School Avoidance Alliance

For schools & districts

One shared response to school avoidance: the School Avoidance Alliance MTSS Framework.

Help teachers, counselors, and school leaders understand barriers to attendance, work more constructively with families, and coordinate next steps with the Framework Curriculum, a Quick Start Implementation Guide, and dedicated resources for teachers and families.

A student who had not attended school in person for three years now attends 4 to 5 days a week.

See Licensing & Pricing

What the Framework includes

  1. 1. The Framework Curriculum
  2. 2. Quick Start Implementation Guide
  3. 3. School Avoidance Teacher Cheat Sheet
  4. 4. Parent Master Class

All four included in every license.

Trusted nationwide

Districts and schools working with our school avoidance specialists

Why a shared framework

Give the people supporting your students a clearer next step.

A student’s difficulty attending school can involve several staff members and the family. The Framework gives your team a common starting point for understanding barriers, discussing responsibilities and planning a coordinated response.

Understand the barriers

Explore school avoidance and the questions that can help your team better understand a student’s situation.

Strengthen school–home conversations

Bring family perspectives and practical communication guidance into the way your team works with families.

Coordinate next steps

Use the Framework and resources to support conversations about roles, responsibilities and implementation.

Once your building is working from the same framework, the change looks small from the outside. A teacher knows what to say when a student says they can't come in today. A counselor isn't carrying the case alone. A parent gets a call that isn't about consequences. The student notices that every adult is saying the same thing.

That consistency is what moves these students. Not any single conversation.

Who it brings together

  • Special education Directors
  • RTI team members
  • Special education teachers
  • Social Workers
  • School Nurses
  • General education teachers
  • School Psychologists
  • Attendance staff
  • School engagement staff
  • School Counselors
  • Principals
  • Student Assistance Counselors
  • Pupil Personnel Workers
  • Truancy officers
  • MTSS Staff

What you receive

Expert-led learning, and a clear plan for putting it into practice.

  1. The Framework Curriculum

    Expert-led lessons your team can return to as it puts the Framework into practice.

    What the curriculum covers
    • Understanding school avoidance and early signs
    • Learning from student and parent perspectives
    • Understanding the functions of school refusal
    • Exploring approaches discussed by specialists
    • Clarifying school and family roles
    • Considering educational supports and responsibilities
    • Planning a return to school
    • Reviewing school practices and prevention

  2. Quick Start Implementation Guide

    Step-by-step guidance to put the Framework into practice, fully aligned with the features and plans on this page.

  3. Teacher resources and family access

    Included with every license: the School Avoidance Teacher Cheat Sheet and Parent Master Class access for families.

An empty classroom desk representing an absent student
Start with the driver

What school avoidance actually is

School avoidance, sometimes called school refusal, is when a student struggles to attend school due to underlying challenges, which can include mental health, learning issues, undiagnosed learning differences, and school-related factors. Often, multiple factors are at play at once. It is one of the most misunderstood challenges facing schools today. It shows up in your data as chronic absenteeism, but the absence itself is not the problem. It's a signal that something deeper is going on for that student.

Compliance-first responses like letters, point systems, and truancy court tend to make attendance worse for the students most likely to respond to real support. Improving outcomes, and your attendance numbers, requires schools to move past generic attendance policy and use best practice, evidence-based strategies built specifically for school avoidance.

A parent and school professional talking together at a table

The family-informed difference

Unmatched Insight: The Family Reality

We are the only resource that brings you the family perspective, and that insight is critical. For over a decade, we've talked directly with both schools and families, and we know how parents perceive and respond to school communications, what builds trust, and what shuts it down.

Family-informed learning is part of every license. Real accounts from children who have experienced school avoidance sit alongside their parents' experiences, paired with professional guidance on school-home collaboration and planning a return to school. Your team sees both the barriers to attendance and what families actually need to move past them.

This is difficult to understand from the outside. It's hard to grasp what these families are going through unless you hear it directly from them, or live it yourself. Once your team speaks the family's language and understands what they're feeling and what actually helps, it opens the door to honest, open communication with families, a needed part of any intervention and necessary to improve attendance. It builds the kind of school-family collaboration that is otherwise hard to achieve.

Every license includes Parent Master Class access for families.

Results

What changed in two districts.

