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Every kid. Every school. Every day.

Welcome to A+ Schools’ 2023 Report to the Community on Public School Progress in Pittsburgh. Since our last report, a focus on school attendance has galvanized community support for children’s success in school. Our collaborative efforts have resulted in over 1,500 more students’ regular presence at school. While we are far from eliminating chronic absence, we know that together, we can reach this goal.

In the 2022-23 school year, 6,161 Pittsburgh Public Schools K-12 students missed more than 10% of school days in the year, for unexcused and excused reasons. Through a partnership with EveryDay Labs, an organization dedicated to achieving positive student outcomes through behavioral science, we learned an incredible amount about how to reach students and parents throughout a school year to track and address absences that are adding up.

We have also spent another year in partnership with the administration, staff, students, families, and associated community organizations at Pittsburgh Perry High School to continue learning from the systems in place. This work has yielded insight into what it takes to create a school environment that inspires students to show up, what tools and staff time are needed to help students catch up when they need support, and how to shift an entire school’s culture toward a celebration of learning every day.

At Pittsburgh Arlington PreK-8, we are forging similar relationships to learn from and support an elementary school on a similar journey. Many of Arlington’s young students fall inside the 1.5 mile radius that deems them a walker, without access to a school bus. We started by addressing the simple fact that if kids needed to walk to school in inclement weather along an unsafe path, they were less likely to go. This led to a fruitful partnership with The Brashear Association to provide school transportation vans—along with calls from “nanas” to nudge students to wake up in time to catch a ride to school. From there, we have begun digging in to identify other ways we can build up community support to help all students in the building achieve success.

Because of this work, our mission has become clearer than ever before:

1. Support communities to be places where students are able to get to school safely every day.

2. Get families and students the necessary resources so students show up ready to learn.

3. Make schools places where students and staff feel they belong and are excited to be every day.

As we developed this year’s report, we kept attendance at the forefront of our thinking while doing the analyses needed to process each school’s data. What is built into the system in schools with high levels of chronic absenteeism? How could small changes affect big outcomes?

We are grateful to Pittsburgh Public Schools, EveryDay Labs, Pittsburgh Perry High School, Pittsburgh Arlington PreK-8, the City of Pittsburgh’s Office of Safe Routes to School, The Brashear Association, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, the Carnegie Science Center, Artist Image Resources, Urban Impact Foundation, Moonshot Museum, the Will Allen Foundation, The Andy Warhol Museum, Schools That Can, the 100+ members of the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative, our funders, and other community partners who are playing pivotal roles in this endeavor. Our community is truly stepping up to the challenge, and we can’t thank you all enough.

Looking forward, we continue to be deeply committed to the work at Perry and Arlington, and we hope to extend our reach to more schools. We believe the key to our children’s success lies in improving our systems. It bears repeating—we have everything we need to succeed by all children. Let’s get to work!