Over a Third of Students in Oregon Still Aren’t Consistently Attending School

This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.

Attendance at Oregon public schools improved only slightly during the 2024–25 school year, and continued to lag behind the national average.

Data that the Oregon Department of Education released Nov. 20 shows regular attendance improved by 0.8% over the previous year. That means about 3,100 more students out of the state’s roughly half-million regularly attended classes.

Even so, more than 1 in 3 students were chronically absent, ranking Oregon near the bottom of states in school attendance.

Oregon schools track “chronic absenteeism,” defined as missing more than 10% of school days—about 18 days in Oregon. “Regular attendees” are students who come to class for more than 90% of school days.

Across the nation, chronic absenteeism soared at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Oregon, it nearly doubled between the school years 2018–19 and 2021–22.

Unlike most other states, Oregon’s absenteeism rose even after schools returned to in-person instruction, climbing to 38% in 2022–23, data shows.

The state also removed truancy officers from schools in 2021 without a backup plan, says Sarah Pope, executive director of Stand for Children Oregon.

“At the most critical juncture, when our rates of chronic absenteeism were skyrocketing, the state said, OK, no more to the only tool that you’ve ever known, and we are not going to help you figure out what the best new tool is,” Pope says.

In a media briefing before she released the updated school data, reporters questioned Dr. Charlene Williams, director of ODE, about new ways to combat one of the state’s most pressing problems.

She pushed back against punishing parents for not getting their kids to school. Chronic absenteeism is a “complex topic,” she said. Parents “need transportation support, they need some support with food or after school activities or those kinds of things,” she said. “Is it fair to penalize them potentially if there are systems we can help put in place?”

A presentation on ODE’s proposed budget scenarios Tuesday showed funding cuts for Every Day Matters, which provides attendance support to school districts through grants and technical resources.

“The Every Day Matters chunk was around $6 million, not serving the entire state necessarily or every classroom necessarily,” Williams said. A hard choice had to be made, she said.

The department will utilize the resources and relationships currently in place to reduce absenteeism, she added.

Pope believes consistent and more frequent data reporting, alongside schools contacting parents when they notice a student missing school, is a potential path forward.

“For a pretty low cost, we could get a pretty high return if our state insisted that every school do that,” she says.

Despite the sluggish improvement in regular attendance, there was at least one bright spot. Kindergarten attendance rose 3.9%, the largest increase among all grades.

“Kindergarten attendance is one of the areas of systemic concern,” said Dan Farley, assistant superintendent of ODE’s research and data office, “so that is good news.”