Contact: Susie Winfield
Published by Parker Publishers
“Count Me Present”: A Retired Cop’s Field-Tested Fix for America’s School Absenteeism Crisis
Holly Ridge, NC, 4/29/2026. Susie Winfield, an Army veteran, retired police officer, and former school truancy liaison, has published Count Me Present: Combating the Truancy Epidemic, a nonfiction resource for school administrators, teachers, counselors, and stakeholders working to improve student attendance in public schools. The book is published by Parker Publishers.
Winfield spent over 30 years working directly with students and families across multiple school districts, primarily in roles focused on attendance accountability. Her career path moved from military service to law enforcement to school based truancy intervention, where she was assigned to as many as 32 schools at a time as an Attendance Specialist.
The book presents intervention strategies Winfield developed and implemented during her career. These include attendance contracts between schools, parents, and students; structured Student Attendance Review Board meetings; daily attendance tracking models with data broken into excused and unexcused categories by grade level; and incentive programs funded on budgets as low as $1,000 per school year. Winfield provides sample student and parent questionnaires, data diagram models for semester by semester analysis, and a framework for partnering with community organizations including churches, banks, barber shops, dental offices, and nonprofits.
The book documents specific cases from Winfield’s fieldwork with identifying details altered for privacy. In one case, a family whose children had missed over 40 days of school in a single year received an intervention plan that resulted in perfect attendance and the discovery that all children in the family were academically gifted. In another, a student’s chronic absences were traced to a parent’s inability to wash clothes more than once a month due to limited income; after the school granted the parent access to its washer and dryer, the student’s attendance stabilized. In a third case, Winfield implemented stricter tardiness standards at a high school where daily tardy counts initially rose from 75 to over 100 students before dropping significantly within two weeks.
Winfield addresses what she describes as learned behavior patterns in families, including parents who register children for school but delay sending them until after Labor Day, students writing their own absence notes, and families who transfer truant students between schools each semester to reset absence records. The book also covers the relationship between attendance and graduation cohort tracking, arguing that schools must monitor student progress from 9th grade enrollment through graduation rather than reviewing records only in a student’s expected graduation year.
The foreword is written by Jeremy Jarmon, Winfield’s son, who describes her approach as rooted in trust rather than authority. Winfield holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Management and is certified in Urban Ministry. She is married to Steven Winfield and has four children: Jeremy, Taylor, Tara, and Jaret. The book is dedicated to her grandchildren, Jeremiah and Kinsley.
Book Information
Title: Count Me Present: Combating the Truancy Epidemic
Author: Susie Winfield
Genre: Nonfiction / Education
Publisher: Parker Publishers
Susie Winfield is available for interviews.
For Any Media Inquiries, Please Contact Sia Stone
Email: sia@parkerpublishers.com
Phone no: +1 (689) 304-8480
