While COVID-19-related school closures in spring 2020 challenged every school district, students in rural districts faced especially significant barriers. In particular, lack of consistent internet limited their access to online instruction.
This case study illustrates how rural districts used NCRERN’s continuous improvement cycle to identify, test, and refine attendance interventions—highlighting both evidence of impact and practical lessons about implementation in rural settings.
This brief finds that personalized messaging—and to a lesser extent family engagement—reduced student absences in rural districts, while mentoring and postcards showed no consistent attendance benefits.
This brief shows that absenteeism in rural New York and Ohio districts—particularly in upper grades—is closely linked to lower academic achievement, underscoring the importance of broad attendance improvement strategies beyond focusing solely on
This brief describes NCRERN’s national replication network, which tests whether personalized attendance messaging—shown to reduce absenteeism in rural pilot districts—can effectively scale across rural schools nationwide.
This brief outlines NCRERN’s New York and Ohio Rural Research Network, highlighting how rural districts collaborate through a structured continuous improvement process to pilot, evaluate, and scale evidence-based interventions in attendance and
This brief explains NCRERN’s five-step continuous improvement cycle, which helps rural districts use data and rigorous testing to pilot, evaluate, and scale effective interventions collaboratively.
NCRERN is a research-practice network that partners with rural districts to test, evaluate, and scale evidence-based strategies—using a continuous improvement model—to improve student outcomes and expand research on rural education.
