AllHere Announces Nationwide Launch at FETC Conference

January 15, 2020 (Miami, Fla.)—AllHere, a platform created to improve attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism, today announced its nationwide launch at the Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC). The platform empowers districts with an easy-to-use, real-time attendance intervention management platform. AllHere is web-, mobile-, and tablet-accessible, and integrates with district rostering and attendance systems.

According to recent research, 1 in 6 students miss three weeks or more of school per year. The graduation rate for these students is 28.6%, compared to 70% for students who miss 10 or fewer days of school per year. In large districts, the financial costs can be enormous: LAUSD lost $20 million in one year due to chronic absenteeism. Chronic absence is an early indicator of greater challenges a student may face, such as drug and alcohol use, suspension, expulsion, dropping out, teen pregnancy, and crime.

To help educators address these issues, the AllHere platform includes:

• Diagnostic tools that allow leaders to align interventions with the root cause of chronic absences;
• Data analytics and reports that provide increased visibility of meaningful metrics for district goal-setting and progress-reporting;
• A library of intervention strategies to determine the services to best support the needs of each student; and
• Access to professional learning that offers best practice training and ongoing support to better serve students.

After participating in a pilot program, Craig Martin, former principal of Michael K. Perkins Elementary School, said, “I wanted to make sure that the time educators were spending on intervention was effective and having a positive impact on attendance. AllHere offered a way to analyze this.”

Joanna Smith, Founder and CEO of AllHere, is one of a very small class of black women leading VC-funded tech firms in the U.S. today. After earning her bachelor's degree from Harvard, Smith worked as a middle school math teacher in Boston, where she faced so much chronic absenteeism that she was unable to be an effective teacher. After serving as an attendance and family engagement coordinator, Smith built the company from a shoestring budget and a spreadsheet into a fast-growing, 15-person startup that has secured nearly $4 million in capital.

“While FETC marks the formal launch of AllHere, over the past 24 months we’ve helped dozens of districts build their capacity for improved attendance and shed light into this hidden crisis,” said Dr. Aaron Jenkins, Vice President of Education and Impact for AllHere. “We offer districts a comprehensive, evidence-based approach and a means to collaborate with multiple departments and agencies to solve for the complex root causes of chronic absenteeism.”

FETC attendees can connect with AllHere from January 15–17 at booth #1435i in the Startup Pavilion. Learn more at AllHere.com. 

About AllHere
AllHere is committed to improving attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism in K-12 school districts through its attendance intervention management platform, going beyond compliance to focus on a positive, problem-solving, and evidence-based approach. AllHere was founded by Joanna Smith, a former school district attendance and family engagement coordinator based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her inspiration for creating AllHere grew out of the frustration that many attendance and truancy professionals share every day: the overwhelming administrative burdens and communication obstacles that divert attention away from student support. Smith, alongside a leadership team from the Harvard Innovation Labs, spent two years collaborating with educators from Boston Public Schools and a number of charter schools that were looking to solve the intervention problem, eventually developing a platform and a company with a purposeful mission to accelerate the rate of attendance in K–12 schools. To learn more, visit AllHere.com.