An Alabama Education Lab analysis of chronic absenteeism rates – the percentage of students who missed 18 or more days of school in a given school year – showed a wide range among the state’s school districts and schools.

September is Attendance Awareness Month. Schools across Alabama are sending reminders and tips to help parents make sure their children are going to school every day. Twenty-six districts had double-digit percentage point increases from pre-pandemic absenteeism levels.

Among the state’s 138 traditional school districts, Perry County had the highest absenteeism rate in the 2021-22 school year, the most recent year data is available. Four in every 10 students missed 18 or more days of school – more than twice the rate of years before the pandemic.

Barbour County, Bessemer City and Linden City school districts were next, with more than three in 10 students chronically absent that year.

On the other end of the scale was Blount County, where fewer than 5% of students were chronically absent. In Mountain Brook City schools, just over 5% of students were chronically absent – a rate that was a tad lower than pre-pandemic levels.

Among the state’s eight charter schools, rates ranged from 3.5% at University Charter School to 53% at Breakthrough Charter School in Perry County.

Rates in non-charter public schools ranged from zero in 22 schools to more than 50% in 17 schools statewide.

[The full list of schools and districts is available at the end of this article.]

The chart below shows how the rate for all student groups increased from 2019 to 2022. Click here if you are unable to see the chart.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey recently praised Alabama’s position in a recent Associated Press and Stanford University analysis of absenteeism rates across all states before and after the pandemic, saying the analysis had “mixed good information.”

“Alabama is No. 1,” he told board members. “We’ve had the least attendance slide of all the states.”

During the 2021-22 school year, 18% of K-12 students missed 18 or more days of school.

That’s higher than the 2018-19 rate of 11%, but is the same as the 2017-18 rate of 18%.

“It’s not good,” he clarified. “It’s not where we want to be. But we were number one in the nation in students getting back in school and not being absent.”

“We’d like to see that our chronic absenteeism rates drop dramatically over the next year or two.”

Why chronic absenteeism matters

Chronic absenteeism is one of the variables schools are graded on each year’s federal report card, but it isn’t just a numbers game. Frequent absences should not be confused with truancy. Chronic absences include excused and unexcused absences. Truancy regulations apply only to unexcused absences.

Absent students miss out not only on what is being taught in class but also on all the other things schools provide — such as meals, counseling, socialization. Students who are chronically absent are at higher risk of not learning to read and eventually dropping out.

Kids stay home for myriad reasons — finances, housing instability, illness, transportation issues, school staffing shortages, anxiety, depression, bullying and generally feeling unwelcome at school, experts say.

While families are responsible for making sure their children attend school, teachers play a big role,too.

In the Student Attendance Playbook, FutureEd Associate Director Phyllis Jordan compiled a wide range of practices backed by research that schools can do to improve student attendance.

Jordan noted that when students feel supported and respected at school, they are less likely to be absent, according to researchers. What students are learning matters, too, and when kids feel connected to the material they’re learning, they’re more likely to show up for class.

Here’s a look at rates for all students in all schools and districts for five school years – 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2020-21 and 2021-22. Chronic absenteeism rates were not publicly reported for the 2019-20 school year. Click here if you are unable to see the table.

In 2017-18 and previously, Alabama counted students as chronically absent when they missed 15 or more days. The number of absences changed to 18 in 2018-19 to conform to the federal definition.

If you’d like to see rates by each student group – race, ethnicity, disability status, poverty status – click here to go to a data visualization (best viewed on a desktop or laptop monitor).