Fifty-Seven Washington Districts Cut Chronic Absence Every Year Since the 2022 Peak

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (October 11, 2026): Washington's state education agency republished its attendance data on September 30, 2026, with recalculated counts for every year, and this article now reflects that edition. Fifty-seven districts, not 58, cut chronic absence in each of the past three years. The statewide rate fell one tenth of a point in 2025, from 27.4% to 27.3%, not two tenths from 27.3% to 27.1%. College Place's reduction is now the second-deepest, ahead of Clarkston's. Naches Valley did not lose 16% of its enrollment in the restated data; it grew 6.5%. The streak districts' chronically absent students fell by 33,891, not 35,531.

Correction (September 30, 2026): An earlier version of this article reported that 60 districts cut chronic absenteeism every year since 2022. Two of them, Republic and Lynden, do not hold up once each district's rate is checked against its own schools: both host programs whose attendance the state does not publish school by school, and the rate across their schools that do publish counts rose in 2025. The count is 58. The earlier version also described South Bend's drop from 31.3% to 6.8% mainly as an effect of enrollment growth; most of that growth came from three online schools the state reports without student counts, and across South Bend's schools that do publish counts the rate fell from 33.9% to 22.5%. We recomputed the list's size cutoffs, enrollment, student counts and starting points, set aside seven districts with the same measurement issue from the rankings, and replaced the charts. An earlier correction, made August 26, 2026, removed policy and funding figures that did not come from the state's published data.

Washington's chronic absenteeism rate barely moved last year. It fell from 27.4% in 2024 to 27.3% in 2025, one tenth of a percentage point.

OSPI has framed lower chronic absence as a statewide challenge.

Underneath the flat statewide line, 57 districts moved. Each enrolls at least 500 students, and each cut its chronic absenteeism rate in every one of the past three years.

What Made 2025 Different

The statewide rate fell 2.7 points in 2023 and another 2.7 points in 2024, from 32.8% to 27.4%. Then it fell 0.1 points.

The stall was broad. Among the 195 districts with a complete four-year record, 94 improved in 2025 and 97 got worse. The median district changed by 0.0 percentage points. That near-even split makes a three-year streak selective: these 57 kept improving through 2025.

How Long the Streaks Actually Run

None of the 57 districts has a run longer than three years, and that ceiling comes from the calendar rather than from the districts. Chronic absence peaked statewide in 2022, the first full year after pandemic school closures ended. A streak of consecutive annual declines measured through 2025 cannot begin before that peak, so three annual transitions is the maximum available to any district in the state.

Where the size cutoff sits changes the count. Across all districts regardless of enrollment, 83 have a three-year streak. At 250 students or more the count is 67, at 500 or more it is 57, and at 1,000 or more it is 50. This article uses the 500-student threshold, which leaves an eligible field of 196 districts. Every count also checks each district's rate against its own schools: a district that hosts an online or home-based program the state does not report school by school stays on the list only if its other schools also improved every year.

The Deepest Turnarounds

Eatonville^↗, in Pierce County, cut its rate 24.7 points over the three years, from 51.9% to 27.2%. College Place^↗, near Walla Walla, fell 24.6 points, from 49.4% to 24.8%. Clarkston^↗, on the Idaho border, went from 51.5% to 27.0%.

Those are large moves from high starting points, and they are worth reading in context. Eatonville's 2025 rate of 27.2% is still well above the 14.5% it reported in 2019. For the districts that peaked highest, three years of steady improvement has returned them to roughly the statewide average rather than to where they were before the pandemic.

Where the Rate Moved for Another Reason

A chronic absenteeism rate is a fraction. It falls when fewer students are chronically absent, and it also falls when the enrollment underneath it grows or changes. Two things can move the fraction without a change in how often students attend: large enrollment swings, and programs whose students count in the district total but whose attendance the state does not publish school by school, usually online or home-based schools that report near-perfect attendance. Districts affected by either are excluded from the ranking above.

South Bend^↗ in Pacific County posted the largest reported drop of any streak district, from 31.3% to 6.9%. Its enrollment went from 563 students to 1,833 over the same period, an increase of 226%, and most of that growth came from three online schools that the state reports without student counts. Across South Bend's schools that do publish counts, the rate fell from 33.9% to 22.5%. That is a real improvement, and a much smaller one.

Republic^↗ and Lynden^↗ are no longer on the list. Republic's reported rate fell from 54.2% to 31.7%, but 39% of its students in 2025 were in a program with no published school counts, and across its other schools the rate rose from 50.3% to 52.3% that year. Lynden's schools with published counts also got worse in 2025.

An earlier version of this article said Naches Valley^↗ had lost 16% of its enrollment and that its reported improvement understated what its schools did. In the state's restated data its enrollment grew 6.5%, every school publishes counts, and its rate fell 10.9 points, from 39.4% to 28.5%, so it now passes both screens and is ranked like any other district.

Not Only the Small Districts

Eight districts enrolling 15,000 or more students improved in each of the past three years. Lake Washington^↗ is the largest of them at 31,020 students, moving from 22.3% to 19.3%. Northshore^↗, with 22,657 students, went from 21.0% to 16.6%. Puyallup^↗, with 23,495, fell from 38.5% to 27.1%, finishing just below the statewide rate. Federal Way^↗ went from 39.4% to 33.5% and Everett^↗ from 35.1% to 24.5%.

Lake Washington Superintendent Dr. Jon Holmen said the district did not tie the decline to a single major initiative. “We did not implement a single major attendance program during this period,” Holmen said. “Instead, we believe the improvement reflects ongoing efforts to create school environments where students feel connected, supported, and engaged.” Holmen said schools monitor attendance throughout the year and work with students and families as patterns become concerning. “We have engagement specialists at each comprehensive high school to support this outreach and collaboration,” he said. That is the district's own account; the state's attendance data cannot show what caused the change.

The 57 districts did not start from a common place. Five began the streak with more than half their students chronically absent, and three of those five were still above the statewide rate in 2024-25, the most recent year the state has published. Six others began with fewer than one in four students chronically absent. Sixteen of the 57 were below 20% in 2025.

Measured in Students

Rates make districts comparable, but they understate what a three-year run adds up to. Across the 57 districts, the number of students who were chronically absent fell from 129,534 in 2022 to 95,643 in 2025. That is 33,891 fewer students missing a tenth or more of the school year, inside a group that enrolled 366,289 students in 2024-25, about 34% of Washington's public school population.

The data does not say why these districts improved and others did not. It records that they did, across three consecutive years, while the state as a whole held nearly still.

What Comes Next

The data cannot say which strategies drove individual district gains. It can identify where sustained improvement occurred and where a falling rate partly reflected a changing denominator. The 57 districts on this list give Washington a concrete set of places to investigate next.

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

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