NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - A celebration ended with a signed golden Boston Celtics basketball at Colegrove Park Elementary school in North Adams Friday after they made one of the biggest reductions in their chronic absenteeism rate in Massachusetts.

“In 2022-2023 the chronic absenteeism percent for Colegrove was in the low 30% so about a third of the students at Colegrove missed 18 or more days of school. For 2023-2024, the percentage dropped by 11% to be in the low 20s. I think it was actually 20% by the end of the year,” said North Adams Public School assistant superintendent Tim Callahan.

The school says they worked hard to reduce the rate. One of the ways the school achieved this was by checking the attendance rates every two weeks and addressing students who started racking up a lot of days outside of the classroom. 

“We talk with the student. Can we do anything to help you? We reach out to families. We had a new plug-in system with power school which was featured like a text messaging app where the dean of students could have some back-and-forth conversations on text," said Colegrove Park Elementary principal Amy Meehan.

The new system helped start a conversation with families without adding the burden of coming to the school for a meeting. Education leaders say this helped the school understand and work with families to get the student back on track. They would also send out several reminders to parents about the importance of not missing school.

“We just sent out a lot of nudge reminders for example like on half days we’d say attendance does matter and we’d give some statistics about absenteeism and the impact it had on students’ overall education,” Meehan said.

Colegrove Park Elementary was one of 10 schools in the commonwealth to receive the award and being recognized as having one of the most improved absenteeism rates.

Two schools in Auburn were also awarded.

The ball was autographed by the 2024 NBA championship Boston Celtics team.