19 Washington Districts Moved From at Least 40% Chronic Absence to Below 30%

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (July 21, 2026): The original analysis kept using a cached data file after detecting that it differed from the state's current published attendance data. This version derives every displayed rate from the published student-count fields. It also corrects the statewide recovery share and removes economic-status, causal, policy, and predictive claims that the analysis did not establish.

Update (August 17, 2026): We asked College Place for context before publication and Superintendent Jim Fry sent a detailed written account of the district's attendance work on July 9. It did not reach the article when it published on July 15. That was our error, and this version adds it. No figure in the piece has changed.

In 2022, 113 Washington school districts had chronic-absence rates of at least 40%. Three years later, 19 of those districts had rates below 30% and enrollments of at least 500 students. Together, the 19 districts enrolled 46,899 students in 2025.

The four largest reductions were in Eatonville^↗, down 24.8 percentage points; Clarkston^↗, down 24.7 points; College Place^↗, down 24.4 points; and Granger^↗, down 24.3 points.

The Scale of the Improvement

Every district on this list started at 40% or higher in 2022 and finished below 30% in 2025. Their reductions ranged from 11.8 to 24.8 percentage points.

Statewide, Washington moved from 32.8% in 2022 to 27.1% in 2025, a 5.7-point reduction. The 19 selected districts' reductions were between 2.1 and 4.4 times the statewide reduction.

Results Across District Sizes

Castle Rock^↗, with 1,458 students in 2025, moved from 42.1% to 19.3%. Okanogan^↗, with 1,093 students, moved from 42.6% to 22.5%. Chewelah, with 798 students, moved from 41.7% to 28.6%.

The group also included larger systems. Arlington^↗, with 5,668 students in 2025, moved from 40.0% to 23.2%. Eastmont^↗, with 5,994 students, moved from 49.0% to 29.0%. Blaine, with 2,027 students, moved from 43.7% to 28.7%.

11 of the 19 districts recorded a lower chronic-absence rate in each annual transition from 2022 through 2025. The analysis identifies the pattern but does not establish why rates changed.

What One District Says It Did

The data cannot say why any district's rate fell. College Place can, and Superintendent Jim Fry set out the district's account in writing when we sent him the draft before publication. What follows is the district's description of its own work. It is not something the attendance data establishes, and it is offered as one district's answer to a question the numbers leave open.

Fry asked first that the credit go elsewhere. Ambra Bryant, assistant principal at College Place High School, built the framework and presented it to the school board at the end of June 2026. "While reducing chronic absenteeism has truly been a team effort involving administrators, teachers, counselors, nurses, office staff, and community partners, Ambra developed and championed the systems that fundamentally changed how we approached attendance," Fry wrote. "She deserves tremendous credit for the progress we've made."

The district stopped letting each school run attendance its own way. It standardized definitions, attendance codes, excused-absence procedures and intervention protocols across every building, and audited its student information system so that students at athletics, field trips, testing and academic events were coded correctly rather than counted as absent. "Everyone was operating from the same playbook," Fry wrote.

Each school then formed an Attendance Coalition of administrators, counselors, teachers, specialists, office staff and data personnel. Weekly reports flag students with three unexcused absences in a rolling thirty-day period, three excused absences in the same window, excessive tardies, class skipping, and subgroup attendance trends. Each report triggers a defined intervention, which is the part that moves the work ahead of the problem rather than behind it.

The change Fry describes as the largest is a change in the question. The district moved from asking why a student was not coming to asking what barrier was preventing them from coming. Students sit for attendance barrier interviews, trusted adults are deliberately paired with students, and the intervention is chosen from the barrier the student named rather than the one the adults assumed. "That philosophical shift changed everything," he wrote.

Much of what surfaced was not about school at all. Fry writes that after the pandemic many families held a different view of when a child should stay home and for how long, and that part of the district's work became rebuilding parents' confidence that its nurses, counselors, mental health professionals and Communities In Schools staff could assess a child during the school day. The district began tracking patterns in chronic illness, mental health, menstrual health, sleep and recurring medical concerns so that teams could reach families before a barrier became a chronic absence.

It also went outside its own walls. College Place convened Community Engagement Boards with business owners, the mayor, law enforcement, court representatives, higher education, faith leaders and nonprofit organizations. Fry is explicit that these were never meant to be punitive, and were built around coordinating resources and shared plans for individual students.

He is equally explicit that none of it is finished. "Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned is that attendance work is never finished," he wrote, describing letters, attendance contracts and barrier forms that keep being rewritten as the district learns more. The belief underneath it, in his words: "every student deserves to be in school every day, and it is our collective responsibility to identify and remove the barriers that stand in the way."

College Place cut its chronic-absence rate 24.4 percentage points over the three years, the third-largest reduction among the 19 districts. The other 18 have their own accounts, and we have not asked them all.

Still Above Pre-Pandemic

18 of the 19 districts remained above their 2019 rates in 2025. Castle Rock's rate was 15.4% in 2019, 42.1% in 2022, and 19.3% in 2025. Eatonville's rate was 14.6% in 2019, 52.0% in 2022, and 27.2% in 2025.

Washington's statewide rate was 15.1% in 2019. Its 5.7-point reduction from 2022 to 2025 recovered 32.2% of the increase between 2019 and 2022. 13 of the 19 selected districts recovered more than half of their corresponding increase, while the remaining district reached or fell below its 2019 rate.

The screen captures a substantial reduction from the 2022 peak. The 2019 comparison shows that, for nearly every district in the group, it was not yet a return to the earlier baseline.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Castle Rock - EdTribune WA - Washington Education Data

19 Washington Districts Moved From at Least 40% Chronic Absence to Below 30%

The Scale of the Improvement

Results Across District Sizes

What One District Says It Did

Still Above Pre-Pandemic