On a bright Wednesday morning, administrators, counselors and school social workers decked out in Cardinals gear huddle around a conference table at Shaw High School.
Laptops are out and the room is mostly quiet as Erin Drakeley, the school social worker, speaks with a parent on speakerphone.
“She’s already missed, like, almost the whole month of September,” Drakeley says gently to start the conversation with a mom about her daughter’s attendance.
The parent explains it’s been difficult finding transportation to get her daughter to school. But they’re hoping to move closer to Shaw pretty soon. Drakeley seizes on that and jumps into developing a plan with the parent.
She proposes that if the family can pay $12.50 for a 7-day unlimited RTA pass for this week, the school can give the student a two-way bus ticket every day she comes to school and she can bank the tickets to use the following week.
“Can we make that work?” Drakeley asks. The parent says she thinks she can.
Hundreds of conversations like this are at the core of the East Cleveland City Schools strategy around attendance and absences. Chronic absenteeism — when a student misses 10% of the year, or around 20 days of school — climbed nationwide following pandemic school shutdowns. This year, Ohio education officials have doubled as they try to combat the problem, creating a statewide attendance dashboard and pushing districts to focus on early intervention.
But the small, financially-strapped suburb has, in many ways, been ahead of the curve.
The 1,140-student district shifted how it approached attendance as part of a turnaround strategy implemented after years of being under state oversight for low academic performance.
“Someone has to own attendance,” Henry Pettiegrew II, the state-appointed superintendent of the district, told Signal Cleveland. He picked Terrence Roscoe, the former 9th grade principal at Shaw High School. Roscoe is in charge of attendance, open-enrollment and athletics for all schools.
Roscoe was adamant the district would stop treating attendance as just another compliance measure where administrators were “checking a box” with a letter or a call home. Its strategy would hinge on “getting at the why” behind a student’s missed days, he said.
Now, East Cleveland approaches attendance with an aggressive early detection plan where staff hold weekly meetings at each school to comb through color-coded spreadsheets of student attendance data, discuss what’s going on with individual kids, and troubleshoot methods to boost their attendance. Staff will now also make home visits when needed to get in touch with families in addition to sending emails and letters and making phone calls.
Data shows the changes have paid off. The number of students considered chronically absent inched down at first and then dropped dramatically — 10 percentage points from the 2023-2024 to 2024-2025 school years.
There’s still work to do, but, as attendance has improved, academic gains have followed. Last year, the district achieved a 3-star rating for the first time ever and was released from academic oversight by state officials. This year, it reproduced the 3-star rating and posted double-digit gains in important areas like the number of students scoring proficient on their 3rd grade reading tests.
Education researchers have taken notice, highlighting the district’s gains and turnaround plan as things other districts can learn from. Pettiegrew has written for education publications about how the district’s turnaround strategy can be replicated. In that analysis, he pointed out that other districts could benefit from assigning areas that need improvement to a specific administrator or team as he has appointed Roscoe.
Removing barriers for students
Roscoe, a former star football player at Euclid High School, approaches his work with a combination of sternness, relentless energy and care for families and kids.
At the morning attendance meeting, he’s attentive to the small details, pointing out, for example, that while it might look as though a student is tardy, they actually don’t have a first period class so they shouldn’t be marked that way.
He told Signal Cleveland that while a big part of his work is to hold students accountable for coming to school, “they know I’m gonna love on them too.” It’s that dynamic, he said, that means students and families feel comfortable telling him why it’s difficult to get to school.
In addition to holding weekly attendance meetings, he’s responsible for managing the incentives and resources the district provides to help students get to school, including thousands of bus tickets purchased with a budget Pettiegrew explicitly set aside for attendance.
“We’re not there to punish parents,” Roscoe said. “We’re asking, ‘How can we assist?’ because we’ve got resources whether that’s laundry or hygiene items — if that’s your barrier, our goal is to get you set up.”
Roscoe said Pettiegrew has given him a lot of flexibility to do this work, allowing him and other school staff to work one-on-one with families. That individual help varies, from offering a kid a paid job as a student ambassador so they don’t skip school to go to work or Ubering a parent to the school for an important meeting.
At both Shaw High School and Kirk Middle School, the East Cleveland district has established resource centers for kids. The first, known as “Kirkmart,” is housed in an empty classroom on the middle school’s first floor. At the start of this school year it is bursting at the seams with the things — clothes, shoes and hygiene supplies — a student might need.
Lakeisha Greer, the school social worker at Kirk, helped start the resource room a few years ago. She said it has made the school more welcoming for students.
“Kids use this every single day,” she said.
Drakeley saw success at the middle school and brought a similar concept to Shaw High School. There the school’s “care closest” is on the fourth floor and is stocked with everything from hygiene kits to prom dresses and formal clothes.
Additions like the care closet and providing an exercise room for students to blow off steam have helped build a welcoming atmosphere and stronger relationships with students, Greer said.
“We’re letting the kids know this is a safe place,” she said. “This is a loving place.”
Focusing on the student and parent experience
Pettiegrew has also tried to change the overall culture in East Cleveland’s schools, starting by making them more attentive to student and parent experiences. He believes that if parents and students aren’t made to feel welcome at school, they’ll be less motivated to come.
“Our job is to show parents we want to partner,” he said.
Parents are coming in with their own assumptions and memories of how they were treated in school, Pettiegrew said, and the district needs to factor that in when they try to shift school culture. A lot of those changes don’t require hiring new staff or completely overhauling how the school runs — they can be small things too like spending a chunk of pandemic relief money on new furniture, so that the schools look good on the inside.
This year, Shaw High School is piloting a new process for when parents visit. Instead of being trapped by security in the vestibule before passing through a metal detector, parents will be able to check in at a separate office filled with Cardinal-themed swag. The goal is to make the process of visiting the school feel less intimidating, Pettiegrew said.
To boost the student experience at Shaw, the school added things like a senior social room with comfy seating and natural light — but students have to have decent grades and good attendance to access the space. That’s been a motivation for them too, Roscoe said.
Putting student and parent experience first has required a mindset shift on the part of administrators, but it’s a valuable one that other districts could adopt, he thinks.
“What are we doing to make the family feel heard and valued?” he said. “In education, for a long time, we’ve been treating parents like distrusted visitors versus working with them as partners.”
