How to Get Kids Back in School

Dr. Leah Marsh is an award-winning assistant middle school principal who has worked with PBIS, attendance improvement and suspension reduction programs. She shares the process they use to tackle improvements and how the whole school pulls together to help kids know that they belong and that they matter. Relationships are key and give purpose to everyone involved.

Sponsored: Ellis, a program of Children’s Health Council, sponsored this podcast episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest. Ellis pulls from a knowledge base of content from trusted partners like CAST, CASEL, Understood and others, and gives you evidence-aligned ideas for students who are struggling with learning, behavior, or the emotional side of school (but not clinical advice). If you’ve got a student (or two) who you can’t stop thinking about, try it and see what it brings you. No personally identifiable student information is collected, and it is a much better place to start than “brainstorming” with your general purpose AI chat tool. Try Ellis today.

Not every idea may be for you, but the process of coming up with the ideas as a team is vital. Meeting, discussing issues, working to improve, these are all things you notice that great schools do. They build teams. They work together. They figure out what works and what doesn’t and how to help kids know that being at school matters. I hope you’ll find today’s show inspiring and encouraging and full of ideas. As always, I’m now curating and putting resources, discussion guides, links to free resources, and links to other shows in the show notes for each show. Let’s get our students to school!

Listen to the Show

Middle school teachers and administrators, attendance teams, PBIS teams, and anyone who has watched a student disappear from the roster one day at a time.

A note from Vicki: My philosophy is to give you lots of viewpoints on how to tackle issues. I believe in and respect the intelligence of listeners and their ability to make up their own mind as they listen to many viewpoints on a topic. I know that PBIS is a hot-button issue with many, and some have perhaps implemented this philosophy in a way that has removed all consequences for misbehavior. If you’ve listened to me long, you’ll know I wouldn’t advocate that. We need discipline, but we need progress. Kids need to know that they matter!! And we need to work together. I’ve seen as many schools have good success with PBIS as some who have not. As with any program, there’s a human aspect to how things are implemented to observe and discipline can bring out the greatest improvements and the biggest criticisms of schools.

Key Takeaways for Teachers from Dr. Leah Marsh

• Numbers are the question. Not the answer. Leah keeps coming back to why. “why are they absent?” One answer they found was a bus driver shortage. Their superintendent was able to fix that problem. We can’t solve a number. We can solve a reason. That is why “why” is such an important question to ask.
• Every adult in the building might be a mentor. Their mentoring program paired struggling students with an adult who would be happy to see them and encourage them. Everybody was involved.
• Creating a space and place for kids who are struggling. Their “dragon den” became a place for those kids who were struggling in different ways. Sometimes a kid having a hard time might come to school and ask to go to the “den” instead. That way the child was at school but also had some space.
• How can more tardies be a win? Attendance improved, but so did the tardies. But Leah reminds us if that child is at school for most of the day, that is a win. They are in class and they are learning.

Chronic absenteeism means missing 10% or more of the school year. It ran at 14.1% in 2018-2019, before the pandemic. In 2024-2025 — the most recent school year with national data — it was 22.6%. It peaked near 28% in 2021-22, so the trend is down, but progress has nearly stalled: the latest analysis from AEI’s From Attendance Crisis to Chronic Condition? found improvement of less than a single percentage point in the most recent year. The Return to Learn Tracker follows this across more than 14,700 districts and charter schools.

If you want the research on whether any of this actually moves attendance, the Center on PBIS published a practice brief in February 2025 — Effects of PBIS on Attendance and Behavior Outcomes — drawing on years of data from the Missouri Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support initiative. It focuses on exactly the two things Leah’s team moved: student attendance and exclusionary discipline.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Check & Connect — the mentoring model Leah’s school uses. Developed at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration, it pairs a student with a mentor who monitors attendance, behavior, and grades and stays with them over time.
• Center on PBIS — the national technical assistance center for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, the framework behind everything Leah describes. Free implementation guides, tiered-support resources, and a searchable research database.
• NASSP 2026 National Assistant Principal of the Year Finalists — where Leah is recognized as one of three finalists in the country.
• Ellis — the free tool from Children’s Health Council that sponsored this week’s shows.

About Dr. Leah Marsh

Dr. Leah Marsh is an assistant principal known for her work in strengthening school culture, student leadership, and career-connected learning. A 2025-2026 Middle School Principal of the Year for the Ohio Association of Secondary School Administrators, and finalist for the National Association of Secondary School Principals Assistant Principal of the Year, she is passionate about increasing student engagement and empowering both students and staff to lead meaningful change.

Free Tools to Reduce Absenteeism and Suspensions

Everything below is free and was verified the week this episode published. Most of it comes from Attendance Works, the national nonprofit that has been working on chronic absence longer than almost anyone.

