As educators at Parma City Schools wrapped up their morning session of the Professional Development Day at Greenbriar Middle School, they stepped outside to the front of the school to the sight of a coffee truck.
To recognize the work the educators and administrators do to support student attendance, in partnership with the Stay in the Game! Attendance Network, The Huntington National Bank provided staff with a beverage of their choice from Tom's Travelin' Coffee Truck during Teacher Appreciation Week, which began on May 5 and runs through May 9.
"Our school had a big attendance initiative, and our staff did a really great job of getting our kids to try to come to school, so we were rewarded for our efforts," eighth grade English teacher Paula Stadalsky said. "We were also celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week, and so, this is an exciting time for teachers to get recognized for their hard work all year. Our staff is really, really excited about the opportunity."
The Stay in the Game! Attendance Network – launched in 2019 by the Cleveland Browns Foundation, Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and Proving Ground out of Harvard, now managed by Battelle – has worked with education experts for the past five years with the goal of dramatically improving school attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism. The Network supports 161 districts throughout the state of Ohio, with 108 of those districts within the Browns region.
Teachers in the Network and throughout Ohio play a crucial role in not only educating students, but also in encouraging students to attend school.
There are 494,971 students within the Browns region of the Stay in the Game! Attendance Network, which saw a 2.9 percent decrease in chronic absenteeism for the 2023-24 school year. Ohio students who are not chronically absent from school are 3.9 times more likely to read on grade level by the end of third grade and three times more likely to graduate from high school on time, so it's critical that students are in school every day ready to learn.
Each day, students directly interact with a classroom teacher – who each have their own creative approach to engaging students and encouraging students to want to come to school. Those teachers play an important role in helping decrease the number of chronically absent students through their daily efforts in the classroom.
"This is a job that requires a lot of dedication," Stadalsky said. "People are dedicating their lives to this because they believe in kids and the future for our children. I think to be recognized as a teacher is really important thing."
The Parma City School District has been a part of the Stay in the Game! Attendance Network since the 2023-24 school year and are seeing the benefits of the program in reducing absenteeism in their schools. Greenbriar and its staff were recognized because they had the lowest chronic absenteeism rates compared to the other middle schools in the Parma City School District.
Since joining the Network, Dean of Students at Greenbriar Middle School Stacey Bram said they have done different promotions of rewarding good attendance throughout the year. They have been recognizing students on a weekly basis who have attended school every day that week, and those students have an opportunity to go to their prize vault and select a Stay in the Game! item. They have hosted competitions between homerooms to have the top homeroom attendance, in which the winning homeroom earns a party.
They also introduced the Greenbriar Attendance Madness Competition, framed after March Madness, with a bracket featuring each homeroom. The competition ran for about seven weeks, and Bram said they recently named their homeroom champion, which was rewarded with t-shirts for their success.
"The Stay in the Game! program has definitely helped us keep a focus," Bram said. "The program has prescribed steps along the way and along the calendar with targets that we are supposed to be meeting, and that has helped us ensure that we don't forget that attendance focus when things get busy, that it keeps going strong all year long."
