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 When COVID-19 struck, schools closed, students “attended” from home, and too many got out of the habit of going to school when the doors reopened.

In 2022, nearly a quarter of Georgia’s students had absenteeism rates high enough to be considered “chronic” — nearly double the rate before the pandemic.

But new data show that the state is gradually recovering. More students are still missing school than before COVID-19, but the rate has been steadily falling, dropping to 17.7% during the 2025-26 school year.

That is nearly 2 percentage points lower than the prior year, which in turn was nearly 2 points lower than in 2023-24, the state data show. The rate remains more than 5 percentage points above the rates in the two years before the pandemic, but observers find Georgia’s trajectory to be promising, especially when many other states have found their absenteeism problems to be more stubborn.

The Georgia Department of Education released the new rates last week, well ahead of most other states, noted Nat Malkus, with the American Enterprise Institute.

“Perhaps even more impressively,” he wrote in an analysis published Thursday, “Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate is declining steadily, bucking the national trend.”

During the 2024-25 school year, Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate was 19.5%, beating the estimated national average by more than 2 percentage points, according to the group FutureEd, whose numbers had Georgia among the third of the states with the lowest rates.

“We applaud the Georgia Department of Education’s early release of end-of-the-year attendance data, which shows an impressive fifth consecutive year of decreased chronic absence,” Hedy Chang, president and CEO of the group Attendance Works, said in a statement. “Georgia’s commitment to timely end-of-the-year data is a model for how states can make a difference.” 

Some of that success came after lawmakers passed a law last year that required more coordinated and sustained efforts against absenteeism. Senate Bill 123 required that school districts with high rates create attendance review teams that engage parents.

State lawmakers tried to build on that this year with Senate Bill 513.

“If we do not have kids’ butts in seats, they are not going to learn,” Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, said before the measure passed with just one vote against it in the Senate.

But the measure faced overwhelming opposition in the House due to some provisions seen as draconian, including loss of driving privileges. Many students who skip a lot of school need their licenses so they can get to jobs — not to mention to school, critics said.

Studies have shown that treating the problem with punishment does not work well, said Matt Smith, the policy and research director for the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.

Indeed, using punishment to address misbehavior in general can aggravate the absenteeism problem by turning school into an unwelcoming environment, he said. Out-of-school suspension, one such “legacy” strategy, directly increases absenteeism.

Instead, Georgia schools are more often trying to address the underlying problems, he said. That started with more behavioral and mental health counseling.

But poor physical health can also rob students of their ability to focus, which can in turn lead them to misbehave, he said, so more schools are looking at that too.

“It could be something as simple as getting them hearing aids or glasses, getting them dental care,” he said.

Smith said the data the state education department has been releasing allows more people, including businesses and organizations in each community, to help school districts identify commonalities among students who are missing a lot of school.

That enables the districts to focus their resources on those students, and it allows the community to help.

They have a reason to help. Research shows that absenteeism affects the whole classroom by bogging down teachers who must divide their students into different groups as they try to catch up the kids who have fallen behind, Smith said.

Georgia and other states still have a lot of work to do to get their absenteeism rates back to a manageable level, Malkus wrote in his analysis. But he added that Georgia is showing how progress is possible when it is seen as an urgent priority.

Many states take far longer than Georgia did to release their data from the prior school year, he wrote. “Indeed, there are some states — Minnesota and Texas among them — that still have not released data for the 2024–25 school year.”