Sixty Washington Districts Cut Chronic Absence Every Year Since the 2022 Peak

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: This version removes policy and funding figures that were outside the article's state-data evidence chain. The chronic-absence findings are unchanged.

Washington's chronic absenteeism rate barely moved last year. It fell from 27.3% in 2024 to 27.1% in 2025, two tenths of a percentage point.

OSPI has framed lower chronic absence as a statewide challenge.

Underneath the flat statewide line, 60 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 2.5 points in 2023 and another 3.0 points in 2024, from 32.8% to 27.3%. Then it fell 0.2 points.

The stall was broad. Among the 194 districts with a complete four-year record, 96 improved in 2025 and 95 got worse. The median district changed by 0.0 percentage points. That near-even split makes a three-year streak selective: these 60 kept improving through 2025.

How Long the Streaks Actually Run

None of the 60 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, 90 have a three-year streak. At 250 students or more the count is 74, at 500 or more it is 60, and at 1,000 or more it is 53. This article uses the 500-student threshold, which leaves an eligible field of 195 districts.

The Deepest Turnarounds

Eatonville^↗, in Pierce County, cut its rate 24.8 points over the three years, from 52.0% to 27.2%. Clarkston^↗, on the Idaho border, fell 24.7 points, from 51.6% to 26.9%. College Place^↗, near Walla Walla, went from 49.4% to 25.0%.

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 14.6% 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.

Three Districts 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. Three of the 60 districts saw enrollment shift by more than 15% between 2022 and 2025, which makes their rate change something other than a like-for-like comparison. They are excluded from the ranking above.

South Bend^↗ in Pacific County posted the largest reported drop of any streak district, from 31.3% to 6.8%. Its enrollment went from 563 students to 1,854 over the same period, an increase of 229%. The number of students who were chronically absent fell from 176 to 126. Holding the 2022 enrollment fixed, the drop is 8.9 points rather than 24.5.

Republic^↗ shows the same pattern in smaller form: enrollment up 57%, the chronically absent count close to flat at 200 and then 181, and an adjusted reduction of 5.2 points against a reported 23.4.

The screen cuts the other way too. Naches Valley^↗ lost 16% of its enrollment, which makes its reported 10.0-point improvement an understatement. On a fixed 2022 denominator it improved 14.7 points.

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 31,013 students, moving from 22.3% to 19.3%. Northshore^↗, with 22,658 students, went from 21.3% to 16.6%. Puyallup^↗, with 23,497, fell from 38.6% to 27.1%, finishing exactly at the statewide rate. Federal Way^↗ went from 39.5% 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. The district's explanation is suggestive context; the state data do not establish what caused the change.

The 60 districts did not start from a common place. Seven began the streak with more than half their students chronically absent, and six of those seven are still above the statewide rate today. Six others began below 25%. Fifteen of the 60 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 60 districts, the number of students who were chronically absent fell from 136,479 in 2022 to 100,608 in 2025. That is 35,871 fewer students missing a tenth or more of the school year, inside a group that enrolls 387,142 students, about 35% 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 60 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.

Naches Valley - EdTribune WA - Washington Education Data