CHARLESTON, W.Va (WCHS) — Reducing the number of chronically absent students has been important for Kanawha County Schools.

"Coming in last year, the year before we were at 20.58% and last year, we were 17.701%, so we had a good almost 3% drop last year," Kanawha County Schools lead attendance director Kim Legg said.

Eyewitness News sat down with Legg last year when a new tiered system was being implemented to lower those numbers. Now she said improvements are continuing.

"The big number we've improved 2.897% that's the impact in about 700 students," she said. "That's a lot of students who are no longer chronically absent, so I think that number speaks volumes."

This comes after a law was changed in July of last year to implement a support system for chronically absent students.

"It really does take everybody, and it definitely makes a change," Legg said. "A lot of our families never had a good experience in school. We want to help those families, help those parents. That's inevitably going to help those students."

Legg said they're finally out of the red with chronic absenteeism numbers. She said this is largely thanks to their tiered support system.

"We started some great things last year," she said. "Our collaboration with our student support staff, with our counselors, nurses, social workers, communities and schools. We just want to continue with what we did last year and keep moving forward with that."

Tier one works towards creating a safe and engaging environment for all students.

Tier two looks at students who may need more help. They put interventions in place - whether that's therapy, medical needs or assistance with housing, they will connect families with the resources they need to be able to bring their child to school.

Tier three deals with the legal system.

"We don't want to involve the legal system," Legg said. "We want to help students at tier one and tier two and eliminate having to take students and families to court for truancy."

Kanawha County Schools superintendent Paula Potter said keeping kids in school is the goal, and this system has proven to be an important way of doing just that.

"We've taken the approach that we want to figure out why some students aren't coming to school," Potter said. "If there's a barrier we can help them overcome, we're going to do that because it's very important to us to have them in school.

"If students are in school, they're learning and they have a better chance of reaching their academic goals,"

These numbers will continue to be monitored throughout the school year.