At Scholarship Prep South Bay, a CCSA member school serving TK–8 students in Wilmington, 54 students experiencing homelessness attended the school last year. Not one was chronically absent.

That means 0% chronic absenteeism among students experiencing homelessness — at a time when nearly 35% of California students experiencing homelessness are chronically absent and nearly one in five students statewide misses at least 10% of the school year.

It is an achievement that recently caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times, Spectrum News and CharterFolk. But step inside Scholarship Prep South Bay and the bigger story quickly comes into focus. This is a school that has worked intentionally to understand why students miss school in the first place — and what educators and communities can do to remove those barriers.

Starting the Day by Asking: How Are You?

Spectrum News recently took viewers inside Scholarship Prep South Bay to see what that philosophy looks like in practice.

Students don't simply arrive, head to class and begin their assignments. Their day starts with a series of human connections.

Staff greet students as they arrive and pay attention to how they're doing emotionally. Breakfast staff check in again. Teachers greet them at the classroom door. And the first 30 minutes of the school day include a morning meeting focused on students' social-emotional well-being.

Staff are also trained in trauma-informed practices, allowing them to recognize when a student may need additional support and connect them with counselors and other resources.

Those small interactions add up to a real sense of belonging.

Seventh-grader Mason Becerra perhaps captured it best when he told Spectrum News: “I feel like I’m welcome.”

That connection is central to Scholarship Prep South Bay's approach. Principal Allison Vann told Spectrum that when students trust the adults around them enough to share what they are experiencing, educators are better able to help students work through challenges and get them back into the classroom and learning.

And the results extend beyond attendance. Spectrum reported that the school's overall chronic absenteeism rate was 1.4%, compared with 19.4% statewide in 2024–25. Vann also pointed to a 20-point increase in math scores last year, which she attributes to the school's broader model of student support.

Looking Beyond the Classroom

The Los Angeles Times took an even deeper look at what surrounds students once they become part of the Scholarship Prep community.

Nearly 93% of students at the South Bay campus come from low-income households. During the previous school year, 54 of its 421 students experienced homelessness.

For those students and their families, simple things can become big barriers to attending. 

Do they have transportation? Clean clothes? Breakfast? School supplies? A safe place to talk about how they're feeling?

Scholarship Prep has assembled a network of more than 50 community partnerships to help answer those questions.

Students can receive breakfast and lunch, before- and after-school care, uniforms, hygiene supplies, transportation assistance, counseling and health and wellness services. The campus has washers and dryers. Families can receive groceries and, when needed, assistance with temporary lodging.

Even individual classrooms are equipped with “Rainbow Carts” stocked with necessities including toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, hair-care products and school supplies. Calming corners give students space and tools to regulate their emotions, while a mental health room provides another place to decompress.

None of these things may look like a traditional attendance intervention.

That's precisely the point.

The Question Behind the Number

Scholarship Prep CEO and co-founder Jason Watts recently reflected on the school's experience in CharterFolk, explaining that the breakthrough came when educators changed the question they were asking.

Instead of focusing only on why a student wasn't attending school, they began looking at what was getting in the way of that student being there.

An absence can be the visible outcome of something much more complicated: housing instability, transportation problems, food insecurity, mental health challenges, trauma or simply not having clean clothes to wear to school.

So Scholarship Prep works to remove the barriers causing them.

Morning meetings help teachers identify changing needs. Counselors regularly check in with students experiencing homelessness. Partnerships with community organizations allow the school to quickly connect families with resources that educators alone could never provide.

In his CharterFolk column, Watts writes, schools cannot solve every challenge confronting a family. But schools occupy a unique position: educators see students every day, develop relationships with families and can often recognize when something has changed. Community partners can then bring additional expertise and resources around them. 

A Charter School Responding to Its Community

Scholarship Prep South Bay's story also reflects something fundamental about California's charter public schools: the ability to design around the needs of the students and communities they serve.

For Scholarship Prep, that has meant building an educational model in which academics, social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, family support and community partnerships aren't separate initiatives. They work together and reinforce one another

When students know someone will notice when they walk through the door — and notice when they don't — attendance becomes about much more than being present.

That's the story unfolding at Scholarship Prep South Bay.

It's a reminder that sometimes the most powerful way to help a student succeed in the classroom begins by asking a very different question: What does this student need in order to get here?

Read More

• Read the Los Angeles Times feature, “How an L.A. charter school has all but eliminated chronic absenteeism among homeless students.”

• Read and watch the Spectrum News report, “How one Southern California school is tackling chronic absenteeism, one morning check-in at a time.”

• Read Scholarship Prep CEO and co-founder Jason Watts' CharterFolk commentary, “What a 0% Chronic Absenteeism Rate Taught Us About Getting Students to School.”
  

Photos courtesy of Scholarship Prep South Bay.