Expansive Ecological Model for Attendance and Engagement Interventions

Abstract

Abstract Attendance and school engagement have been long-standing goals within school social work. This chapter re-engages these goals through the Transformative Racial Equity Framework (TREF), an approach that explicitly identifies structural racism as the primary barrier to school attendance and engagement. After renewing literature on how structural racism manifests in barriers to school engagement, the authors apply TREF to direct practice. By applying TREF to direct practice, the authors hope to counter the pervasive notion that school attendance and engagement are individualized problems of student deficits. Through a case example, the authors demonstrate how TREF can help foster structural competency and reconceptualize school engagement interventions. The chapter closes with a discussion of school engagement and attendance as structural problems that require the political engagement of school social work.