School Attendance Letters and Notices: The Complete Template Bank

"Counts" is the column districts get wrong most often. Chronic absenteeism counts every absence including documented illness and out-of-school suspension. Truancy counts only unexcused absences. A letter that mixes the two arithmetics is the single most common defect we see in district attendance correspondence.

Which letter do I send?

Four inputs decide it, in this order. Work down; the first row that matches is your letter.

• Are the absences unexcused? If no — if they are documented illness, bereavement, religious observance or approved travel — you are not in the truancy ladder at all, no matter how high the count. You are in the chronic absenteeism or excessive-excused ladder, and a legal-sounding notice is both wrong and risky. See excessive excused absences.
• What does the count actually reach? Against your state's unexcused threshold, and separately against 10% of days enrolled. These are two different numbers on two different denominators and a student can cross one without the other.
• What contact is already documented? Most states require the district to have attempted contact, offered a conference, or applied an intervention before the next rung is available. If that evidence does not exist in writing, the next rung is not available to you yet, whatever the count says.
• How old is the student, and who is the responsible adult? A notice about a 17-year-old in a split-custody household goes to a different set of people, in a different register, than one about a first-grader.

Two shortcuts worth stating explicitly. A student who is chronically absent but has never had an unexcused absence gets a chronic absenteeism letter and never a truancy notice. A student with six unexcused absences in a district with a three-absence threshold is already past the first notice and should not receive it as though it were new information — families notice when the paperwork is out of sequence, and so do courts.

The tier 2 attendance warning letter, in full

This is the rung most districts skip, and skipping it is why tier 3 referrals get returned. It is not a legal notice. Its job is to state the count, name the consequence honestly, and offer a meeting before anything statutory happens.

[DISTRICT LETTERHEAD]

[DATE]
[PARENT OR GUARDIAN NAME]
[ADDRESS OF RECORD]

Re: Attendance — [STUDENT NAME], [GRADE], [SCHOOL]

Dear [PARENT OR GUARDIAN NAME],

As of [DATE], [STUDENT FIRST NAME] has missed [N] days of school this year. [X] of those days were recorded as unexcused. School has been in session for [M] days, so this is [P]% of the days [STUDENT FIRST NAME] has been enrolled.

We are writing now rather than later because attendance patterns are much easier to change in October than in March, and because families frequently tell us the total was higher than they realised. If our count is wrong, we want to know — call [ATTENDANCE OFFICE PHONE] and we will go through it with you day by day.

If the count is right, we would like to meet. A meeting is not a disciplinary step. It is thirty minutes to work out what is actually getting in the way — transport, health, work schedules, something at school — and what we can change. [SCHOOL] can offer [LIST TWO OR THREE REAL SUPPORTS].

What happens if nothing changes: at [STATE THRESHOLD] unexcused absences, [DISTRICT] is required by state law to send a formal truancy notice, and the process after that is no longer one we control. We would much rather resolve it here.

Please call [PHONE] or reply to this letter by [DATE + 10 DAYS].

[NAME], [TITLE] — [DIRECT PHONE], [EMAIL]

160-character SMS companion. [DISTRICT]: [STUDENT] has missed [N] days ([P]%). We would like to meet before this becomes a formal notice. Call [PHONE]. Reply STOP to opt out.

60-second voice version. This is [NAME] from [SCHOOL], calling about [STUDENT FIRST NAME]'s attendance. As of today [STUDENT FIRST NAME] has missed [N] days this year, which is [P]% of the days enrolled. That is a level where we start to see it affect grades, so we would like to sit down with you. A letter with the details is on its way. If the number does not sound right to you, please call the attendance office on [PHONE] and we will go through it day by day. Again, [PHONE]. Thank you.

Spanish, US-district register. Estimado padre, madre o tutor legal de [ESTUDIANTE]: Hasta el [FECHA], [ESTUDIANTE] ha faltado [N] días de clase este año escolar, de los cuales [X] están registrados como ausencias injustificadas. Esto representa el [P]% de los días inscritos. Nos gustaría reunirnos con usted antes de que el distrito escolar tenga que enviar un aviso formal de ausentismo escolar. Esta reunión no es una medida disciplinaria. Llame a la oficina de asistencia al [TELÉFONO]. Si nuestro conteo no es correcto, avísenos y lo revisaremos día por día.

Proof of notice: the six things you must be able to evidence

Referrals are lost on proof of notice far more often than on the wording of the letter. Before any tier 3 document leaves the building, a district should be able to produce, for every prior notice in the chain:

• Recipient — the named adult, and their legal relationship to the student on the date the notice went out.
• Address or number of record — what it was on that date, not what it is today. A number corrected in March does not fix a November notice.
• Date and time sent, not the date the letter was drafted.
• Channel, and where the statute specifies a method, evidence that the specified method was used.
• Language the notice was sent in, and the household's language of record.
• Delivery outcome — accepted, delivered, bounced, undeliverable, returned. "Sent" is not an outcome.

Most districts can reconstruct three or four of these from a mail merge and a spreadsheet. The two that go missing are the address of record at the time and the delivery outcome, and those are exactly the two a court asks about.

What we do not do, so you can plan around it

Kastr is a communications platform. It is not an attendance product and it does not read your SIS attendance table.

• No auto-notice engine. You can configure notice rules in the interface; nothing fires them. Attendance sends in Kastr are composed and sent by a person. If your requirement is "the platform detects the fifth unexcused absence and mails the letter", we do not do that today and you should weight that heavily.
• No grade-level or school-level audience presets. Two audiences resolve: specific people, and everyone in the district. Selecting a student auto-expands to that student's guardians, which is the right shape for attendance work, but "all 4th grade at Lincoln" is not a target you can pick.
• No merge-token magic to assume. The bracketed placeholders on these pages are for a human to fill. Whatever platform you use, send a test to yourself before a bulk run and read it — a family receiving Hi [family] is a worse outcome than sending nothing.

What we do give you is a cost-and-reach preview before you send, a translation preview so you can read the Spanish before a family does, scheduling with the audience resolved at send time rather than schedule time, and SMS-to-voice failover with quiet hours defaulting to 21:00–07:00.

Questions people actually ask

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