Mentoring as a Pathway to Addressing Chronic Absenteeism in Urban High School Academies

Chronic absenteeism is a rising concern for schools across the country. There are a host of reasons why students miss school: internal factors that can push students out of school and external factors that can pull students out of school. Districts have been mandated to implement strategies and supports that will combat this issue by increasing student attendance and decreasing chronic absenteeism. The concept of mentoring has been around for centuries and recently has been associated with improvement in the attendance of chronically absent students. This dissertation intended to examine attendance and chronic absenteeism rates of students in two urban high school academies who participated in mentoring programs as compared to students who did not. This study aimed to reveal how impactful mentoring is on attendance and chronic absenteeism rates of high school students and whether or not gender and race has an effect on the relationship between mentoring and absenteeism. This non-experimental study utilized quantitative methods to examine mentoring programs of 54 students at one academy and 96 students in the other. The study used a Difference-in-Difference statistical technique and regression analyses to compare the average daily attendance results from the treatment group (students being mentored) to the comparison group (students not being mentored) over two time periods: the months before and the months after each academy’s program implementation. Results showed that participation in a mentoring program can predict student attendance and chronic absenteeism for high school students although results showed a decrease in student attendance after program implementation for both academies. Results also indicated statistical significance for males and Hispanic students at one academy, and statistical significance for males, females, Black, and Hispanic students at the other academy. Although there was statistical significance, the mentoring viii programs were ineffective with showing an increase in students’ attendance