District results · First cohort

A multidisciplinary school team meeting around a table

A K–12 district in New Jersey

Staff confidence, 5-point scale
2 → 5
Staff confidence, 5-point scale
Students back in the building
10+
Students back in the building
Protocols adopted district-wide
7 of 8
Protocols adopted district-wide
  • Secured an external university grant to fund a third year of coaching
  • Built check-in/check-out systems and mentoring for at-risk students
  • Embedded CBT- and DBT-informed strategies in reintegration planning

“Every attendance improvement we’ve seen is a direct result of this training.”

Director of Student Services

District-wide initiative

A public school district in Washington State

7 schools60 educator licensesDistrict-wide
  • Moved from legal letters and crisis firefighting to a unified, evidence-based response
  • Staff learned to recognize anxiety-driven absence instead of defiance — shifting from punitive enforcement to clinical partnership
  • Multiple students returned to regular attendance, including long-term school refusal cases
  • Reduced out-of-district placement referrals, avoiding $25K–$130K per student in placement costs

Breakthrough — 3-year re-entry case

One of three siblings who had exhausted every available option — a student who had not attended in-person school since 5th grade — now attends 4–5 days per week, supported by a modified attendance day paired with structured exposure therapy.

Now a repeat customer with an ongoing district-wide partnership.

These results reflect two districts’ reported experience working with School Avoidance Alliance’s school avoidance specialists; they are not an evaluation of the Framework. Outcomes vary by setting and implementation.

What this looks like in your building

Right now the people in your building are working from different ideas about what is happening. None of it is for lack of caring. A counselor reads it as manipulation. The front office makes a late arrival feel like trouble without meaning to. A teacher keeps sending work home that the student cannot touch yet. And the assistant principal, whose job is attendance, uses the language of consequences, because that is the job. Your social worker can be doing everything right and have it undone by the next conversation that family has with the school.

That is the first thing that changes once your building is working from the same framework, and it is mostly a reframe rather than a new skill set. Once everyone understands what they are actually looking at, the responses stop contradicting each other. People are more patient because they see it differently, not because they were told to be. It becomes clear who leads with the family, and which adult the student is building trust with. Over the following months that turns into how your building handles this, instead of four people each doing their best on their own.

Pricing

Framework Pricing

The framework is licensed by building type, so every adult in your building is working from the same approach.

For one building

Single School License

One license per building type (Elementary, Middle, or High). Includes full staff access, teacher tools, and family resources. Pricing and proposal available instantly.

  • Full staff access
  • Teacher tools
  • Family resources
  • Instant pricing and PDF proposal

Pricing and PDF proposal sent to your inbox instantly

Discounted for multiple schools

For multiple schools

District Licensing

For districts licensing multiple schools, we provide a custom quote based on the number of buildings. Every building uses the same approach, with full staff access across your district.

  • Full access for all staff
  • MTSS-aligned training
  • Implementation tools
  • Teacher support
  • Districtwide consistency

Custom quote within 1 business day

The cost of doing nothing

$25,000–$130,000

What a district pays for one out-of-district placement, per student, per year

9 in 10

Schools reported at least one student maintained in district rather than placed outside it

7 in 10

Reported three or more

Keep one student out of one placement and this license has paid for itself several times over.

2026 School Avoidance Impact and Benchmarking Survey

Funding

Most districts already have a budget line for this.

Many districts use Title I and Title II funds for professional development like this. Title IV, Part A is frequently overlooked for attendance work specifically, but it directly supports the family engagement and school climate side of it. McKinney-Vento funds can also apply, since annual staff training is a required part of that program.

If you want help identifying which fund fits your situation, bring it up on a call.

Building Types We Support

  • Elementary
  • Middle
  • High
  • Districts with multiple schools

Talk through the right fit for your school or district.

Use a 15-minute overview call to discuss staff coverage, participating schools and implementation questions. Invite your administrator if that would help.

Expertise

Professional expertise. Family-informed perspective.

Meet the school avoidance specialists behind the Framework.

The only national organization focused exclusively on school avoidance.

Jayne Demsky

Jayne Demsky

Author & Founder, School Avoidance Alliance

Jayne is a national authority on chronic absenteeism and the author of Overcoming School Avoidance. After identifying critical gaps in school resources during a personal family struggle, she founded the Alliance in 2014 to build systemic, evidence-based solutions for districts and families.

Read full bio for Jayne Demsky

Jayne is a founding member of Attendance USA, delivering professional development frameworks for school leadership nationwide. Her flagship district platform and parent masterclasses serve as premier national resources. Her work has been featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, Education Week, and CBS News.

