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Tacoma's Attendance Recovery Reversed: Chronic Absenteeism Jumped Back to 36%

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For three years, Tacoma^↗ Public Schools was one of Washington's attendance recovery stories. The chronic absenteeism rate dropped from a catastrophic 40.4% in 2021-22 to 37.6%, then 33.9% — a steady, encouraging trajectory that suggested the state's third-largest district was finding its way back.

In 2024-25, that trajectory broke. Tacoma's chronic rate rose to 36.2%, a 2.3-point jump that erased more than a year's worth of progress. Roughly 10,448 of the district's 28,840 students are now chronically absent — 872 more than the year before.

The largest reversal among top districts

The 2.3-point increase is the largest reversal among Washington's 10 biggest school districts. Kent (+1.0 points) and Vancouver (+1.6) also worsened, but Tacoma's reversal is the most significant both in magnitude and because it interrupted what had been consistent progress.

Other large districts continued improving. Spokane^↗ dropped 2.7 points to 29.6%. Evergreen-Clark fell 3.8 points to 34.4%. Puyallup shed 1.1 points. The split among large districts — some still improving, others reversing — suggests that the statewide stall is not a uniform phenomenon but the result of gains in some places being offset by losses in others.

Who got worse

The reversal in Tacoma was broad-based. Every major subgroup saw its chronic rate increase. Hispanic students experienced the largest jump: from 39.6% to 42.8%, a 3.2-point increase. Homeless students rose by the same margin, from 53.0% to 56.2%. Low-income students went from 40.9% to 43.4% (+2.5 points).

White students and Black students saw identical 2.1-point increases, landing at 29.2% and 39.4% respectively. Asian students, typically the lowest-rate racial group, rose from 24.4% to 26.1%.

The across-the-board nature of the reversal suggests this was not driven by a single demographic shock. Whatever caused Tacoma's attendance to worsen, it affected every student group.

Still 12 points above pre-pandemic

Even before the reversal, Tacoma was far from recovered. The district's 2024-25 rate of 36.2% is 12.0 points above the pre-pandemic rate of 24.2% — itself not a low number. Tacoma had elevated chronic absenteeism before COVID, consistently running 7-10 points above the state average through the 2010s.

The pandemic pushed Tacoma from a district with a significant attendance problem to one where more than a third of students miss a month of school. The brief recovery period brought the rate down but never approached the pre-pandemic baseline, and now the direction has reversed.

At the current rate, roughly 10,448 Tacoma students — enough to fill every seat in four large high schools — are missing 18 or more days per year. That represents an educational crisis that compounds year after year: students who are chronically absent in one year are far more likely to be chronically absent the next, and their academic outcomes deteriorate accordingly.

The question of why

Tacoma's reversal does not yet have a clear single cause. The district serves a diverse, relatively high-poverty population — 59% of students are economically disadvantaged — in a mid-size city grappling with housing costs, homelessness, and the ongoing effects of pandemic disruption.

The fact that the reversal was spread across all subgroups argues against a targeted cause like an immigration-related enrollment shift or a change in how one population group engages with school. It is more consistent with a systemic factor: a housing-cost spike that destabilized families, a transportation disruption, a staffing shortage that affected school climate, or simply the exhaustion of the "easy" attendance recoveries.

Vancouver^↗ School District (22,075 students) showed a similar pattern, with its rate rising 1.6 points to 35.8%. Both districts are in regions of Washington where housing costs have risen sharply, and both serve high proportions of low-income families. Whether the housing connection is causal or correlational remains an open question.

Data source

Data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction via waschooldata. Analysis covers 2014-15 through 2024-25. The 2019-20 school year excluded due to COVID-related attendance tracking anomalies.

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

61 Washington Districts Hit All-Time Lows

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For three years, Washington's public schools were clawing their way back. From the COVID trough of 1,091,343 students in 2021-22, enrollment ticked upward: 5,352, then 3,364, then 5,325. The state had recovered about 14,000 of the 55,539 students it lost when the pandemic hit. Then 2025-26 arrived and took back most of it. Washington shed 9,099 students in a single year, dropping to 1,096,285, lower than any non-COVID year since 2015 and just 4,942 above the 2022 trough. Only 8.9% of the COVID-era loss has been recovered, and 61 districts now sit at the lowest enrollment in the 17-year data series.