Start with your own data

• Classroom Attendance Calculator – a free, self-calculating spreadsheet that sorts your roster into satisfactory, at-risk, and chronic absence. Built for teachers whose district does not hand them chronic absence reports. It reminds you to count excused absences and suspensions as missed school, which is the whole point of this episode.
• Identify the Root Causes of Absence – this is Leah’s entire method on one page. Attendance Works sorts every reason a student misses school into four buckets: barriers, aversion, disengagement, and misconceptions about whether absences matter. Grab the free Identifying Root Causes worksheet (updated September 2025) and mark the ones that apply to your students.

Here’s a quote I think it is important. “when you see a high level of chronic absence in a school, the root cause may be a school policy or practice.” If suspensions for minor infractions are pushing kids out of the building, the answer isn’t an intervention. It’s changing the practice which is what the Dragon Den is.

Then build the response

• The Three Tiers of Intervention – the tiering framework behind Leah’s “we would love to connect with all 450 to 500 students, but we have to prioritize.”
• Check & Connect – the research-based mentoring model itself, developed at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration and now in its fourth decade. A trained adult checks in on one student’s attendance, behavior, and grades and stays with them over time. Their site opens with two words that could be the title of this whole episode: One Caring Adult. It is also the only program the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse has found to have positive effects on staying in school.
• Strategies to Address Chronic Absenteeism (PDF) – the single best free document I found. Published by the Institute of Education Sciences’ Regional Educational Laboratory, it walks through four strategies early warning systems, mentoring, Check & Connect, and nudging families and for each one tells you what it is, what the research found, and where to go next. If your team wants the evidence base in one place before it commits to anything, start here.
• Center on PBIS – free implementation guides and a searchable research database for the framework underneath all of it.

Mark your calendar

The Attendance Awareness Campaign runs every September, with free posters, family letters, and messaging you can put in a newsletter the first week of school. If this episode gave you an idea, September is when to launch it.Take five minutes and list every student you teach, from memory, without your roster. Then open the roster and see who you left off. That is the exercise award-winning principal Nancy Blair had her whole staff do, and it is the one I thought of while Leah was talking. The students nobody listed are the students who already believe nobody would notice if they stopped coming. Pick one of them tomorrow and tell them you are glad they are here.

Other Shows on Belonging, Culture, and Getting Kids to School

Listen and Subscribe

If this episode gave you something to try, share it with the teacher down the hall who needs it and leave a review wherever you’re listening.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show.

Vicki Davis (00:00): Chronic absenteeism, or kids that miss more than 10% of school days, was around 22.6% in the 2025-26 school year, compared to 14.1% in 2019. Because we’re trying to keep kids in school, many schools have taken a close look at their suspension policies, which often take troubled kids and send them away from school for even more time. But how can it be done? Today’s guest shares how her middle school cut suspensions by 32% and worked with improving student absences.

This is Fab Idea Friday, episode 974.

Announcer (00:45): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:50): Today’s show is sponsored by Ellis, a free tool from Children’s Health Council that helps teachers think through tough student moments and find practical next steps. Tune in at the end of the show, and I’ll tell you more about Ellis. Today, we’re talking with Dr. Leah Marsh, Assistant Principal at Niles Middle School in Ohio, named one of three finalists for the National Association of Secondary School Principals Middle Level Assistant Principal of the Year.

Under her leadership, Niles Middle School has reduced suspensions by 32% while increasing student attendance and engagement. And she’s going to tell us how. Welcome to the show today, Dr. Marsh.

Dr. Leah Marsh (01:41): Thank you so much for having me.

Vicki Davis (01:43): So Leah, when you first walked into Niles Middle School, what did you see that told you this is what we need to work on?

Dr. Leah Marsh (01:50): There wasn’t anything that jumped out we need to work on. My first year I came in and I observed and I built rapport with the staff and students. I learned my job. I didn’t come here to make any changes, but there’s a fabulous staff here And their priority really is the students.

They were seeing that students were absent. We needed to find out the why. Students had some behavior issues. You’ve got to get to the why they’re acting this way.

And we really worked as a huge team to implement our PBIS, our Positive Behavior Interventions and Support System. And find out the whys and what we could do to help address this. There is no absolute cure-all, fix-all for anybody in the country. We’re all struggling with the same stuff.

Vicki Davis (02:33): Leah, you know there’s a lot of controversy surrounding PBIS because not all schools get the same results. And sometimes teachers say, OK, I don’t know what happened, but my principal was giving the kids a lollipop when they misbehave and sending them back to class. But the educators I’ve talked to that have effectively implemented this method, that’s not what it’s about. So help us understand what PBIS looks like at your school.

