Sometimes the solution to improving student attendance can be as simple as offering an alarm clock, a bus token or a free breakfast. For schools in Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, Colorado and elsewhere across the country, especially those serving low-income populations, the answer is a washing machine.

“If it’s a choice between coming to school dirty, and have kids laugh at you or make fun of you, and staying home, they’ll stay home,” said Rebecca Nicolas, the principal at Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Ky., where almost 70 percent of students qualify for subsidized or free lunches.

This month, the school opened a “Laundry and Loot” room, where students can bring their clothes to be washed, and also pick up donated items such as socks and deodorant.

All 1,750 students are eligible to participate, and teachers and counselors are recruiting students to bring their laundry to school.

Students are given a mesh bag with a numbered identification tag (and soon, a more discreet backpack to carry the mesh bag). They can drop the bag off in the administrative office or in the laundry room, where the clothes will be washed and folded by an assistant who is also on hand to give lessons.

“We’re just trying to remove as many barriers to school attendance as possible,” Dr. Nicolas said.

According to the Department of Education and the Civil Rights Data Collection, approximately one out of six students was chronically absent during the 2015-16 school year, meaning they missed more than 15 days of school for any reason.

Absenteeism can impede a child’s ability to learn how to read, and can lead older students to fail courses and become more likely to drop out, studies have found.

Until recently, absences at public school were tallied with paper and pencil, and measured through truancy, or unexcused absences, and a school’s average daily attendance, said Hedy Chang, who is the executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit initiative dedicated to reducing chronic absences.

Historically, schools have responded to unexcused absences with punitive measures, she said.

“Truancy has been all about compliance in a legal system,” she said, and not about developing a “deeper understanding” of the reasons students stay home.

With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, and the widespread adoption of electronic records, chronic absenteeism became a nationally recognized metric. By 2017, she said the vast majority of states had adopted chronic absences as a standard measurement for school accountability.

“Now this data can be used as an early warning that we need to invest in relationship building, problem solving and understanding what’s going on,” she said.

About two years ago, mentors in a program for chronically absent students alerted the principal of Benjamin Banneker Elementary in Kansas City, Mo., that dirty clothes were keeping students home, said Derald Davis, the assistant superintendent for Kansas City Public Schools.

At the time, only about 46 percent of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90 percent of the time, Dr. Davis said. But since the school received funding from the United Way to install a washing machine, the number of students meeting the requirement jumped to 84 percent.

Now, at least five elementary schools in the district have installed machines, he said, which is the first step in helping students achieve broader learning goals.

“Once we get them in the seat,” he said, “then we can work on minimizing the other gaps.”

At Doull Elementary in Denver, almost all of the 400 students qualified for free or reduced lunches, and received breakfast in the mornings. Sometimes teachers have helped pay for medications and electric bills for struggling families. Some have even taken clothes home for students, and returned them clean.

“There are many families that take pride in how they look,” said Jo Carrigan, the school’s principal, and “don’t want to send their children to school because they don’t have clean clothes.”

The school received a $10,000 grant to install a washing machine through a program organized by Whirlpool and Teach for America, which has installed commercial-grade machines at 72 schools in 13 cities.

The school used to have a washing machine for custodians in a “dungeon-y area,” Ms. Carrigan said. In January, the new machine was installed in a brightly lit room near the cafeteria, where students are invited to learn the basics of measuring detergent and clothing care. Ms. Carrigan said students with intellectual disabilities who are learning functional skills, like grocery shopping and using money, are also learning how to do laundry.

Ms. Carrigan said that the program was still in its infancy and that administrators were working with the school’s psychologist to identify students who would benefit from the program.

A laundry program at West Side High School in Newark has changed the culture of the school and helped reduce bullying, said the school’s principal, Akbar Cook.

Mr. Cook used a $20,000 grant from a local utility company to convert an old football locker room into a laundry room and has since been recognized by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

At the high school in Kentucky, the school’s alumni association collected about $1,000 to buy a washing machine and dryer for the students and made plumbing and ventilation modifications to a supply closet.

The space, replete with signs of inspirational sayings such as “Life is tough but so are you,” also has a clothes closet, which will soon have secondhand semiformal dresses for prom.

The goal is to “take the stigma out of getting help,” Dr. Nicolas said, “so that they’re comfortable being in class.”

“It’s not a huge expenditure for the school,” she said.

Although there have been a few comments on the school’s social media accounts saying this is government overreach, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“People from the community are randomly dropping off detergent,” she said. “I think because it’s a tangible good. People say, ‘This is an opportunity for me to help and they want to be a part of it.’”

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