More Colorado public school students stayed on track with attendance last year, but hundreds of thousands of students missed more than 10% of the school year, according to data released Thursday by the Colorado Department of Education.
Both the state’s attendance rate and chronic absenteeism rate improved slightly last year. The state’s overall attendance rate ticked up by 0.1 percentage points to 91.5% from the 2024-25 school year. Meanwhile, 27.5% of kids were chronically absent, meaning they missed more than 10% of school days. That represented a small improvement over the previous school year, when 28.4% of students were marked as chronically absent.
Widespread struggles to get attendance rates back to pre-pandemic numbers have remained a top concern for state education officials and school and district leaders. Attendance and chronic absenteeism continue to lag behind the 2018-19 school year, when Colorado’s average attendance rate was 92.3% and the average rate for chronic absenteeism was 22.5%.
State data highlighting attendance patterns last year points to a mix of progress and the need to continue finding ways to draw kids back to class.
Among the bright spots, attendance improved in every grade level, with the largest jumps in attendance rates in kindergarten as well as in grades seven, eight and 10, and the rate of chronic absenteeism in every grade dropped from the previous year.
Most of Colorado’s 178 school districts and boards of cooperative educational services managed to increase their attendance rate or at least hold it steady while also cutting down on the rate of students counted as absent for significant swaths of the school year.
State data shows that the attendance rate in 124 districts and BOCES was the same as or better than the previous school year and 113 districts saw their rate of chronic absenteeism fall or match the previous school year.
Still, 233,281 students did not show up to school for more than 10% of the school year. That means a student attending a school that is in session for 160 days — the minimum required by the state — misses 16 or more days of school.
“These results show steady, broad-based progress,” Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said in a statement. “That is encouraging, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that more than 27% of Colorado students are still chronically absent.”
The state education department is particularly concerned about consistent absences among older students, continuing a worrisome trend. Last year, 41% of high school seniors missed more than 10% of school days while 34.5% of high school juniors and nearly 32% of high school sophomores were absent just as frequently.
At the same time, some groups of students tend to struggle more to make it to class than their peers. Well over half of homeless students in Colorado — 57.5% — were out of school for more than 10% of the school year and 38.6% of students from low-income families missed a lot of school last year.
Rates of chronic absenteeism fell across most student groups and across different racial groups of students, though gaps persist. While more than 20% of white students were recorded as chronically absent, for example, more than 42% of Indigenous students were chronically absent last year, according to state data.
“Every day in school is an opportunity for a student to learn, build relationships and stay connected to their future,” Córdova said in the statement. “We need to build on this progress and continue working together — educators, families, students and communities — to make sure every student is in school, engaged in learning and on a path to success.”