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Oregon’s elementary, middle and high school students are starting to attend school more often. That’s good news for Oregon, a state whose high absenteeism rates consistently place it in the bottom of the pack nationwide.
Students in Oregon are considered regular attenders if they show up for more than 90% of the days they are enrolled and chronically absent if they don’t. New data from the Oregon Department of Education for the 2023–24 school year indicates 179,264 of Oregon’s students were chronically absent, making the state’s absenteeism rate 34.3%.
That’s an improvement from the 2022–23 school year, when 200,103 kids were chronically absent. The rate that year was 38.1%, the lowest in a decade. (In 2022–23, the national K–12 absenteeism rate was at 26%, according to the American Enterprise Institute.)
The state’s young learners are among the most improved demographics: Elementary regular attenders grew to 70.9%, up 6.7% from the previous year.
Attendance rates are still nowhere near where they were before Oregon closed its schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2019–20 school year, 20.4% of students statewide were chronically absent.
But Oregon education leaders are optimistic. “We have promising indicators happening now,” said ODE director Charlene Williams, though she acknowledges there’s still work to be done.
“While these gains signal progress, they also remind us of the work still ahead to meet the needs of each and every scholar,” Williams said at a Tuesday webinar for journalists.
While the state seems to be heading in the right direction, Portland school districts appear to be lagging behind. Portland Public Schools and the David Douglas and Parkrose school districts all reported higher absenteeism rates than the state average.
At PPS, 15,544 students were chronically absent last year, making the district’s rate 36.9%. It’s a pretty stagnant difference from last year, when 15,595 students were absent. (More students attended PPS in 2022–23, so the absenteeism rate then was slightly lower, at 36.4%.)
One accomplishment for PPS? Its kindergarten absenteeism rate lowered about 5 percentage points, from 38.3% to 33.4%.
David Douglas improved from the 2022–23 school year; 2,929 students were chronically absent in the district this past school year, down from 3,266 the year before. That’s a 4.3 percentage point change.
Parkrose’s number of chronically absent students increased slightly, from 1,208 to 1,235. The district’s chronic absenteeism rate is particularly high—46.6% of students fall under the category. Still, the district also made significant progress with its kindergartners, from 50.6% chronically absent to 42.1%.
None of the three Portland-area school districts responded to WW’s requests for comment.
Tim Boyd, ODE’s director of district and school effectiveness, said the department is working on understanding why the state’s progress on attendance has lagged behind others nationwide. “It’s not just about getting kids to school, but better understanding the reasons, the barriers that are preventing them from coming,” Boyd said at the webinar.