Drawing on a multiyear local research project on the affordable housing crisis, this article outlines a pedagogical approach we call Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research, or CISER. The CISER model brings together three key groups of actors—undergraduate students, university researchers, and community organizations—drawing on and extending the powers of cooperative “dyads” between them. This model aims to improve pedagogical and sociological practice by constituting undergraduate students as both knowledge producers and an active public while at the same time creating meaningful partnerships between university researchers and community-based organizations. Based on assessments of the program from the vantage points of all three groups, our findings indicate that CISER is a powerful pedagogical tool and mode of community-engaged scholarship and that it offers both challenges and rewards to the involved students, faculty, and community organizations.

Students with low attendance miss important learning and developmental opportunities and research has shown that they are at heightened risk of negative outcomes. Although there is an extensive body of research on truancy, chronic absenteeism is not generally measured or tracked in school data systems and is therefore not as well understood. This analysis uses linked, longitudinal administrative records to examine chronic absence across years for elementary and secondary school students. We investigate chronic absence patterns over time, ramifications of chronic absence on students’ educational outcomes, and effects of continued absence across school years. Results illustrate the cumulative nature of chronic absence and the negative role of persistent chronic absence on students’ educational outcomes. We discuss implications of these results for state policies and intervention procedures.

Meeting college students’ basic needs is the goal of a new set of student success initiatives that address students’ urgent food, housing, or financial hardships in an effort to help them remain and succeed in college. Focusing on one California public university, we describe one such basic needs program, identifying the students who participate, their hardships and services received, and their retention over time. Students presented with issues in four main areas: food insecurity, mental health, multiple severe hardships, and need for one-time supports. In general, participants were retained at lower rates than the campus average, which is to be expected given their severe hardships. However, those who enrolled in the Supplementation Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) were retained at higher rates, on par with or higher than university-wide retention. California has amended SNAP regulations to waive work requirements for low-income students, making it easier for college students to qualify.

School recess is an evidence-backed approach to increase school-based opportunities for students to play, accrue necessary physical activity, and socialize with peers, to the benefit of their physical, academic, and socioemotional health. As such, the Centers for Disease Control recommend at least 20 min of daily recess in elementary schools. However, unequal provision of recess contributes to persistent health and academic disparities for students, which remain to be addressed. We analyzed data from the 2021–22 school year from a sample of low-income (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education-eligible) elementary schools (n = 153) across California. Just 56 % of schools reported providing more than 20 min of recess daily. Differences in daily recess provision were apparent, with students in larger and lower-income schools receiving less daily recess than students in smaller and higher income schools. These findings support the enactment of legislation mandating health-sufficient daily recess in California elementary schools. They also highlight the importance of, and need for, annually-collected data sources to enable monitoring of recess provision, and potential disparities, over time, in order to assist in identifying additional interventions to address this public health problem.