PACE and Attendance Works counted 1,143,668 chronically absent California students in 2024-25. Districts keep answering that number with a posting.
One more attendance clerk. One more expanded learning aide. One more analyst who “owns the file.”
The file is still a spreadsheet.
The hire is not the register
I sit with partners who already spent the allocation. They can name the vacancy. They cannot name, pupil by pupil, which absence got a recovered day, which afternoon was ASES, and which hours were ELO-P.
Headcount does not assign an absence. Education Code 46211 still wants a recovered day attached to an eligible absence, with a certificated LEA employee in the room and a ratio you can prove. CDE still wants Recovery on its own register.
A new clerk who inherits six tabs titled “make-up” is not a system of action. That is overtime.
What a spreadsheet actually hides
The statewide count is public. CDE’s 2024-25 DataQuest chronic absenteeism report is the same 1,143,668. CDE Fingertip Facts still show 1,011 districts serving 5,731,260 enrolled students.
None of those counts tell you whether Tuesday’s check-in became a student-day CDE will count toward an ASES target, or a recovered day fiscal can put on P-2.
I wrote the ASES version this week in ASES Attendance Targets and Grant Reductions, Explained. The Recovery packet is the Attendance Recovery hub. How to pull your own chronic absence count is in 1,143,668 Kids.
Hiring does not merge those files.
Three jobs, three workbooks, one vacancy
A CWA office and an expanded learning office can share a campus and still not share a row.
One person is supposed to send the truancy notice after three unexcused full days under Education Code 48260. Another is supposed to keep ASES student-days on the target I just walked through. A third is supposed to bank Recovery hours until they become a day Education Code 46211 will recognize.
On paper that is three FTEs. In the building it is often one tired clerk and three exports. Monday’s SIS pull. Tuesday’s afterschool sign-in. Wednesday’s “make-up” tab that never names the absence.
I already said we do not build another dashboard of the same empty seats. That note is in Why We Build Workflows, Not Dashboards. This one is the staffing version of the same leak.
If you hire into that mess, you did not buy capacity. You bought a second person who can be blamed when the workbook breaks in April.
Chronic absence is a workflow problem
That is the whole claim.
If the next step after an empty seat is “open the workbook,” you will hire people to babysit cells. They will reconcile in May. They will miss the P-2 window because the assignment was never in the daily work.
Your SIS is the system of record. Attendly is the system of action. We read from Aeries, PowerSchool, or Q SIS. We do not replace them. We do not ask a new person to become the integration.
Hire when the caseload is real. Hire when the letters, the ASES student-days, and the recovered days are already separate files a new person can walk into. If they still need four exports to start the day, you did not hire your way out of anything.
If that is the leak in your district, let’s talk. Sit with the team that builds the next step, not another vacancy for the same workbook.
Sources
Where Attendly fits
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If this is the leak in your district, sit down with the team that builds the workflow.
Let's talk
