Data-Driven Education Journalism for the Evergreen State
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Washington's attendance recovery follows a nearly perfect gradient by age: younger students are bouncing back while high schoolers remain stuck near their pandemic peak.
Washington's 3,788 foster youth saw their chronic absence rate hold near 40% for two years, then rise to 41.6% in 2024-25, even as other vulnerable groups kept recovering.
In 2021-22, 43 Washington districts had at least half of their students chronically absent. By 2024-25 the count was 19, eight of them tribal school entities, with 4,169 students between them.
Native American chronic absenteeism was 45.6% in Washington in 2024-25, with eight tribal and reservation districts above 50% and a gap with white students wider than before the pandemic.
The in-person schools in Forks went from 41% of students chronically absent in 2021-22 to 21.6% in 2024-25, now below Washington's 27.3%. The district-wide rate is lower still because it counts a large online school.
Elementary schools have recovered more than two-fifths of their COVID attendance losses, but high school chronic absenteeism remains within 1.4 points of the pandemic peak.
About 23,000 Washington students who are homeless were chronically absent in 2024-25, a rate of 51.2%. Even the districts with the lowest measurable rates are near 30%.
Seattle has a below-average overall chronic rate of 23.4% but a 17.8-point gap between white and Black students — a disparity that widened after the pandemic.
In raw numbers, 298,029 Washington students were chronically absent in 2024-25, 130,000 more than before the pandemic. The cumulative toll since COVID: 1.48 million student-years.
One in three Hispanic students in Washington was chronically absent in 2024-25, and the gap with white students has widened from 5.1 to 8.9 percentage points since before the pandemic.
After two straight years of improvement, Tacoma's chronic absenteeism rate rose 2.1 points to 36.2% in 2024-25, the largest increase among Washington's 10 largest districts.
After three years of improvement, Washington's chronic absence rate barely budged in 2025, leaving 298,029 students missing too much school.
After 35 years in Washington education and more than two decades in Enumclaw, Jill Burnes steps into the superintendent role as the district hits record enrollment and builds a $65M school.
Nine Washington districts report enrollment growth over 200%, but the students are virtual, the operators are for-profit, and the classrooms are empty.
Washington's Native American student count fell from 24,768 to 12,489 in 16 years. A reclassification explains part of the drop, but not the decline since.
