One day this school year, after a rough night with lots of middle-of-the-night bad dreams, Gladstone resident Tianna Karas and her sons slept in.

Their wake-up call came not from an alarm clock but from her youngest son’s school.

They were missing her 5-year-old, the staff member said from the other end of the phone and wanted to make sure everything was okay.

“I want them to call me,” Karas said during the scramble of trying to drop off her son at school on a recent Thursday. “I want them to want to know where he is.”

Like nearly all the town’s other 4- and 5-year-olds, her son attends the Gladstone Center for Children and Families, a converted Thriftway that’s now a home-away-from-home for about 200 preschoolers and kindergarteners.

That kind of personal connection — along with an unusual citywide campaign that has everyone from the small Clackamas County town’s mayor to local faith leaders and business owners pitching in — has helped the Gladstone School District greatly reduce the number of its kindergarten students who have missed at least three weeks of school this year.

Last year, as of early March, 55% of kindergartners had been absent on 10% or more of school days. This year, the district’s efforts cut that to 25% and led to smaller but still significant improvements in attendance rates in grades one through 12.

For the youngest students, the district has instituted a multi-pronged approach to combating chronic absenteeism, said Sarah Dunkin, the school’s principal. There are daily basics, like personal phone calls home when kids don’t show up and parents haven’t called them in sick. There are classroom-wide incentives, like pizza parties and public recognition for stellar attendance, plus regular community nights just for Spanish-speaking families to help connect them to school.

In some cases, the district offers more direct interventions, like smoothing out transportation hurdles for families who are having trouble with their morning commutes or school bus routes.

Making progress against rampant absenteeism is notable because in 2022-2023, an astounding 45% of Oregon kindergarten students were considered chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% of school days or more. Falling out of the habit of regular school attendance puts students at risk of not learning how to read or write and can be a precursor to giving up on school entirely, national researchers say.

Oregon’s top education officials have acknowledged that chronic absenteeism is an enormous obstacle to improving student outcomes at every grade level, especially because Oregon is one of the only states where attendance rates have yet to show any post-pandemic rebound. In 2022-2023, 38% of the state’s students — about 200,000 — were chronically absent, nearly twice pre-pandemic levels.

COVID school closures perceptibly changed many families’ perceptions of the school routine, principals, teachers and administrators from around the state have said. Some families remain convinced that even a small cough is enough to keep their child home, while others are quicker to grant mental health day breaks.

In a recent newsletter, state schools chief Charlene Williams said she perceives “a deeply felt and, I believe, widely shared, concern around school attendance. This is real and it is top of mind for many across our state, and there are no easy answers.”

Two lawmakers — Democrat Hoa Nguyen, who represents East Portland and Damascus, and Republican Suzanne Weber of Tillamook — have launched a work group to review Oregon’s current efforts to address chronic absenteeism, with an eye to proposing legislation in the 2025 session that could further attack the problem.

Gladstone School District officials don’t claim any silver bullets and they acknowledge some built-in advantages. Their district is small, 70% white and has 37% of its student body qualifying for subsidized school meals. Chronic absenteeism is worse than ever even in low-poverty and overwhelmingly white districts, but is yet more acute in those that serve students who are poorer and from more diverse backgrounds.

In 2022-2023, 65% of Gladstone students attended school at least 90% of the time, slightly better than the statewide average of 62%, yet a huge fall from its pre-pandemic level of 84% regular attenders.

Still, the district bucked statewide trends last year by posting a tiny 1% uptick in attendance rates, spurring conversation about how to make larger inroads, said Assistant Superintendent Jeremiah Patterson.

“We can’t do our jobs if they aren’t here,” Patterson said. “It’s a gateway problem.”

Gladstone was inspired by an initiative in Grand Rapids, Mich., that reduced chronic absenteeism in that district by 25% in part by featuring billboards, yard signs and posters in local businesses that urged schoolchildren and their families to miss fewer than five days per year.

The two-and-a-half-square-mile Clackamas County city is now dotted with Gladstone Shows Up! yard signs in both English and Spanish. Mayor Michael Milch, who drops off and picks up two young grandsons at Gladstone schools nearly every day, said the campaign emphasizes that chronic absenteeism is not just the school district’s problem to solve.

The well-being and future of the city he leads is closely tied to the school district’s success and vice versa, said Milch, who as the City Council’s liaison to the district said he tries to attend or call in to every school board meeting.

“The boundaries of the city and the school district are contiguous,” Milch said. “Everyone who lives here goes to school here, and the families get to know each other. As the schools are successful, that will ultimately mean more economic prosperity, growth and fulfillment among people in the community.”

In Gladstone, districtwide attendance teams, including attendance coordinators, counselors and administrators, now meet monthly to swap strategies, compare data and make sure that middle and high school staff are aware of which children will need extra help as they progress through the school system.

At the Center for Children and Families, the broader goal is to make school fun and engaging for the littlest students so that they want to go to school every day, Dunkin said.

Teacher Rachael Gannon’s “discovery room” in the center of the school is part maker-space, part mini-Portland Children’s Museum. All day long, clusters of about a dozen students rotate in — the other 12 remain in their homerooms for small group time with their main teacher — to play in kinetic sand, build robots, kittens and whatever else strikes their fancy from cardboard tubes, pipe cleaners and tape, read in a quiet corner or use natural materials to create miniature worlds writ large.

“There is always a next here,” Gannon said. “Something that feels unfinished. Some friend they didn’t get to spend time with. That creative investment pulls them back, so they look forward to finishing what they started.”

The strategy seems to be working. Before school on Thursday, parent Courtney Lopez’s 5-year-old son Edwin, who was standing on the center console of his mother’s car with his head out the sunroof waiting for the school’s doors to open, said his favorite reason to come to school was Gannon’s discovery class.

Karas, too, said her son enjoys being in school, particularly the “fun aspects,” like Gannon’s class.

He’s on the autism spectrum and struggles with academics, she said, and so she sometimes lets him take “chill days,” especially if he hasn’t slept well and wakes up bleary-eyed. But even on days like that, Karas said, he’ll still look around for his backpack and ask her, “When do I get to go to school?”