Attendance in the Coupeville School District has plunged since the pandemic, and student test scores have slipped with it, prompting district leaders to launch a bold plan to reverse the trend.

“Like districts across Washington state and the nation, we’ve experienced significant attendance challenges since the COVID-19 pandemic,” Coupeville Superintendent Shannon Leatherwood wrote in an email to the News-Times .

She, along with members of the Coupeville School Board, expressed concerns about the low attendance rates at a recent school board meeting. Seeing a need for change, as part of the “Washington State School Improvement Framework,” a comprehensive state accountability system, the district set an “ambitious but achievable goal,” Leatherwood detailed in an email . That goal is to

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