That is the most all-time lows recorded in any year since tracking began in 2009-10. By comparison, just 13 districts were at record lows the year before, and the previous worst year was 2021, when the pandemic pushed 39 districts to their floors. The 2026 figure is 56% higher than even that crisis year.

The asymmetry of decline

The 61 districts at all-time lows collectively enroll 136,140 students, 12.4% of the state total. On the other side of the ledger, 46 districts hit all-time highs in 2026, but they account for only 57,645 students, 5.3% of the state. The math is lopsided: shrinking districts are more than twice as large as growing ones.

The largest district at all-time high is Lake Stevens^↗ at 10,276 students. After that, the list drops quickly: Cheney (5,750), Ridgefield (4,367), Lynden (3,679). Two of the "all-time high" districts, Goldendale (3,163) and South Bend (2,066), are inflated by virtual schools housed under their enrollment codes. Goldendale hosts Connections Academy, which accounts for roughly 2,300 of its students. South Bend jumped from around 650 students to 2,066 in two years, a pattern consistent with virtual program placement rather than families moving to town.

The record-low districts, by contrast, include Evergreen (Clark)^↗ at 21,903 students, Vancouver^↗ at 21,304, and Marysville^↗ at 9,672. These are not small rural districts cycling through demographic noise. They are mid-to-large suburban systems losing hundreds of students per year.

Where the students went

Thirty-eight of the 61 all-time lows are new this year: districts that were not at their floor in 2025 but crossed it in 2026. The remaining 23 have been at or near their minimum for multiple years, unable to reverse the slide.

Evergreen (Clark)^↗ has lost 4,678 students since its 2013 peak of 26,581, a 17.6% decline. Vancouver^↗ peaked more recently, in 2017 at 23,917, and has shed 2,613 (10.9%). Marysville^↗ peaked earliest, in 2010, and has lost 2,181 students (18.4%) since. Smaller districts show steeper percentage losses: East Valley (Spokane) is down 25.4% from its 2012 peak, and Toppenish has fallen 23.8% from 2017.

Statewide, 63.6% of districts lost enrollment between 2025 and 2026. Only 113 of 327 districts with data for both years gained students. The 10 largest single-year losses alone total 4,263 students, led by Vancouver (-639), Kennewick (-500), Lake Washington (-492), Issaquah (-478), and Bethel (-468).

Birth rates, housing costs, and the funding cliff

The most widely cited driver is demographic: Washington's birth rate has fallen roughly 8% since 2016, from 90,505 births to 83,838, a steeper drop than the 7% national average. Those smaller birth cohorts are now flowing through elementary grades. Lisa Guthrie, board president of Lake Washington School District, attributed the enrollment shifts directly, telling the Sammamish Independent that the decline reflects "a decline in birth rate in the late 2010s and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic."

The pandemic itself created a separate, compounding loss. Washington's public schools have recovered only 8.9% of the 55,539 students lost between 2020 and 2022. Many never came back: homeschool enrollment in Washington climbed by roughly 9,000 students, a 43% increase, while private school enrollment jumped by nearly 17,000, a 26% increase between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years. The pandemic accelerated a departure that has not reversed.

"If you are in a community and they are considering closing your elementary school, it is personal to you. It is very visceral, it is very powerful for you." — State Superintendent Chris Reykdal, The Seattle Times

Housing costs offer a third, less quantified explanation. Demographer Eric Hovee told The Columbian that "the enrollment drops are greatest in the school districts that aren't getting much new single-family residential development, coupled with declining birth rates." Clark County's median home sale price reached $380,000 by 2019 and has climbed since, pricing young families out of established suburbs. The districts that are growing, Ridgefield, La Center, and Deer Park, are precisely those outer-ring communities absorbing displaced families. But the students arriving in smaller districts do not replace the students leaving larger ones.

School closures are already underway

The fiscal consequences are tangible. Washington funds schools on a per-pupil basis, so every departing student takes state dollars with them. Evergreen Public Schools has faced a roughly $20 million budget deficit for three consecutive years, proposing to cut 140 positions in 2024-25 alone. Superintendent John Boyd was blunt: "Ninety cents of a dollar goes to staff. There's no way to reduce $20 million without affecting staff."

