In this series: Oregon Chronic Absenteeism.

Oregon's chronic absenteeism rate peaked in the wrong year. Most states hit their worst attendance numbers in 2021-22, the first full year back from pandemic disruptions. Oregon peaked in 2022-23 — at 38.1% — a year later than the national pattern. Whatever forces kept students out of school during the pandemic didn't loosen their grip in Oregon until a year after they did elsewhere.

Two years later, the rate stands at 33.5%. One in three students — approximately 174,000 children — missed at least 10% of the school year in 2024-25.

That 33.5% is a substantial drop from the 38.1% peak. It is also 13 percentage points above the 20.4% rate Oregon posted in 2018-19 — the last normal year. The state has recovered 26% of the ground lost since the pandemic. Seventy-four percent remains.

The pace problem

The two-year improvement — 38.1% to 34.3% to 33.5% — tells an initially encouraging story. But the pace is slowing. The first year gained 3.8 percentage points. The second gained 0.8.

A linear regression through the post-COVID data points gives a rate of improvement of 1.16 percentage points per year. At that pace, Oregon returns to its pre-pandemic 20.4% in 2037 — more than a decade from now. That projection assumes the pace holds steady, which the deceleration from 3.8 to 0.8 suggests it may not.

The projection is not a prediction. It is an arithmetic statement about what happens if nothing changes. If the 2025-26 numbers show another year of sub-1-point improvement, 2037 starts looking optimistic.

Before COVID, Oregon was already sliding

The statewide rate was not stable before the pandemic. It rose steadily from 17.4% in 2014-15 to 20.5% in 2017-18, ticked down to 20.4% in 2018-19, and then the floor dropped out. The pre-pandemic trend was already upward — chronic absenteeism was growing at about 0.75 percentage points per year even before COVID.

That pre-existing drift matters for the recovery target. Returning to 20.4% doesn't mean returning to a healthy baseline — it means returning to a rate that was itself worsening. Oregon's chronic absenteeism challenge didn't start in March 2020. The pandemic converted a slow-moving problem into a crisis.

What 33.5% means in practice

At 33.5%, the average Oregon school has one-third of its students meeting the definition of chronically absent. In a classroom of 30, ten missed 18 or more days. A teacher planning a week of instruction can expect one-third of her students to miss at least one day of that week, statistically.

The state's 520,023 enrolled students collectively lost roughly 3.1 million student-days of instruction beyond what they would have lost at the pre-COVID rate. Governor Tina Kotet has called the numbers "unacceptable." A FutureEd analysis placed Oregon among the bottom tier of states recovering from COVID-era absenteeism.

Oregon did not collect chronic absenteeism data during the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. The two-year gap in the data means the pandemic's full trajectory — how quickly rates rose, whether they peaked during remote learning or after — is invisible. What the data shows is the before and the after, with a chasm in between.

The landscape underneath

The statewide 33.5% obscures enormous variation. Only 16 of 178 districts with comparable data — 9% — have recovered to their pre-COVID rates. Nearly half of Oregon's Native American students are chronically absent. Homeless students are at 56%. Twelfth-graders are at 52.5%, with zero improvement since 2022.

Sixteen districts got worse in every measurable year from 2016 through 2023 — a six-year streak of unbroken deterioration spanning both sides of the pandemic. At the other end, Nyssa, a small farming community in eastern Oregon, cut its rate from 33% to 10.6%.

The articles that follow in this series examine each of these patterns. What they share is a common starting point: Oregon's chronic absenteeism rate is 33.5%, it is improving slowly, and it is nowhere close to where it was.

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