In addition to two Celebrations of Excellence, the Board of Education (BOE) listened to a presentation from Newtown High School (NHS) Dean of Students LeeAnn Browett, covering her duties at the high school, at its Tuesday, April 7 meeting.

The dean of students position was included in last year’s 2025-26 budget, with Browett taking the position at the start of the 2026-27 school year.

Browett said she would give the best overview she could about what she'd been doing so far this year regarding the role. The biggest point she wanted to get across, Browett said, is that she is providing a lot of data-informed support to students.

She noted that her primary mission as dean was to improve attendance at the high school and to address chronic absenteeism. This directly ties into NHS Principal Kimberly Longobucco's strategic goals for the school to reduce chronic absenteeism, and build on strategic actions involving data analysis, identifying students in need, running absentee reports, and the implementation of SmartPass, a digital hall pass system that gives insight on student movement at school.

While her work ties to this goal, Browett believes it also indirectly ties to other ones involving engagement and school climate.

Browett then pulled up the high school's chronic absence data from EdSight, the interactive data portal for Connecticut's public districts, schools, and programs. This chart shows chronic absenteeism rates for NHS from the 2018-19 school year to the 2024-25 school year.

Connecticut identifies students as being chronically absent at 18 absences. NHS had a 5.1% chronic absenteeism rate in 2018-19. This number bumped up to 5.9% in 2019-20, and later to 7% in 2020-21. It rose to 11.3% in 2021-22 and later to 12% in 2022-23. However, the chronic absenteeism rate lowered to 10.3% in 2023-24 before a slight rise to 10.7% in 2024-25.

Of this data, Browett said seniors are consistently absent the most.

Browett said she feels most people recognize there was a bump up during the COVID-19 pandemic, but pointed out the 2020-21 school year increase could be attributed to everyone getting sent home in March and attendance probably not being taken in the last marking period of that year.

"I think that bump up really happened before, and it happened across the state; COVID just sort of brought it all to the surface just a little bit more," Browett explained.

She said there is a three pillar approach to reducing chronic absenteeism: provide proactive support and targeted interventions for students, partner with and provide support for families, and conduct daily, weekly, and monthly data analysis and see what they can do at the high school to improve this data.

In addition to that three-pronged approach, Browett said there are three tiers to address chronic absenteeism. The first level is support that applies to everyone, the second is more targeted support for students that seem to have more needs, and the third tier is for students with higher needs.

"I've used that approach throughout the year, and I think it's going to be the most effective approach to address chronic absenteeism," Browett said.

Tiers Of Support

For universal support, Browett said she sends students a monthly newsletter in which she embeds videos covering topics such as how to get to school on time, how to study, or how to manage stress. While Browett said this seems tangentially related, she noted the reality is that if kids feel stressed about studying before midterms, they are going to stay home from schools to study.

"But there's better ways to go about it because then they miss things at school and they fall behind," Browett explained.

The second tier is when Browett looks at daily and weekly attendance to start to tease out students that are struggling. Browett will directly meet with the students, their families, and they often have things like care and concern meetings when the student is not reaching certain attendance thresholds. She clarified this is for absences not related to something obvious, such as a student being sick with the flu.

Browett said the third tier sees an increase in meeting with students and a referral to something the high school created this year, the NHS Attendance Review Board. This group includes Browett and Longobucco as permanent members and provides targeted support for students, determines any underlying issues of school disengagement, and identifies relevant barriers, aversions, or misconceptions regarding attendance.

The NHS Attendance Review Board includes the district's supervising nurse, a school psychologist, a student assistance counselor, and the director of Newtown Youth and Family Services, along with the individual student's assistant principal, counselor, and, if they are a special education student, their case manager.

"And the goal of these meetings is to be really supportive in identifying what is the root cause of the student not coming to school so we can address whatever that root cause is," Browett said.

With many students, Browett feels they have had some significant success in turning things around. She said that, sometimes, just having a meeting with people sitting around a table saying," We want to help. What can we do?" is what a student might need. She said it also gives the student's family a sense of support and that they are with them in wanting to help their student.

Browett said she has also done home visits for students, especially when they refuse to come into school or it is unusual for a student to do so. When Browett does home visits, she goes with another staff member, usually a school psychologist, and makes sure that a parent is home when they are doing it.

