About me
Hedy is the founder and executive director of the non-profit initiative, Attendance Works
(www.attendanceworks.org) which promotes equal opportunities to learn and advances student
success by reducing chronic absence. Founded in 2010, Attendance Works is the nation’s go-to
resource for attendance policy and practice. The website serves over 350,000 users each
year. Attendance Works successfully moved chronic absence from a little-known term to a
required reporting and optional school accountability metric in the federal Every Student
Succeeds Act (ESSA). A skilled presenter, facilitator, researcher and writer, Hedy co-
authored the seminal report, Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance
of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, as well as numerous other articles
about student attendance.
Deeply committed to promoting two-generation solutions to achieving a more just and
equitable society, Hedy has spent over three decades working in the fields of family
support, family economic success, education and child development. She served as a senior
program officer at the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and as co-director of California
Tomorrow, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a just and inclusive multiracial, multicultural
and multilingual society. She has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University and B.A. from Occidental College.
