you feel the same way. So head over to schoolforschoolcounselors.com slash mastermind. Enter October 25 and see what I've got waiting for you. Hey, thanks for being here and for showing up for your students, even when they won't show up for themselves. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for continuing to show up each and every day for your students. And thank you for fighting for their futures. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Until then, take care. Hey, before you go, I want to tell you something. Every week when I sit down to record this podcast, it's usually very late on a Sunday night, right before the episode goes out on Monday morning. The house is quiet. I'm recording in my closet, actually, and I'm thinking about the school counselor out there who's exhausted but still trying to do the right thing. When you leave a review or you hit follow on this podcast, it tells me that my late nights matter. It tells me that this work is reaching you. So if this episode helped you see your students or yourself a little differently, would you please take a second to tap follow or leave a quick review? That helps more school counselors find the show. And it keeps me here at this microphone fighting for the kind of school counseling that actually makes a difference and doing what I can to make your job feel a little less impossible. Have a great week and thanks in advance for your follow and your review. You're the best.