Dr. Leah Marsh (02:57): At our school, it’s a lot about team meetings and data. And I learned from my fabulous administrative assistant that you can look at data in different ways. I always looked at it straight on. We have X amount of chronic absenteeism.

So the problem is absenteeism. She goes, why are they absent? What are the reasons they’re absent? Let’s go deeper into the data and then you can only solve it.

I’m like, so we need to do more with data. So we bring that to the team. One of the issues we found was there was a change in busing because we didn’t have enough bus drivers. And students weren’t able to get here.

So that was an issue that we brought to the superintendent who went out of her way to make sure that that was no longer one of our obstacles. We got more kids here. Another piece of the data we found out is students didn’t feel like they had connections here at school. So that was part of a PBIS.

Well, nobody cares if I’m there or not. And I have no reason to be there. Again, you have to have a staff that buys in and really has the heart for students. Otherwise, it won’t work.

And our staff here said, let’s make a program, a mentoring program, where we find who those students are from the data that we’ve really analyzed and connect them with an adult in the building. It could be a teacher, an administrator, a staff member. We have students that come because they love working with our custodial staff, and those are life skills that they’re doing. And then making those connections, hearing those adults say, I am so glad you’re here.

Oh, my goodness, let’s talk about your accomplishments. Just getting here today was an accomplishment. Making those students feel welcome, feel a part of something. And that’s really where the increase came.

And once they feel they’re a part of something and they feel that they have some ownership in their schooling, the behaviors begin to decrease. Now we move from punitive behaviors to restorative practices. And it was just all the team. Where do we go from here?

We’re always working on it. Then we do feedback surveys, staff and students. What’s working for us? What’s not working?

This year, we started a LEAD class. L-E-A-D, it stands for Learn, Engage, Act, and Deliver. And our students are the ones going and saying, here’s how we can, as students, change the climate and the culture. We have staff members that facilitate and lead this.

Students are planning dances and spirit weeks and food drives, drives for community services. They are doing peer tutoring. These were all brought by the students saying these are what we want to do. So PBIS started with an initiative.

And turned into such fabulous things that the school is doing, all because we have buy-in from staff and students.

Vicki Davis (05:47): We have to relate to educate. What you’re saying reminds me of an award-winning principal from some years back in my interviews, Nancy Blair. And she had everybody at the school list every single student they could think of in five minutes. And they identified the students that nobody listed.

And you’re really doing that by figuring out who can these kids connect with? Who can they relate to? Kids want to know they matter. Adults want to know they matter.

Do you feel like that even your custodial staff and your lunchroom and all on your campus feel like they have more purpose because they’re needed to connect with kids?

Dr. Leah Marsh (06:23): I feel like they appreciate coming here more because it’s not just a job. It is the connections. It is the relationships. I’ve had multiple staff members, including our cafeteria staff, get very excited and realize their purpose when they get nominated.

Students are able to nominate a staff of the month and they get their little certificate saying who nominated them and why. And that’s a big deal. Students get it from the staff and staff members each month get it from the students. And sometimes it’s just nice to know that you’ve made a change in a student’s life that you didn’t even realize because you come in, you’re here, I’m going to do the best I can.

And somebody sees that. Even our student teachers from Youngstown State University that come in to do some of their practicum, they’re getting little nominations, even though they’re not full-on staff, and our substitutes get them. Our students are very generous. Each grade-level teacher has a spreadsheet to see who’s been nominated to make sure the same children aren’t continually being nominated.

We spread the wealth because everybody brings something to the table.

Vicki Davis (07:33): If you have a 32% reduction in suspensions, now that’s not just a number, that’s children. Do you feel like that your discipline is holding steady or improving? Or do you feel like you’ve had to relax your standards to decrease your suspension rate?

Dr. Leah Marsh (07:50): We didn’t relax anything. Instead, we have actually implemented a new room and position. We call it the Dragon Den. And it’s kind of an all-purpose room.

So in the past, I mean, this is middle school. They horseplay, let’s be honest. They run in the halls.

Vicki Davis (08:08): Yeah.

Dr. Leah Marsh (08:10): He slapped the top.

Vicki Davis (08:11): I mean, how many times do I have to say, keep your hands to yourself and do not touch anyone? Because that’s what they do.

Dr. Leah Marsh (08:18): Before that would have been a detention after your first warning. And now we have our dragon den and it’s, you know what? You need kind of a time to reflect. Go to the dragon den.

They fill out a little PBIS reflection form. They re-regulate the, and they have time to reflect, and then they’re back to class. So now that’s going from a discipline to a restorative practice. But that room isn’t just for students serving a purpose for consequence or reflection.

Sometimes we use it as our quiet room because kids might have had a rough night at home, things are going on, and they just can’t get to class and focus. They need that calming space for a little bit. I have one student who comes, and we know what’s going on at home, and he’ll say, can I please just go to the Dragon Den today? Just for today, I’ll do my work in there, and we’ll try again tomorrow.