For third tier students in particular, Browett will take a look at data and see how many absences a student has and if there is a particular day of the week that is more of a struggle for that student. Browett sends letters to families when students hit the six-day mark of absence, then again at the nine-day mark, 12-day mark, and 15-day mark.

"The six and nine day are deliberate, because once you get past nine days of absences, its much more difficult for student absences to be excused by state law. So I want families to be informed well in advance of that," Browett explained.

Misconceptions And More

A misconception Browett said she wanted to address is why the district has this 18-day rule. She clarified that it is not the district's rule, but the state's rule; it passed through law in 2015. Section 10-198c defines a "chronically absent child" as one whose total absences >=10% of their enrollment days. Browett's presentation notes students who miss ten percent of the school year suffer significant academic harm, and this applies regardless of whether absences are "excused" or not.

Another misconception is if students come to school that day then they count as "present." However, Browett said the state defined in 2022 that a child has to be in school for at least half of the school day to count as "present."

Browett added that parents can excuse the first nine absences, but it is actually really hard to get absences excused if their child is not legitimately sick when they get to the tenth or later absence. Other exceptions include a death in the family or another extraordinary circumstance. The other piece is that you cannot submit documentation at any point, it has to be within ten school days.

However, Browett said the biggest challenge when it comes to chronic absences is that absences add up. If they miss two days a month starting in September, this means by the end of May they have missed 18 days of school. These days could also be spread out sporadically through the year.

"It's a day here and there, or a couple of days here or there; the habit of, 'I went to school for a week, so now I'm going to take a day,'" Browett said. "Those really add up quickly, and then when a student does get sick on top of that, they're really hard to get past."

Browett said PowerSchool especially helps her, since it allows her to look at daily attendance, cuts, and even weekly attendance. This gives her up-to-date data to accurately inform family.

While they can crunch numbers, Browett said they need to connect it to policy. She noted seniors being more consistently absent compared to their peers. Browett said she started to look at how many classes a student needs to miss to consider having lost credit in the class. The high school's current policy is 21 classes, but Browett noted that state policy says a student is chronically absent at 18.

Browett said she and Longobucco felt they should run those numbers and see how many kids actually fell in that 18-20 mark of missed classes, which equates to three percent of seniors last year.

"This is pretty significant when you're just looking at a few days," Browett explained.

She and Longobucco decided to change this for next year; students would start to lose credit at 11 absences in the first semester. Browett said this is more in line with the state's policy of a student starting to lose credit at nine absences in the first semester.

Browett said they also came up with a "You Showed Up Senior Showdown!" which lets a senior who has 17 absences or less enter a raffle, where two winners each get a $250 Amazon gift card.

The big question, Browett said, is if all of this effort is working. She compared last year's data to this year's data up till the end of February.

For chronic absenteeism in 2024-25, September had 15.7%, October had 8.3%, November had 12.4%, December had 10.7%, January had 12.7%, February had 14.1%, March had 11.1%, April had 11%, and May had 10.5%.

Chronic absenteeism saw an overall downtrend in 2025-26, starting with 7.1% in September — a considerable dip from the previous school year. October saw an increase to 7.7%, which dropped back down to 7.1% in November. This increased to 10.1% in December, dropped to 8.9% in January, and increased to 10% in February.

The increase in chronic absenteeism this past December, Browett said, felt a "little bit like a knife." However, she said she was not surprised as the school was hit very hard by flu B this year.

Browett said she was happy to see an overall decrease in chronic absenteeism numbers compared to the previous year. That said, she hopes to lower the number even more.

Her other focus areas as dean include monitoring students throughout the day at extracurricular events, disciplining students, working in various chairs and teams, holding restorative practices and circles for student support, and troubleshooting miscellaneous issues and challenges for students and teachers.

More than anything else, she said the critical components of her work are building relationships with students, families, and school staff, along with increasing student engagement and school connections. Getting the trust of students to the point they will seek her out, Browett said, shows the importance of building relationships with them.

She continued, "You can have high standards for behavior and say, 'This is the consequence when you break this rule.' But if kids know you care about them, they still seek you out for other support. They're not mutually exclusive, and in fact, often, I think they go hand in hand."

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.