Dr. Anne Marie Albano

Dr. Anne Marie Albano

Professor of Medical Psychology in Psychiatry; Co-author of the SRAS-R

Dr. Albano is a Professor of Medical Psychology in Psychiatry and board-certified in clinical child and adolescent psychology. She is the founder and director of a leading clinic for anxiety and related disorders in New York City.

Read full bio for Dr. Anne Marie Albano

Dr. Albano has co-authored over 200 articles and chapters, conducts clinical research, supervises the research and clinical development of interns and postdoctoral fellows in psychology and psychiatry, and is involved in the advanced training of senior clinicians in CBT. One of her most well-known works is co-authoring "You and Your Anxious Child: Free Your Child from Fears and Worries and Create a Joyful Family Life" with Leslie Pepper.

She has been awarded the "Outstanding Contribution by an Individual for Clinical Activities" distinction by the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

Dr. Dina Nunziato

Dr. Dina Nunziato

Clinical Director – Anxiety & School Avoidance Treatment Program

Dr. Dina Nunziato is a clinical director of an anxiety treatment program in Greenwich, Connecticut, providing partial treatment programs and customizable outpatient services for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and school avoidance.

Read full bio for Dr. Dina Nunziato

Dr. Nunziato has helped young adults in anxiety-related clinical and educational settings for twenty years. She specializes in Cognitive-behavioral treatment of anxiety and related disorders. Her research and publications include evidence-based mindfulness techniques to support anxiety management, academic success, and emotional well-being.

Most recently, Dr. Nunziato completed a doctoral dissertation entitled Embodied Learning Communities of Practice in Addressing College Student Anxiety.

Krystina Dawson

Krystina Dawson

School Psychologist & Founder – Center for One Consulting

Krystina Dawson, M.S.Ed., is a certified school psychologist and special education administrator in Greenwich, Connecticut. She is experienced and dedicated to leading teams and building plans to reintegrate kids with school avoidance back into school.

Read full bio for Krystina Dawson

She is an adjunct professor at Iona College, teaching graduate classes for mental health students and future school psychologists. Such as: "Consultation and Collaboration in Schools," "Social Psychology," "Psychological Aspects of Sexual Health," "Contemporary Issues in School Psychology," and "Exceptional Individuals."

Krystina is the founder of a private consulting agency, Center for One, which supports families and unique learners through the special education process.

Getting started

From choosing your scope to bringing your team together.

  1. Step 1: Choose your license

    Compare the Single School License and District Licensing.

  2. Step 2: Request pricing and a proposal

    Request pricing and a proposal for your school.

  3. Step 3: Get your team started

    After payment or an accepted purchase order under agreed terms, we’ll coordinate staff access with your designated contact. The Quick Start Implementation Guide walks your team through the first steps.

Planning around a new term or a staff-development day? Talk through your rollout timing with us.

FAQs

Questions school teams ask

What does every license include?

Every license includes unlimited staff access, the Framework Curriculum, the Quick Start Implementation Guide, the School Avoidance Teacher Cheat Sheet and Parent Master Class access for families. Districts can contact us for District Licensing.

Which building types does the Single School License support?

The Single School License supports Elementary, Middle School and High School buildings. Select your building type in the Request Instant Quote form. Every license includes unlimited staff access and the same resources.

How does District Licensing work?

Districts receive discounted pricing when licensing multiple schools. Every district license includes full access for all relevant staff, MTSS-aligned training, implementation tools, and districtwide consistency. Contact us for a district quote.

Can this be paid for with grant or federal funding?

Yes. Many districts use Title I and Title II funds for this kind of professional development. Title IV, Part A is often overlooked for attendance work specifically, but it directly supports family engagement and school climate initiatives like this one. McKinney-Vento funds, typically associated with homeless student services, can also be applied for, since annual staff training is a required part of that program.

Is live training included?

Live workshops are not included in the standard licenses. They are available as optional add-ons; book a call to discuss them.

How do I get pricing?

Use Request Instant Quote under Single School License to receive pricing and a proposal for your school. For multiple schools, use Request District Quote under District Licensing.

Do I need to take the survey or book a call to buy?

Both are optional. You can request a Single School License quote directly, or request a district quote for multiple schools.

Does the license include ongoing consulting?

Ongoing consulting is not included in the standard licenses. Ask about additional needs before purchasing.

How long does a license last?

Licenses are annual. Review the purchasing terms for your license before completing your order.

Give your team a shared starting point.

We built the Framework, the system districts use to respond to school avoidance. Choose the coverage your school or district needs and bring its curriculum, practical resources and family-informed guidance to your team.

See Licensing & Pricing