The child is showing up to school regardless of what’s going on at home. And it’s great that we have that space where they want to be here, they want to do the work, but they might not be able to be in the traditional classroom that particular day. It’s another way to bring students to school and make sure that they have what they need while they’re here at school. So then the behaviors don’t amp up because they don’t want to be in the class for whatever reason.

Again, was a beautiful suggestion from our PBIS team. We took it to the superintendent who was able to implement that.

Vicki Davis (09:43): So let’s just shift and go back that your Check & Connect mentoring program. What does that look like on a Thursday morning at Niles Middle School?

Dr. Leah Marsh (09:54): The teachers, the staff members actually connect with the students. They set their own time. We just ask for, twice during the week. Do a check-in, like, what are your goals for this week?

What can you talk about at the end of the week to see if you met them? Other students, we’re just going to meet daily because I know you have a study hall and it’s the same time as my planning and I love meeting and chatting with you. So we leave it up to them. Some teachers have taken on three and four students at a time, while others are more comfortable connecting with one.

Vicki Davis (10:24): How do you determine which students become part of Check & Connect?

Dr. Leah Marsh (10:29): Attendance is one of our priorities. Who are our chronic absent kids? Let’s meet with them. Let’s find out the whys.

Why are they tardy? Teachers fill out a sheet saying who’s struggling in what subject, and we tier them. Is a child struggling in, let’s say, three out of the four core contents? They’re going to become our priority versus a child who’s just struggling in one subject during this particular term.

So we have to prioritize. Then, of course, we look at our behavior data, you know, who are our primary offenders that are recurring the same behaviors. And let’s make connections with them. Our biggest increase in attendance came from our small tiered group of chronic absent students.

Because now that they have those connections and somebody who’s calling home and praising them or calling home and finding out what we can do. Maybe they just need an alarm clock. Maybe they need a wake up call. I’m going to be honest.

Our attendance has increased. But so have our tardies. and our thoughts are at least they’re coming. They’re not out a whole day missing hours of instruction.

Vicki Davis (11:41): Leah, having your teachers have to make a wake up call to a kid Like, isn’t that the parent’s job? And I mean, I’m all for it. I’d do it if I had to, right? But I could hear some folks say that.

Dr. Leah Marsh (11:54): I want to respond with, it’s not a, we don’t make. That was something they wished to do. And we would never stop them from going above and beyond. Number two, we don’t know what’s going on with the parents or their struggles.

It takes a village to raise these children. And why would we stop any support that can be offered?

Vicki Davis (12:15): So Leah, could you give a motivational pep talk to all of the administrators as well as the teachers, particularly those who work with middle schoolers right now?

Dr. Leah Marsh (12:26): I would just get through the day, but every day looks different. Enjoy it. Like, we’re all on this journey. It’s never the same.

Even in my teaching position, it was not the same. I could say, we’re going to read the same books and do the same questions in the same assignment. And you get those children that come in and they ask questions and they take you on a different route. And that’s the fun thing.

Let’s learn from each other every day. I don’t come in with all the answers, but I do come in with an open mind. And I want to leave here knowing more and being better today than I was yesterday, because that’s our goal.

Vicki Davis (13:00): I love that. Knowing more and being better. The person who got me into teaching said great teachers and great educators are repeaters. Knowing more and being better.

That’s a great one to repeat. Dr. Leah Marsh, Assistant Principal at Niles Middle School in Ohio. Thanks for coming on the show.

Dr. Leah Marsh (13:16): Thank you for having me.

Vicki Davis (13:17): Thank you, Ellis, for sponsoring this week’s shows on the 10 Minute Teacher. Ellis is a free tool for K-12 educators from the Children’s Health Council. Here’s how it works. You type in what actually happened with a student, what you saw, what you already tried, and where you’re stuck.

Then Ellis gives you practical, evidence-aligned next steps. From a knowledge base of content, from trusted partners like CAST, CASEL, Understood, and others. Ellis gives you information, not clinical advice, and it doesn’t collect personally identifiable student information. It’s a far better place to start than general purpose AI tools because Ellis isn’t pulling from the open internet.

So the next time you leave school still thinking about that one student, go to coolcatteacher.com forward slash Ellis. That’s CoolCatTeacher.com forward slash Ellis. Thanks for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you.

Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at CoolCatTeacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a sponsored episode and blog post. Ellis, a program of Children’s Health Council, has compensated me to share information about Ellis. However, all opinions expressed are my own. I have personally reviewed these resources and only recommend tools I believe offer genuine value to classroom teachers. My endorsement is limited to the educational products and services discussed in this episode. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The sponsor has no impact on the editorial content of this show.