Val Verde Unified School District
A read of every Val Verde student's attendance against their grades, their course failure, and their discipline — built from a de-identified Aeries export. Every figure on this page is an aggregate.
Find where attendance moves outcomes — and act before June.
Attendance is the one thing every school already tracks, every day. This project asks a plain question of it: where a student's days add up, what happens to their grades, their failed courses, and their time in the office?
The answer is built from a single de-identified Aeries export for the 2025–26 school year — every student, every site, read all at once. The point isn't to grade the past. It's to name, early, the students a missed week is already pulling off track.
This year, last year, and the first month of school — present days, absent days, and the share of school missed for every student.
Current GPA and the courses each student is passing or failing this term.
Referrals and suspension days, joined to the same students.
Program flags and demographic groups, so every cut can be read fairly across our students.
Site and level for every record, so each school can be pulled out on its own.
● Every record is keyed to a surrogate ID — no names, no student IDs, no identifying information appears anywhere in this read. The link back to real students stays private with the district.
We exported a handful of records from Aeries — the district's student information system — screen by screen. Five kinds of record, for every student.
Every student's days present and absent — this year, last year, and just the first month of school.
Each student's grade-point average, plus the list of D and F marks they're carrying.
Days suspended, joined to the same students.
Special education and English-learner status, ethnicity, gender, grade, and school.
Every site in the district, by name.
Then we stripped the names and student IDs out of every file, replaced them with anonymous codes, and lined the files up student by student — so each student's attendance could sit next to their grades, their discipline, and their outcomes. Nothing identifying ever entered the analysis. The key that links the codes back to real students stays with the district.
All of this already lives in Aeries — but in separate screens that are never put side by side.
National research says attendance drives outcomes. This asks whether it's true here, in Val Verde, with our own students — and whether we can see trouble coming early enough to actually help, instead of finding out in June.
So we pulled the records, lined them up, and looked.
3.2→2.3
Average GPA · steady attenders → chronically absent
It isn't a gentle slope. Group students by how much school they miss and the line bends sharply downward — grade-point average slides from a 3.2 among steady attenders toward 2.3 as absence deepens, and the share of students failing a course rises alongside it.
The same students missing the most days are the students carrying the most failed courses.
Nearly a quarter of Val Verde students — 24.9% — miss ten percent or more of the school year. That is the chronic-absence threshold, and it sits at one in four.
And it bites: chronically absent students fail at 29.5%, against 17.6% for their peers — close to double the rate.
24.9%
of students are chronically absent · 29.5% vs 17.6% course-failure
62%
of this year's chronically absent were chronically absent last year
This isn't only a June story. 62% of students chronically absent this year were chronically absent last year too — and two absences in the first month of school triple the odds a student lands there again.
So we can name who needs help in the fall, not just after the damage is done.
These are correlations, not proof of cause — but the pattern holds across every cut of the data.
One is built to explore, one is built to present. Both run on the de-identified export — nothing here leaves the district.
The cliff, the equity matrix, the site leaderboard, and an early-warning list — with a per-site filter so each principal pulls their own school's profile.
Open the dashboard → Board presentationThe board-room version of the same findings — keyboard-navigable, ready to project, with presenter notes built in. Press P for presenter mode.
Open the deck →