Attendance USA Joins the 2026 INSA Conference in Alicante, Spain

ALICANTE, Spain. Attendance USA is taking part in the 2026 conference of the International Network for School Attendance (INSA), held September 30 to October 2 at the Hotel Alicante Golf in Alicante, Spain. This year’s theme is “On Course for Attendance!”

INSA is an international, interdisciplinary network. Its conference brings together practitioners, researchers, educators, and policy leaders from advocacy, counseling, education, juvenile justice, psychiatry, psychology, policy, social work, and sociology to advance school attendance around the world.

Dr. Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, founder and CEO of Attendance USA, is a co-founder of INSA and serves as its Vice President. INSA honored her in 2024 for her pioneering global work on school attendance. In 2019, she delivered the keynote at the INSA gathering in Oslo to participants from 14 countries.

At Alicante, Attendance USA brings the U.S. perspective to a global conversation. The organization shares its four-category classification of absence (truancy, school withdrawal, school avoidance, and school refusal), the PSSB© measure of school bonding, the Family Stability Index, and its new national certification for attendance professionals.

“Every country asks the same question: what makes a child show up? When we answer it together, every country gets better at it faster.”

Dr. Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, founder and CEO, Attendance USA

Attendance USA’s mission includes merging lanes across silos. The INSA conference extends that mission across borders, so that research from one country becomes practice in another.

Media contact: Shelneka Adams-Marsalone, Executive Director, Attendance USA Press Office · info@attendanceusa.org