Advancing School Safety and Attendance in New Mexico

In late September our team traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the Fourth Annual New Mexico Safe School Summit – “Safe, Secure, and Supported: Advancing School Safety Through Prevention, Attendance, and Connection”. The summit focused on a holistic approach to building protective environments for students. More than 300 teachers, school leaders, mental health providers, safety professionals, school resource officers, law enforcement and other first responders, attendance liaisons, and community partners came together bringing their ideas to create  safe, supportive learning environments across New Mexico. Topics ranged from behavioral health and wellbeing to strategies and tools that raise awareness, deter cyber crimes and prevent on campus violence. Attendance liaisons were invited to attend a series of sessions focused specifically on systems to improve attendance. The summit organizers were intentional about highlighting strong, supportive relationships as the foundation for maintaining safe, welcoming environments for all students. We applaud this decision; it is not only heavily supported by research, but it also keeps the focus squarely on actions school adults can take to make schools places where students are welcomed for who they are and where they truly want to be. To quote New Mexico’s teacher of the year for 2025, Lorilei Chavez, “If you want to keep kids safe you do it through building relationships.” 

In partnership with the NMPED Attendance Improvement Program, Talent Development Secondary (TDS), engaged with over 40 district leaders and attendance liaisons. This cohort of districts are receiving layers of technical support and guidance from the Attendance Improvement Program including this opportunity to learn together as a professional learning community during in-person and virtual sessions. This professional learning community session included sharing and discussing evidence based practices designed to improve attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism. Our session included a jigsaw activity in which participants examined a School based Site Coordinator’s guide to improving chronic absenteeism created by  The Partnership for Student Success. In addition, the participants engaged in a discussion of a case study  detailing a series of activities that one NM district engaged in to determine root causes for student absenteeism that are actionable by school adults. This district case study also highlighted the practice of leveraging qualitative and quantitative mixed data to determine root causes actionable by school adults.

In partnership with TDS, NMPED facilitates a yearlong series of professional learning sessions focused on attendance improvement. As a result of its commitment to evidence-based research, developing systems of support for districts, robust resources and a sustained effort to promote policies that encourage a systems approach to attendance improvement, New Mexico has seen its chronic absenteeism rates steadily decline. New Mexico is one of the states that is approaching a recovery to pre-pandemic attendance rates as mentioned in this brief: Can School Districts Bounce Back from Large Pandemic-Era Chronic Absenteeism Increases? 

The TDS team was happy to learn with and from the educators in New Mexico.