Attendance Letters

Project Overview

Our program unites behavioral science, data science, and evidence-based family communication strategies to deliver personalized messages that are proven to prevent absences district-wide. This effort will be split into two projects - a letter project and a text project. The former will consist of two rounds and target 20,000 families, while the latter will last five rounds and potentially target up to 200,000 families.

Key Dates

Project: Letters

  • Test file pulled Jan 27th.

  • First data pulled Feb 2nd.

  • First letters sent Feb 19th.

  • First letters delivered Feb 22nd.

  • Second data pulled March 17th.

  • Second letters sent April 2nd.

  • Second letters delivered April 5th

Project: Text

  • The first text will be sent Feb 22 .

  • Texts will be sent every two weeks after initial text for 5 rounds.

Questions

How are Students Selected?

  • Students will be randomly selected by Every Day Labs (EDL), parent’s preferred language must be English or Spanish (those are the only languages they can support this year), EDL will first limit sample to students with 50-94% attendance. If they do not reach the total needed to randomly select 20K students, they will expand the sample to 10%-94%

How are Schools Selected?

  • For the Letter Project: Level 1 CA schools were selected for this study to support efforts to meet ESSA goals. EDL will randomly select students from Level 1 CA schools in NYC (list attached) which includes 834 DBNs.

  • For the Text Project: Schools will self select into the program. Announcements will be made to sign up in P-Digest, the OCS newsletters and directly to Attendance Managers.

Samples and Stuff

NYC Text Message FINAL R3.pdf

One-Pager for Schools

Spring 2021 - NYC DOE_SMS Samples.pdf

Text Message Sequence