Marysville, which has fallen from 11,853 to 9,672 students since 2010, closed an elementary and a middle school for the 2025-26 year, targeting $2.4 million in annual savings. The state assigned a special administrator to oversee the district's finances. Seattle Public Schools proposed closing up to 21 schools to address a nearly $100 million budget shortfall before ultimately abandoning the plan, leaving the structural deficit unresolved.

The expiration of $2.6 billion in federal pandemic relief funds compounds the enrollment-driven squeeze. Districts that used one-time money to maintain staffing levels during the enrollment dip now face a double cliff: fewer students and less emergency aid simultaneously.

A bifurcated landscape

The size distribution of record-low districts reveals a pattern. Among districts with 1,000 to 5,000 students, 23 are at all-time lows and only 11 are at all-time highs. Among districts with 5,000 or more students, six are at lows and just two are at highs. The decline is concentrated where it costs the most: mid-sized districts with fixed overhead in buildings, administration, and specialized staff that cannot easily scale down.

Small districts under 500 students split evenly, 24 at lows and 24 at highs. Demographic fluctuations at that scale can swing a district from record to record on the arrival or departure of a few dozen families.

One data caveat: the 17-year window (2010-2026) means "all-time low" reflects the lowest point in the available series, not necessarily the lowest enrollment a district has ever seen. A district that was smaller in 2005 but grew before 2010 would not show 2010 as its minimum. The metric captures the direction of the current era, not a district's full history.

61 districts, one question

Washington's 2026 reversal raises a specific question: was it a one-year correction in an otherwise recovering trajectory, or the start of a new decline phase? The answer depends on whether the kindergarten cohorts entering in 2027 and 2028, born during Washington's lowest birth years on record, are large enough to offset the 12th-graders leaving. In Lake Washington School District, elementary enrollment has fallen 14.3% since 2019 while high school enrollment has risen 16.9%. That inversion will resolve itself within a few years, one way or the other.

For the 61 districts now at their floor, the operational question is whether to consolidate proactively or wait for the next year's count. Marysville and Evergreen have already made their cuts. The remaining 59 face the same arithmetic.

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

Washington Lost 9,099 Students and Three Years of Progress

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

For three years, Washington's public schools looked like they were healing. Between 2022 and 2025, K-12 enrollment climbed back by 14,041 students, a modest but steady recovery from the 55,539-student crater the pandemic had carved. Then 2025-26 arrived: 9,099 students gone in a single year, erasing 64.8% of that recovery and dropping statewide enrollment to 1,096,285.

It is the largest single-year loss since 2020-21, when remote learning drove 53,551 students out of public schools. But unlike the COVID year, there is no obvious one-time shock to explain it. OSPI has attributed the sustained elementary decline to two forces: lower birth rates and persistent homeschooling gains that began during the pandemic and never reversed. The 2026 data suggests neither force has relented.

A decade of growth, undone in six years

Washington added 111,947 students between 2010 and 2020, a 10.8% expansion fueled by population growth along the I-5 corridor and in Puget Sound suburbs. The state peaked at 1,146,882 students in 2019-20, the last normal school year before COVID.

Six years later, the state sits 50,597 students below that peak, a 4.4% decline. The three-year recovery that followed the pandemic's bottom now looks less like a rebound and more like a brief plateau before a steeper drop. Net recovery from the COVID low stands at just 4,942 students, or 8.9% of what was lost.

The acceleration is the worrying part. In 2022, the state lost 1,988 students. In 2026, it lost 9,099. Nothing in the intervening years suggested the trajectory would reverse this sharply. The three recovery years averaged gains of 4,680 students per year. The 2026 drop was nearly twice the size of any single year's recovery.

The kindergarten signal

The bottom of the enrollment pipeline tells the clearest story. Washington enrolled 69,338 kindergartners in 2025-26, down 16.4% from the 2020 peak of 82,947. That is the smallest kindergarten class in the 17 years of data available. Meanwhile, grade 12 enrolled 98,754 students, its largest class on record and 42.4% more students than entered kindergarten that same year.

This is not a pandemic artifact. Kindergarten enrollment never recovered after the COVID crash: it bounced from a low of 70,977 in 2021 to 78,640 in 2022, then has declined every year since. The 2026 class is 2,105 students smaller than the 2025 class and 9,302 smaller than the 2022 partial rebound.

