School leaders rank attendance, not violence, as top concern

New data from Minga, based on surveys at four 2026 education conferences in Texas, Florida and California, found that attendance and tardiness outranked bullying, violence and cyberbullying by a wide margin. The findings suggest schools are facing a quieter problem: disengagement, not a safety crisis.

Why it matters: - School leaders say the biggest challenge in 2026-27 is not violence on campus, but students drifting out of engagement. - The shift matters because attendance, tardiness and weak belonging can erode school culture and instructional time before a crisis becomes visible. - Minga, used by more than 2,500 schools nationwide, says the data points to a problem schools can address with clearer systems and more consistent policy.

What happened: - Minga asked thousands of school leaders at four 2026 education conferences in Texas, Florida and California what behavior issues worried them most. - Attendance and tardiness ranked first or second at every event. - Bullying, violence and cyberbullying ranked at or near the bottom at each conference. - At the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Summer Workshop, attendance and tardies drew more than double the responses of any other category. - At FETC in Orlando, attendance got more than 260 responses, more than nine times the number for violence, the lowest-ranked category. - At CADA in California, attendance again led, while cyberbullying trailed far behind.

The details: - Jason Richards, Minga’s CEO, said leaders were describing “a slow stall,” not a crisis of violence. - Richards said students are “showing up to the building, but not to the culture.” - When leaders were asked how engaged students actually feel, 59% at the Texas event placed students in the “neutral middle,” physically present but not fully invested. - At CADA, 74% of leaders put students in that middle category. - Very few leaders described students as fully checked out. - Almost none described them as fully engaged. - Minga says the same survey at UNITED 2025 in Seattle and FETC 2026 in Orlando showed attendance-related concerns rising about 24%. - Nearly half of Texas principals described their approach as preventive. - A meaningful share of those principals still track that work on spreadsheets. - At the DASA 2026 conference, 37% of respondents said the top reason tardiness is hard to manage is the absence of a consistent policy.

Between the lines: - The results suggest many schools are prepared for visible threats but less ready for the slower problem of disengagement. - That gap may be a systems issue as much as a student-behavior issue, since leaders already favor preventive, relationship-first approaches. - The findings also imply that attendance and tardiness may be the clearest early warning signs of weaker belonging.

What's next: - Minga says a consistent policy applied the same way in every classroom can close the gap quickly. - Richards said the company has seen those improvements happen “in a matter of months, not years.” - As the 2026-27 school year begins, schools are likely to keep watching for major safety threats while the quieter disengagement problem continues to build.

The bottom line: - The data says schools may be fighting the wrong battle if they focus first on violence instead of attendance, consistency and student belonging.