10.07.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared three simple ideas about attendance. Attendance is access. Students must be present before they can access the teachers, relationships, interventions, activities, and opportunities we work so hard to provide. Every percentage has a name. Behind every attendance number is a student like Max who needs to feel seen, connected, and part of something bigger than themselves....
17 days ago • 1 min read
10.01.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, If you're an Illinois school leader, today is an interesting day. Your 2026 Educator Preview opens today. As you view your school’s new Summative Designation, pay particular attention to attendance. Click "Students" in the left column to view your Chronic Absenteeism Rate. Consistent Attendance Rate is also shown as one of Illinois’ elevating accountability indicators. Around the state principals and...
23 days ago • 2 min read
09.23.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Hey Reader, Last week I shared a simple idea: Attendance is access. Students have to be present before they can access the teachers, relationships, interventions, activities, and opportunities we work so hard to provide. But percentages can make this work feel clinical. So today, I want you to meet Max. Max was new to our school. He was introverted, quiet, and easy to miss. He wasn’t causing problems. He wasn’t...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
09.16.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader get this, Attendance Is Access Schools invest an incredible amount of time, energy, and money creating opportunities for kids. Great teachers. Strong curriculum. Interventions. Technology. Athletics. Clubs. Counseling. Career pathways. Specialized supports. We build all of it because we believe those opportunities can change the trajectory of a student’s life. But there is one requirement that comes before...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
09.09.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, This past weekend, my son Mason ran in the Twilight XC Classic in Memphis, Tennessee. What a cool event. Junior high, high school, and college races. All at night. Lights, music, energy, and hundreds of runners packed together waiting for the gun. Mason’s race had 434 boys on the starting line. Watch the clip and FEEL the start ----- And they were off. I stood there thinking, I cannot imagine standing on a...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
09.02.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, The first four weeks of school have been a lot. We started August 5. Crazy, right? We’re short-staffed, covering multiple areas, solving the normal beginning-of-school problems, and then my daughter slid into second base and broke her leg. There have been moments when my brain has simply said: I cannot take on one more thing. When I get there, I have to bring myself back to the present. I may not be able...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
08.19.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, Here’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about lately: Own what you notice. It may be one of the simplest definitions of leadership I know. As humans, we are incredibly good at noticing things. We notice the broken process. The meeting that wastes everyone’s time. The student who keeps slipping through the cracks. The customer experience that could be better. The recurring task nobody has figured out. The little...
2 months ago • 1 min read
08.12.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, I was born and raised on the corner of Center and Guthrie Streets in Ottawa, Illinois. When I was nine years old, I became a paperboy. I started with about 30 customers on Cornell Street, delivering papers six days a week. By the time I was 13, I had moved over to Guthrie Street and expanded to a 60-paper route. This was back in the 1900s, believe it or not. There was no automatic payment, online billing,...
2 months ago • 2 min read
08.05.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! As humans, we love to make plans. We plan our days and organize our weeks. We set goals for the month and create a vision for the year. Then life looks at our perfectly organized calendar and laughs. It is no secret that things rarely go exactly as planned. Barriers appear. Roadblocks slow our momentum. Problems arrive without an appointment. We should expect the unexpected. The question is not if something will...
3 months ago • 1 min read
07.29.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! To all my friends in education, it is almost time. Ready or not, here they come. That is usually my response when someone asks how I feel about the beginning of another school year. Are you ready? Well... define ready. My wife is a teacher, and I am a principal, so our house lives at the intersection of teacher reality and administrator optimism. We laugh at the social media reels about surviving welcome-back...
3 months ago • 2 min read