From Absenteeism to Action: How Pflugerville ISD Boosted Attendance and Recovered $8M in Revenue with a Simple Question
Pflugerville Independent School District (ISD), Texas, is a premier district serving over 25,000 students across 35 campuses. Faced with attendance challenges after the COVID-19 pandemic, district leaders knew they urgently needed a new approach.
Using ThoughtExchange to engage their community, the district improved student attendance and school culture and recovered $8 million in revenue.
Disrupted classrooms—disengaged students
After the pandemic, Pflugerville ISD saw a dramatic drop in student attendance. The district's initial focus on academics and behavior was losing ground, as absenteeism undermined all other efforts.
Seasoned superintendent Dr. Quintin Shepherd recognized a core truth: "If the kids aren't present, they can't learn." What’s more, student attendance directly impacts school funding in Texas, so the issue was also about financial sustainability.
Dr. Shepherd explained, “Improving student presence has immediate fiscal implications for sustaining programs, staffing, and innovation. Increasing attendance is one of the most strategic and human-centered levers a district can pull to improve outcomes across the board… academically, behaviorally, and operationally.”
Teachers were exhausted by the constant need to reintegrate students who had missed classes, and students felt disengaged. The system was fragmented and unsustainable—Pflugerville ISD needed a fast-acting, comprehensive solution.
ThoughtExchange surfaces critical community insights
To tackle the attendance challenge, the district targeted unexcused chronic absenteeism. Dr. Shepherd developed a six-step "recipe card" approach to guide the process.
Gathering primary insights from the community, ThoughtExchange provided a key strategic tool. The district launched an Exchange asking parents one simple but powerful question: "Why do kids miss school?"
The leadership team, including campus-level teams, a district task force, and Dr. Shepherd's student advisory group, then shared the parent Exchange results with the student advisory groups.
This crucial step allowed students to interpret and validate their parents’ responses, going beyond the numbers to provide deeper, more nuanced insights and critical hypotheses for next steps.
Stories inspire action
For Dr. Shepherd, the most surprising "aha!" moment came when students interpreted the parent data. When 18% of parents cited "family responsibilities" as a primary reason for kids missing school, Dr. Shepherd took this insight directly to students, asking them to help define what that meant to them.
A student’s story about how family responsibilities affected their attendance made the data "personal" for teachers and administrators. This shift in understanding encouraged the district to focus on the relational aspects of teaching, helping staff create consistent, caring micro-moments with students.
Dr. Shepherd explained, “What actually drives change is stories, and I can harvest those stories through an Exchange. When I can tell the story of a student who shared the family responsibilities that prevent them from coming to school, it makes it personal for my teachers and my administrators. They can picture that student—and that’s what moves people to action.”
Initiative drives positive results
Pflugerville ISD's strategic, community-centered approach yielded remarkable results:
- Chronic absenteeism dropped from 20% to 16% in just one year.
- In the highest-need schools, chronic absenteeism fell from 32% to 23%.
- The district recovered $8 million in revenue due to these attendance gains, allowing them to retain programs and deliver raises to staff.
- School accountability scores improved significantly, with 13 campuses jumping one letter grade and five campuses jumping two letter grades. All five schools that jumped two grades were in the targeted, highest-need feeder pattern.
With these notable improvements, the district's culture also changed. Dr. Shepherd shared that he sees a new energy in the buildings, with more intention, awareness, and shared ownership.
Pflugerville’s attendance initiative revealed that a well-executed strategy, aligned with community purpose and based on community insights, can be fiscally sustainable and culturally transformative.
Recipe card—key takeaways for districts
Step 1: Form a leadership team. Establish a cross-functional task force that includes district leaders, campus staff, families, and community members. Assign clear roles and responsibilities, from data leads to outreach coordinators.
Step 2: Collect and triangulate data. Pull together attendance data, student demographics, and behavior records. Supplement this with surveys and focus groups. Pflugerville ISD partnered with ThoughtExchange to collect much of this data. Triangulate the data to identify patterns and isolate the most critical barriers to attendance.
Step 3: Identify barriers and insights. Use the data to understand the human story behind the numbers. Pflugerville ISD saw transportation gaps, mental health challenges, and a lack of belonging show up again and again.
Step 4: Develop and implement interventions. Design solutions that match the specific needs you’ve uncovered. For Pflugerville ISD, this included personalized outreach via EveryDay Labs, creating school-based attendance teams, offering incentives, and most importantly, fostering a culture where every student feels seen.
Step 5: Monitor and adjust regularly. Create a rhythm of accountability. Hold reviews at the campus and district levels. Use data. Empower teams to iterate.
Step 6: Evaluate and scale success. Measure your key performance indicators (attendance rates, family engagement, behavior incidents) and share your results. What worked should become institutional knowledge, not individual memory.
2. Mitigating bias and building trust: Nolin presented her entry plan in two parts, highlighting ThoughtExchange’s AI-generated themes with her own analysis. This transparent approach helped mitigate concerns about individual bias while demonstrating a commitment to the community's voice.
“ThoughtExchange allows me to focus on the public, rather than the extreme amount of time it used to take me to tabulate survey results and then theme the data. ThoughtExchange has always been on the leading edge of making that process just instantaneous and so helpful—so I can focus on the in-person part of my job.”
Pflugerville ISD, TX
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