United States of America · Dunkirk · See the United States of America profile
Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 98% 13/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice
Dunkirk City School District, New York (~2,000 students), rolled out AI company Edia's attendance module district-wide in the 2025–26 school year. Automated two-way texts to families of absent students accompanied a fall in chronic absenteeism from about 38% to roughly 20–22% wit
Dunkirk is a small, high-poverty public school district (just under 2,000 students) in Chautauqua County, western New York; in February 2025, more than 38% of its students were chronically absent (18 or more missed school days).
The district signed a three-year, district-wide contract (2025-26 through 2027-28) with AI company Edia, combining an AI math-instruction tool with an attendance module that automatically texts parents of absent students each morning and lets them reply in real time with a reason; district reporting indicates 40-50% of parents respond.
By early 2026, chronic absenteeism had fallen to roughly 20-22%, reported independently by Spectrum News (February 2026) and the Observer Today (March 2026), both citing Superintendent Brian Swatland; the district also reported concurrent gains in math and reading proficiency across most grade levels over the same period.
The district's own reporting credits the improvement jointly to the Edia app, newly formed school-level attendance committees, and classroom teachers and instructional leadership, so the AI tool's independent contribution cannot be isolated from the available reporting. No controlled comparison against a similar district without the tool is available, and neither source discusses data-privacy or consent safeguards for the family-texting and attendance-tracking system.
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