School attendance is a persistent problem. A key ally is helping to turn it around.

06/23/2025 - By Julie Mack, Crain's Cleveland Business

School attendance has been an issue for years in Cleveland, and led to a partnership a decade ago between the district and the owners of the Cleveland Browns, Jimmy and Dee Haslam.

“In 2015, the superintendent of Cleveland Metropolitan School District called us into a room and said, ‘We need your help’” to improve school attendance, Dee Haslam recalled at a recent Stay In The Game event.

“We were like, ‘Well, what can we do? We’re a sports team.’ He said, ‘We need messaging to go to the parents and teachers and we think your athletes would be the perfect fit to deliver the message.’ Well, that we could do,” Haslam said.

In quick order, school attendance became the signature issue of the Cleveland Browns Foundation. Soon, the initiative expanded to metro Cleveland and the Haslams and foundation staff began meeting with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Those efforts led to the creation of Stay In The Game in 2019. Last year, SITG became part of Battelle, an Ohio nonprofit consulting organization.

Partially funded by the state, SITG helps districts analyze their data, gets each school to develop specific strategies for their building, holds monthly online meetings so educators can problem-solve with peers across the state and provides other resources, including access to researchers at Harvard and elsewhere.

SITG also works with the Cleveland Browns and Ohio’s two Major League Soccer teams – the Columbus Crew, also owned by the Haslams, and FC Cincinnati – to send athletes to events celebrating attendance.

This past year, for instance, Browns defensive tackle Mo Hurst appeared at a back-to-school event for Breakthrough, a Cleveland charter school, and held a contest at Orchard Park Academy, another charter, for students to design his cleats.

In October, Pierre Strong Jr., a Browns running back, ran a gym class at Stephanie Tubbs Jones School, part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. This spring, Browns wide receiver Cedric Tillman visited a fifth-grade class in Maple Heights City Schools to celebrate a significant improvement in attendance.

“These kids idolize pro athletes and the fact that we’ve got the partnership — those things matter, and that role modeling matters,” Dackin said.

Any Ohio school system, public or private, has free access to Stay In The Game and its services. This past year, the organization worked with 161 districts that serve about a third of the state’s K-12 students. SITG data indicate that chronic absenteeism in the districts it assists is dropping, on average, twice as fast compared to non-participating districts, Bodary said.

SITG’s May conference drew 500 participants, double the number last year.

Haslam told conference attendees that she’d like to see SITG expand beyond Ohio.

“This is a big issue in the state of Ohio and in our nation,” Haslam said. “What can we do? How can we go further? How can we make this bigger?”

It’s a notion Detroit’s superintendent supports.

Vitti said there has to be “greater fire” around attendance, not just in his district, but across Michigan, which doesn't have a statewide campaign.

“Even things like commercials or things on social media,” he said. “It creates a statewide energy, where it’s palpable and it’s ever-present – that’s going to have an impact.

“We need more energy, more incentives, more business-district partnerships, the state saying ‘we need to put money here.’ We’re not seeing any of that.”

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