The number of Michigan students considered “chronically absent” continues to decline, but still hasn’t dropped below pre-pandemic levels, according state data released this week.
Students are considered chronically absent when they miss more than 10% of school days, or around 18 days a year. During the 2024-25 school year, almost 28% of students statewide met that criteria.
That number has been improving every year since it peaked during the height of the COVID pandemic, but it’s still higher than nhe pre-pandemic rate of roughly 20%.
Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, a professor of education at Wayne State University who researches chronic absenteeism, said there’s one exception: school districts like Detroit that have long been dogged by low attendance rates, but seem to have recovered faster. “And almost all the other schools are still, on average, about ten percentage points greater chronic absence than they were before the pandemic,” she said.
Lenhoff said researchers haven’t yet teased out the primary reasons for why school attendance continues to lag in the aftermath of COVID. “I think there's never going to be one answer to this question of why so many students are missing so much school,” she said. “But I do think there's reason to believe that there's some amount of potential disruption of the school-family relationship, which is really important for kind of creating the strong bond [so] that schools really understand what's going on with families, and can support them in getting to school.”
That said, Lenhoff emphasized that schools alone can’t bear the burden of reducing chronic absenteeism. “Schools can't solve all the barriers to attendance on their own, and asking them to actually kind of pulls them away from their core mission of teaching and learning and supporting student well-being,” she said.
Lenhoff said the causes of chronic absenteeism are complex, but typically include issues like housing instability, poor transportation, and unmanaged chronic illness.
