Balancing the Head and the Heart: Award-Winning ICAN Program Gets Kids Back to School

“If a kid misses school two or three days in a row, and no one says, ‘Hey, we missed you,’ the kid might start wondering why they should attend at all if nobody notices I’m not there,” explains Shannon Coulter, San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) director of assessment, accountability, and evaluation.   

That sense of belonging can be difficult to measure — and even harder to act upon and improve at scale. But that’s exactly what a dedicated group of SDCOE team members is trying to change — and they’ve got data-backed evidence to demonstrate their methods work. 

They are the team behind SDCOE’s Improving Chronic Absence Network (ICAN), which was started in 2019 to address the issue of chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. 

The need was real: during the 2018-19 school year, 50,000 students across the county were chronically absent. Rates exceeded 12% across 250 elementary and middle schools. 

And then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Chronic absenteeism rates soared into the 30s and approached 50% at some schools. The immediate and lingering effects of the pandemic only underscored the need for a high-quality, results-driven approach. 

ICAN stands out by mixing proven interventions with robust data analysis. “This program is a balance of the head and heart,” explains Todd Langager, director of implementation, improvement, and impact. “We use data to measure what’s working and who needs what. But the intervention strategies require human connection and relationships. If it’s too clinical, it won’t work with the kids and their families. So, we use data to dive in where we need to, then slow down to the human level and find ways to address issues with families.”

ICAN functions on a cohort model, with 15 to 20 schools per year participating. The ICAN team begins the process in July by assembling the right team of personnel at the school and providing training and coaching necessary to successfully reduce absenteeism. 

Over the past seven years, ICAN has worked directly with 88 schools from 15 districts and two charter organizations serving over 62,000 students and has delivered measurable and meaningful results: 

• Cohort 3 (2022-23): Helped more than 600 students return to the classroom while reducing chronic absenteeism from 38% to 32%.
• Cohort 4 (2023-24): Helped more than 1,100 students, reduced chronic absenteeism from 34% to 25%, and led to improvement at 18 of 19 participating schools.
• Cohort 5 (2024-25): Helped more than 600 students, reduced chronic absenteeism from 27% to 20%, and led to improvement at 14 of 17 participating schools.
• Cohort 6 (2025-26): Helped more than 330 students, reduced chronic absenteeism from 19% to 15%, and led to improvement at all 14 participating schools.

“In education, we do a lot of things we believe are right,” Langager explains. “ICAN gives us the data to prove it. We can see we’re making things better through fewer days missed. I’m really proud that we’ve gone from an Excel spreadsheet to a dashboard that allows teams to do good things for their kids on a daily basis.”

Members of the ICAN team acknowledge that getting going was harder than they anticipated. Back in 2019, chronic absenteeism wasn’t a widely tracked metric. The team also found that definitions of chronic absenteeism varied from location to location. 

As Langager described, they chipped away at the problem, and through constant iteration, built up a sophisticated absence-tracking and communication system. Data within the dashboard can be sliced and diced in various ways to provide year-over-year comparisons, grade-level trends, and more. It also provides detailed stats at the individual student level.

Daily updates allow a school to react and act in near-real time. “I would say the biggest change we’ve had over time is now everybody can see attendance on a daily basis,” says Coulter. “We used to have it just monthly, so the data was lagging. Daily attendance data is huge because it allows people working with kids to get timely feedback on whether their interventions are working.”

Here’s an example of how everything ties together. ICAN data shows that “nudge letters” — short notes to parents and guardians letting them know when absences pile up — reduce absenteeism by up to 29%. Using the ICAN dashboard, a school can generate nudge letters autopopulated with the student’s name and recent attendance stats. Within the dashboard, users can pull up that student’s profile, pinpoint the nudge letter date, and observe attendance trends that follow.

To complement the role of data-driven interventions (the “head” Langager mentioned), ICAN also strives to take a fresh approach to addressing absenteeism — the “heart.” Gone are the days of treating absenteeism as a compliance issue, with outreach based on discipline. Now, the ICAN team treats the issue as a shared improvement responsibility that includes principals, counselors, staff, and others with close relationships with students and families. 

“We’re trying to flip the script on how absenteeism is treated,” explains Coulter. “It’s not about punishment. We want to be positive in nature and not have kids feel like something is wrong with them just because they’re not coming to school.”

As school teams understand and embrace this work, the program thrives. “We’re literally watching their mindsets change,” Julia Bridi, executive leadership coach, says when describing how school teams evolve and adopt ICAN. “They’ve tried a lot in the past without results, and they are proud of what they’re achieving.” 

Those results, and the systems developed to achieve them, have attracted attention well beyond San Diego County. This spring, ICAN was presented the 2026 Strategic Data Impact Award from Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. 

Though the award plaque says 2026, the recognition is really seven years in the making. For the ICAN team, the award does not provide the validation — the results do. “This recognition is a testament to all the people who have come together to synergize and prioritize like never before,” says Bridi. “Our work shows it can be done, and potentially these results can serve as inspiration for other schools and areas that want to do this work on behalf of their students.”

Coulter adds, “I appreciate the award, but it should be bestowed upon people in the schools working with kids every day who are making a difference.”

ICAN continues its work. With a growing number of schools having completed the one-year network, the team has set up a community of practice for all cohorts to continue meeting quarterly to share their approaches and results. 

Langager and Bridi are half joking, half serious when they say their goal is to work themselves out of a job. “We’re always coaching for sustainability and scale,” says Bridi. “It would be the best news if schools say they no longer need us, though we’ve learned that schools really benefit from the county office’s support.”

At its heart, ICAN is about getting kids back in school … and making them feel seen and heard. That perfectly supports SDCOE's North Star goal of increasing belonging. For the ICAN team, that may be the most meaningful measure of success.

Further Reading

As mentioned in the article, ICAN is the recipient of the 2026 Strategic Data Impact Award from Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. Check out an ICAN video and blog post produced by the Center for Education Policy Research.