Good day, CharterFolk
Today we are pleased to present a Contributor Column from Jason Watts, CEO of Scholarship Prep, which operates charter schools in Southern California.
We provide a bio for Jason below.
Jason Watts has been part of teams operating award-winning district and charter schools for nearly 20 years. He developed the initial concept for Scholarship Prep to provide high-quality educational opportunities for students and families in the most underserved areas.
Mr. Watts’ career of nearly 30 years in education includes over 10 years teaching elementary and junior high school, serving in-site leadership positions including principal and assistant principal, and co-founding charter schools in five counties.
He received his master’s degree in educational administration and clear administrative credential from National University. Jason also holds a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology from California State University, Fullerton.
Many of you may have seen the great article in the Los Angeles Times that ran this week about Scholarship Prep’s extraordinary success serving homeless students.
We had another post scheduled for this week which has required a little extra time. I asked Jason if he would be willing to go deeper on the issues addressed in the Times article, offering additional thoughts that would be of assistance to practitioners and advocates. I’m delighted that he’s done so. A special thank you to Jason. Let’s get on to his post.
What a 0% Chronic Absenteeism Rate Taught Us About Getting Students to School
Last school year, 54 students experiencing homelessness attended our Scholarship Prep South Bay campus. None of them were chronically absent.
That statistic has gotten a lot of attention lately, and understandably so.
In California, chronic absenteeism is a persistent and inescapable issue. During the 2024-25 school year, nearly one in five students statewide were classified as chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of the academic school year. That amounts to nearly 1.1 million students. For students experiencing homelessness, that rate was even higher, at nearly 35%.
These numbers highlight a hard truth: too many students are missing critical classroom time, and for those facing greater challenges outside of school, consistent attendance can be even harder.
Against those numbers, what happened at South Bay is unusual. And while I’m incredibly proud of that result, I’m even more proud of the approach behind it. We didn’t get to 0% because we found a better way to enforce attendance. We got there because we learned to look beyond the absence itself.
Instead of asking why a scholar wasn’t showing up, we started asking a different question: What is getting in the way of them being here?
The Zero Isn’t Really the Story
At Scholarship Prep, we’ve built our approach around making sure our Scholars have what they need to be at school and ready to learn.
That support can look different depending on what is keeping a student from school. Through our community partnerships, students and families have access to food, clean clothes and laundry facilities, hygiene supplies, transportation assistance, technology, health and wellness services, counseling, and other resources.
The answer to ‘what is getting in the way?’ is rarely as simple as whether a student wants to be at school. In many cases, absence is a symptom, not the underlying problem.
And that isn’t unique to students experiencing housing instability. Every student has circumstances that can affect their ability to be present and ready to learn. The barriers may look different from one student to the next, but the principle is the same: if we only respond to the absence, we’re responding to the outcome. That only gets us so far.
In many cases, an absence is a symptom, not the underlying problem.
We have to understand the whole child, what they may be carrying with them when they walk through our doors, and what might be preventing them from walking through those doors in the first place.
Looking Beyond the Absence
So, that’s what we do. We identify the barriers our Scholars are facing and remove them wherever we can.
Identifying those barriers starts with knowing our students and families well enough to recognize when they need help. Our Morning Meetings give teachers a chance to check in with students each day, understand how they’re doing, and identify needs that may be impacting their ability to learn. We also use a weekly emotional check-in, Sown to Grow, to better understand the emotional climate of the school and to recognize patterns or changes in Scholars’ well-being. Our students experiencing homelessness are checked in on monthly by our counseling team. During these check-ins, we assess whether a student needs additional support, and if so, we mobilize resources as quickly as we can to be responsive to their needs in the moment.
But recognizing a need is only useful if we can do something about it. For us, community is how we make that possible.
At South Bay, we’ve intentionally built more than 50 partnerships with local organizations and experts that allow us to connect students and families with resources, services, and expertise our school could never provide alone.
Those partnerships help us meet needs in ways both big and small. Scholars and families can access food through programs like Blessings in a Backpack, school supply boxes and duffel bags for children moving between homes. On campus, Scholars have access to clean uniforms and other clothing, washers and dryers, hygiene supplies through Rainbow Carts, and calming corners in every classroom. Families can also receive support with transportation, technology and internet access, before- and after-school care, counseling, health and wellness services, groceries and temporary hotel assistance. Our community partnerships also bring expertise into the way we educate and support our students and families. We look to experts like Dr. William Parham at Loyola Marymount University’s (LMU) Center for Trauma-Informed Education, to help guide our trauma-informed educational programming and strengthen how we respond to the experiences students bring with them into the classroom.
Schools cannot solve every challenge a family faces on their own. But they are uniquely positioned to connect families with people who can. We see our students every day, know their families, and can recognize when they need help.
Our community partners bring resources and expertise that we could never replicate within the walls of a school. By bringing the two together, we can build a much broader system of support around our students and families.
If clean clothes, food, transportation, health care, or another unmet need is standing between a student and the classroom, helping remove that barrier is part of the work of improving attendance.
What 0% Taught Us
Ultimately, every school community is different, and so are the barriers that keep students from getting to school. But what we’ve built at Scholarship Prep offers a model for how schools can identify those barriers and respond to the whole child.
As charter school leaders, we have the flexibility to respond to what our students and families actually need. That flexibility matters when the barriers our students face don’t fit neatly within the traditional limits of what a school provides.
The 54 scholars I mentioned at the beginning didn’t stop experiencing homelessness because they enrolled at Scholarship Prep. Their circumstances didn’t change, but the support around them did.
A 0% chronic absenteeism rate among our Scholars experiencing homelessness is the number that gets people’s attention. And it should. I’m incredibly proud of the teachers and staff who made that possible. But I’m most proud of what we built behind that number: an approach that lets us know our Scholars recognize what may be keeping them from school and respond with the support they need to be there.
To me, that’s the real story behind 0%.