b'Absences, when chronic and sustained, are disruptive to the learning process and to well-being. When a student is repeatedly absent, they miss key instruction which can impact learning and a sense of belonging. When multiple students in a class are repeatedly absent, the flow of instruction can be hampered, and the classroom community can be disrupted. This can quickly turn into a pattern that can be difficult to break. Attendance issues have a range of contributing factors including academic, social, economic, and psychological. Improving student presence and engagement requires a coordinated and comprehensive system response. Most of all, it requires the nurturing of relationships.Over the last couple of years, the Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) developed both public and internal attendance data dashboards to help track patterns and trends in student attendance. These reports show a significant increase in absence rates in general and in the number of students who are chronically absent from school. A student is considered chronically absent when their absences exceed 10 per cent of the school year. Absence rates certainly spiked at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, as our Fall Student Attendance and Winter Student Attendance website spotlight stories illustrated, absence rates continue to be a concern. In response to this continued increase and to the Manitoba Early Education and Childhood Learnings (MEECL) January directive, the Superintendent launched a Student Attendance Taskforce in February 2023.The taskforces mandate to:1.Create a Student Presence and Engagement Policy as per MEECLs directives.2. Promote common understanding and greater consistency in the use and categorization of attendance codes.3. Understand more fully the current state of presence and engagement and the multi-dimensional causes of chronic absences. 4. Identify the key components of and current barriers to effective prevention, early intervention, as well as sustained, individualized intervention.5. Identify needed resources/tools to aid schools in addressing attendance concerns (i.e., resource materials, templates, data reports).6. Make recommendations for an improved systems approach to prevention, identification/tracking, investigation,In the following school year, we plan to seek intervention, and monitoring of absences input from more staff, as well as students, and in LRSD. parents/guardians as we start to implement recommendations and measure their impact.15'