Stephen Wakefield 
BALTIMORE, Md. — August 13, 2026 — New Jersey’s Linden Public Schools (LPS) today announced it is expanding its partnership with Concentric Educational Solutions to reduce chronic absenteeism across every school in the district. Building on the results of the pilot program conducted at Linden High School earlier this year, this expansion supports the goal Dr. Perkins and her team set to cut chronic absenteeism by 35% by June 2030.
“We are very pleased with the initial results of our partnership with Concentric Educational Solutions,” said Linden Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Atiya Perkins. “Since the start of this work, we’ve built a system that identifies the real barriers to attendance and helps us strategize how to remove them so impacted students can reconnect to learning. As we move forward, we’re excited to scale that infrastructure to every school in the district and align Concentric’s efforts even more closely with our Show Up and Roar attendance awareness campaign, which is about making sure every Tiger, at every age, knows they belong in their seat and in our schools.”
LPS is a diverse school system serving more than 6,100 preK3–12 students at 11 sites in Union County, New Jersey, that empowers all learners by fostering the development of the critical skills needed for post-secondary success. LPS’s progressive community is dedicated to developing future-ready individuals who embrace challenges, positively contribute to society, and excel in a constantly evolving world.
Concentric Educational Solutions partners with school systems, municipalities, and community partners to combat the urgent issue of chronic absenteeism and reconnect youth to opportunity. Concentric’s unique approach leverages certified members of the community to gather real-time insights from students and families that help school systems respond to student absences earlier, align resources, and address the factors driving disengagement. With the expanded partnership, services Concentric will provide across all LPS schools include:
Home visits by trained, community-based teams to enrolled LPS students, from preK3 through 12th grade, identified as chronically absent or not attending school
Engagement with families through collaborative discussions to identify barriers to attendance at every grade level
Custom ethnographic research from noted scholar and Howard University Professor Dr. Ivory Toldson interpreting the data collected during family engagements and outlining how and why chronically absent students have disengaged from learning
Collaboration with LPS administrators, teachers, and support staff districtwide that turns research into intervention and remediation strategies for the students and families engaged during home visits
Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more of school days, has been identified as a major issue nationwide, with research showing that chronically absent students face substantial hurdles with academic recovery. In Linden Public Schools, the chronic absenteeism rate was 23.2% for the 2024-2025 school year, down 3 percentage points from a pandemic-era high of 26.2% in 2022-2023. New Jersey’s statewide rate of chronic absenteeism was 14.4% for the same year.
“Linden Public Schools has shown real courage in taking on chronic absenteeism head-on, and now they are scaling that commitment across their entire district,” said Concentric Educational Solutions CEO Molly Hebert Loyd. “Dr. Perkins and her team understand that reconnecting students to school is relationship work, not paperwork, and that getting a student back in their seat is often the first step toward a much longer path to opportunity. We are honored to grow alongside them and to support every school, every family, and every student across LPS.”
To learn more about Concentric Educational Solutions’ approach to combating chronic absenteeism, visit the company’s website at www.concentriced.org, follow the organization on X, or connect on LinkedIn.
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