Skip to main content
Portland Public Schools saw its percentage of regular attenders this academic year increase 1.4 percentage points from the previous year.
A June 11 presentation to the Portland School Board’s teaching, learning and enrollment committee showed the district had increased regular attendance from 64% to 65.4%. (In Oregon, a student is considered a regular attender if they attend 90% or more of their days enrolled in school.) It also made progress among its focal group students, ranging from a 0.5 percentage point increase for multilingual learners to a 6.7 percentage point increase for American Indian and Alaska Native students.
But Dr. Jill Bryant, assistant director of the district’s multitiered system of support, acknowledged PPS had fallen behind in its attempt at a “lofty” goal for the school year—raising attendance by 5 percentage points. Similarly, PPS is behind its hopes for its focal groups—it had hoped to increase numbers for each group by 8 percentage points.
These were goals PPS had set last year, as district officials eyed increasing regular attenders by 15 percentage points by June 2028. The ultimate hope was that by then, the district could realize a 79% attendance rate.
It turns out the Oregon Department of Education will ask for much less. ODE is setting new goals for school districts as part of Senate Bill 141, the 2025 state education accountability bill that will hold school districts to improvements in everything from third grade reading to early grade attendance. It groups districts into “clusters,” lumping similar districts (think size, demographics, and urbanization) together to meet specific goals.
For PPS, Bryant says ODE’s attendance goal is to up attendance by 6 percentage points over the upcoming three years, less than half of the district’s original vision.
“Overall, when looking at almost 44,000 students, moving an improvement of 1.4 points is not the 5 percentage points that we wanted, but there is growth in that area,” Bryant said. “And next year, ODE is changing those growth targets... [and we’ll need to improve] about 2 percentage points a year. It’s a pretty good start, putting us in a good position for that.”
The district’s ending regular attender percentage is also lower than it was in the middle of the year. As of Dec. 19, PPS had reported 74.24% of students were regular attenders, up 2.3% districtwide from the previous year. Richard Smith, PPS’s senior director of data and accountability, tells WW that chronic absenteeism data is cumulative.
“A student who misses two days in October might have a 90% attendance rate at that moment, but if they miss eight more days in February and 10 more in April, their overall rate drops,” Smith says. “Because of this, attendance percentages naturally drift downward as the year progresses.”
The district, Smith says, uses point-in-time benchmarking to track attendance, allowing it to compare progress to exact dates from the year prior, and make adjustments as needed. It could, for example, intervene in a specific school or focal group to better understand the numbers.
Bryant credited improvements in attendance to better family engagement, facilitating positive relationships at school, and more specific efforts to identify students in need of more support. The state is providing technical assistance with data tracking, Bryant said, but is not providing additional financial support to help PPS meet its new goals.
