About 3,500 more students didn’t show up for large parts of the school year than last year as officials fight the trend.
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More than one out of every four Colorado students is missing a lot of school. The rate of those often-absent students has bumped up slightly last school year from the previous year— about 3,500 more students from the year prior. The bump is a disappointment, after a couple of years of improvement in the state’s chronic absenteeism rate after the pandemic, according to new figures released by the Colorado Department of Education.
The rate of students who are chronically absent, which is missing more than 10 percent of school days or 18 days a year, increased less than a point to 28.4 percent last year. It is still below the post pandemic high of 34.5 percent of students who were chronically absent.
