Can Home Visits Re-Engage Chronically Absent Students? Evidence from the LEAP Program

Beginning in the summer of 2021, the state of Connecticut launched the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP) where home visits by school personnel were conducted with students identified as chronically absent from Connecticut’s 15 most disadvantaged school districts. Home visits were designed to connect students and their families directly with teachers to foster strong connections. We use student-level data from 2021–22 through 2023-24 to estimate event studies of the effect of LEAP on student attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary incidents, and student achievement. Utilizing models that address selection into treatment timing over student observable and unobservable attributes, we find that students who received the LEAP intervention experienced approximately a 4 to 5 percentage point increase in attendance rates, a 13 to 15 percentage point decline in chronic absenteeism, and a 3 to 5 percentage point decline in the number of disciplinary incidents. Notably, initial event studies indicated increasing treatment effects over time, but after correcting for selection on unobservables treatment effects appeared constant over time. These effects were broad based, with similar impacts by gender, race and ethnicity, and free or reduced-price lunch status. These attendance and discipline results provide suggest that the LEAP intervention increased student noncognitive skills.