88th Annual CASCWA State Conference

Every missed school day is a lost opportunity, yet most attendance strategies fail because they rely on compliance over connection. In this session, Hugo Lopez will reveal how Ontario-Montclair School District cracked the code using a data-driven systems approach that doesn’t just track absences—it changes behaviors. Through real-world success stories and practical strategies, you’ll learn how to design an attendance system that engages families, mitigates barriers, and transforms outcomes.

This presentation will lay out how to partner with schools and districts to first prevent and reduce truancy and chronic absence without law enforcement involvement. I will cover best practices, district-wide attendance messaging, and how to effectively communicate with parents about absences. I will also cover how to establish and run an effective collaborative truancy court, that both supports parents who are struggling with a crisis leading to their child's truancy, and encourages accountability of the parents in order to achieve improved attendance rates.

San Gabriel Unified developed a District Response Team when schools reopened after the COVID school closures. The team consists of a CWA counselor, 2 Wellness Counselors, the School Based Mental Health coordinator, and the District Licensed Clinical Social Worker. The team has a wide range of situations that it responds to and ways that it supports site staff. These include: coordinating and providing mental health support after significantly negative school events, training relevant staff in the CSTAG threat assessment protocol, and coordinate Tier 3 interventions for intensive student situations. Members also participate in the District Safety and Emergency Committee to include postvention strategies into crisis response. This presentation will share how the team functions and is deployed and will give concrete examples of cases where team members partnered with schools in their responses to negative school events.

In this session, participants will learn how SBCUSD is using a unique restorative approach called the Undercover Anti-Bullying Team to stop event the toughest of bullying cases.