Many of California’s youngest students keep missing weeks of school, data show
Top Takeaways
- Transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students still have some of the highest chronic absence rates in the state.
- Early intervention after initial absences can help prevent chronic absenteeism, data shows.
- Forthcoming absenteeism state data will show how districts fared last school year.
When kids start attending school, the youngest tend to get sick their first year. Some may have a tough time adjusting to a new school routine. Some parents may believe missing the day’s lesson isn’t that big of a deal, so their student stays home.
But when young students miss school, the days absent can quickly add up and impact student learning. About 24% of California’s youngest students were chronically absent in 2024-25, higher than the 19% chronic absenteeism rate for all students.
In October, the state will release data on chronic absenteeism from the 2025-26 school year, the first school year transitional kindergarten, or TK, was widely available for all families. Education experts and administrators will be zeroing in on attendance rates among the very youngest.
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Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more days in one school year. The overall rate has improved since the percentage of students in that category hit a peak of 30% of all students in the 2021-22 school year in California.
But the rate has remained high among TK and kindergarten students. That matters, early education researchers say, because the effects of not attending school regularly in the earliest years can show up in lower academic achievement years later.
“If they are missing school, they are missing out on the building blocks and it will impact them for the rest of their lives,” said Jessica Hull, executive director of communication and community engagement at Roseville City School District near Sacramento.
In many ways, it makes sense that the youngest students have spotty attendance. They tend to get sick more often so higher rates of absenteeism are largely expected, say school administrators. This can be especially true for students who did not attend preschool or other early learning programs prior to TK.
“When your child starts school, that’s usually a year of sickness,” said Kara Stern, director of education at SchoolStatus, an education technology company that works with 123 California school districts on chronic absenteeism.
Illnesses such as colds — sometimes even monthly, according to SchoolStatus data — are often part of the TK and kindergarten experience because “it’s a first exposure to all these other kids,” said Stern.
Long lasting effects of missing school
Some families are unaware of the foundational learning that happens every day in TK and kindergarten classrooms, said Hull.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s a requirement to attend each day,” she said. And since the Covid pandemic, parents have had difficulty discerning when a child might be sick enough to keep home from school, she said.
“It’s hard to send a 4-year-old to school if they have a runny nose,” said Hull.
Recent research shows that students who are chronically absent in TK and kindergarten are about twice as likely to transfer school districts and that kindergarteners’ ability to read and do basic math can be predictive of academic achievement by third grade and beyond. Part of that may be that students and families build routines in TK and kindergarten – establishing a wake up time, getting to school on time, socializing with classmates — which helps with attendance as students grow older.
‘Absences sneak up on families’
A student who is chronically absent, and attends a typical 180-day school year, has missed about 3.5 weeks of school.
In 2021-22 when schools began reopening after Covid-related closures, nearly 2 million of the state’s TK-12 students were chronically absent. California districts launched a years-long campaign to get students back into the classroom.
One of them was Roseville City, a 12,000-student district in Placer County. The district mailed letters to families explaining the importance of attendance, created graphics detailing how quickly absences can add up, and called families whose children were often absent.
In communications with parents, the district said it’s fine to keep a sick child home, but they can send them to school “if they are a little under the weather.”
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The messaging worked. In three years, the district’s overall chronic absence rates dropped from nearly 26% in 2021-22 to 10.5% in 2024-25 despite an increase in total enrollment, according to state data.
But the district’s TK and kindergarten students were still missing class at alarming rates — at its peak in 2022-23 their chronic absence rate was 11 percentage points higher than the rest of the district, state data shows.
Last year, Roseville City focused its attendance communications on TK and kindergarten. The letters to those families described what their children were learning each day in class and how those lessons were the building blocks to reading, math, writing and science.
On the district’s website, staff has also listed the building blocks children learn in early grades: hand-eye coordination in TK turns to learning sight words in kindergarten, writing sentences in first grade and writing short paragraphs in second grade. This is all part of educating parents on the value of their youngest children being in class, Hull said.
District staff have learned that “absences sneak up on families,” Hull said. Families are not keeping track of the number of days, so the schools need to point out the amount of time a student is missing. “That’s on our part to reach out and explain,” she said.
This school year, Roseville City’s communication to families about absenteeism are more tailored to the individual student.
Hull said that a letter might say “it’s been two months of the school year and you’ve already missed 5 days. You’re on track to be chronically absent. What can we do?” The most important part of that message, she said, is showing families the district is ready to help.
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That early intervention is critical, said Stern of SchoolStatus, which works with Roseville City. Once students become chronically absent, her team has found that re-engaging them becomes much more difficult, especially as they grow older.
“Our data suggests that reaching out in the window of three to five absences is a lot more effective in returning them to school and not needing further intervention than waiting until it’s more set in stone,” said Stern.
SchoolStatus’ internal data for the 2025-26 school year seems promising. In 97 of the California districts they work with, the TK chronic absenteeism rate dropped under 22% from nearly 29% in 2023-24. Among kindergarteners it dropped to about 20% from nearly 25% during the same two-year timeframe.
“It’s a lot of extra work, but our entire system is so determined and focused on this because they do see that end result,” said Hull of Roseville City. “They see the kids who return to school are doing better both academically and socially.”
This story was originally published by EdSource.