The pipeline inversion, 29,416 more seniors than kindergartners, means the state will lose more students to graduation over the next several years than it gains through new kindergarten entry. Without a surge in births or in-migration of young families, the math runs in one direction.

Washington's birth rate fell 22% over 15 years, from 13.77 per 1,000 residents in 2007 to 10.70 in 2022. The state's Office of Financial Management projects the school-age cohort will shrink from 2026 until 2038, reflecting the sustained decline in births since their peak in 2016. The kindergarten numbers are the first wave of that demographic shift reaching the schoolhouse door.

Where the students disappeared

The losses were not concentrated in a few large districts. Of 326 districts with comparable data, 207 lost students in 2025-26 while just 113 gained. The losing districts shed a combined 14,125 students; the winners added only 5,009.

Vancouver^↗ led all districts with a loss of 639 students (-2.9%), followed by Kennewick^↗ (-500), Lake Washington^↗ (-492), Issaquah^↗ (-478), and Bethel^↗ (-468). Seattle^↗, the state's largest district at 50,898 students, lost 302, a 0.6% decline.

Fifty-five districts hit all-time enrollment lows in 2026 across the 17-year data window, including Evergreen (Clark County)^↗, which has now declined for nine consecutive years and sits at 21,903 students, down from its peak of 26,581. Only 39 districts reached all-time highs.

Two of the largest apparent "gains" are virtual school artifacts. South Bend added 889 students because it hosts a digital academy. Similarly, Goldendale's 136-student gain reflects Connections Academy, not local enrollment growth. The underlying geographic trend is one of widespread, diffuse decline.

A white enrollment cliff, with a Hispanic dip

White students accounted for the bulk of the 2026 loss: 9,955 fewer white students, a 1.9% decline that exceeded the total statewide net loss of 9,099. White enrollment has fallen from 657,143 students in 2010 (63.5% of total) to 516,147 (47.1%), a loss of 141,000 students even as total enrollment grew and then fell.

Hispanic enrollment, which had grown steadily for over a decade, also declined in 2025-26 by 3,417 students (-1.2%). That reversal breaks a trend that had seen Hispanic enrollment rise from 167,426 in 2010 to 294,985 in 2025. Whether this reflects a demographic shift or a response to the current immigration enforcement climate is not distinguishable from enrollment data alone.

Asian (+2,906) and Black (+2,060) enrollment grew, partially offsetting the losses but not enough to change the aggregate direction.

The fiscal math

Washington funds schools on a per-pupil basis. Each 100 students represents roughly $1.3 million in state funding, according to a Bellevue School District estimate reported by Cascade PBS. By that measure, 9,099 students translates to approximately $118 million in reduced funding capacity statewide.

That pressure compounds what districts already face. Federal pandemic relief totaling $2.6 billion for Washington schools expired in September 2024. Adjusted for inflation, the state distributes roughly $1,000 less per student than it did in 2018, according to OSPI, an aggregate shortfall of about $1 billion annually.

"Any districts that escaped cuts this year are probably going to be in that boat next year unless something turns around." — Dan Steele, Washington Association of School Administrators, The Seattle Times

The consequences are already visible. Seattle Public Schools initially proposed closing as many as 21 schools before withdrawing the plan after public backlash. Marysville ran an $18 million deficit. In smaller districts, the cuts are quieter: Prescott eliminated preschool and its librarian position; Mount Baker reduced elective offerings and staff.

The state legislature has taken notice. SB 6125 would create an enrollment stabilization fund, holding districts harmless at their 2025-26 enrollment levels if revenue drops in 2026-27 or 2027-28. OSPI estimates 24 districts would qualify in the first year, for a total of $1.9 million. That is a rounding error against the scale of the problem.

The math from here

The 2026 drop is not a one-year anomaly that recovery will reverse. The kindergarten pipeline guarantees continued losses as large graduating classes cycle out and smaller entering classes replace them. The gap between grade 12 and kindergarten, nearly 30,000 students, will take years to work through the system.

State population projections indicate the school-age population will continue shrinking through at least 2038. The smallest kindergarten cohorts have likely not arrived yet.

For superintendents managing buildings designed for a larger student body, the planning horizon just shifted. The recovery was always fragile. Now it is over.

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