Limitations
Data
Head Start program policy is for teachers to enter absences
each morning, but more than a quarter of the classrooms
do not enter all attendance by the end of the month. Because
the program’s ChildPlus computer system’s attendance
default is ‘‘present,’’ the data are unreliable, absences undercounted,
and surveillance incomplete. As of this writing,
Head Start programs housed in public schools in North
Carolina are not integrated into NCWISE. ChildPlus does
not have the ability to generate a daily attendance report
or to measure cumulative attendance from one month to
the next. The Head Start program’s 92% average monthly
attendance exceeds the 85% federal expectation, so there
is no urgency to address absences on a programmatic level.
Many families’ phone service is inconsistent, making parental
contact challenging. Elementary school absence reports
came at different times each day. When the elementary data
people were not at school, the report did not come until the
next day. For both programs, the lack of more than 1 year
retrospective absence data limited trend analysis.