When he resumed in-person classes at Evans High School in the 2021-22 school year, that habit stuck. His attendance was spotty and his classwork often undone. In tenth grade he estimated he missed nearly 60 days of school, or a third of the academic year.
He is part of an alarming trend. Absenteeism across Florida skyrocketed beginning with that COVID-19 interlude — and, confounding experts’ predictions and defying educators’ hopes, it hasn’t come back down.
Nearly one million Florida students missed more than three weeks of school last year, a staggering number of chronically absent children undermining their academic success.
In the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic, about 20 percent of Florida’s public school students missed 10 percent or more of the school year, meeting the state definition of chronically absent. That figure topped 32 percent the year after COVID shuttered schools and has barely inched down since — remaining above 31 percent in the 2023-34 school year, the latest year for which data is available, an analysis by the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel shows.
Central Florida’s schools counted more than 145,000 chronically absent students who missed 18 or more days out of that 180-day school year. Orlando’s three downtown sports venues combined couldn’t hold them all.
Though 2024-25 attendance information is not yet available statewide, early data from Osceola and Seminole county schools shows some modest improvements but rates still well above pre-pandemic levels.
Educators say the pandemic, which shuttered all Florida schools and forced students to study online, fundamentally broke some parents’ and students’ bonds with education. COVID-19 created new hardships especially for families living in poverty, and those challenges impacted their ability to get their children to school.
But something less tangible shifted, too. The pandemic disrupted attendance habits, accustomed students to looser standards and convinced them in-person classes mattered less.
“Once they got comfortable with not going into that building, they got comfortable,” said Tequila Dillon, whose daughter ran into serious attendance problems at her Orange County high school before turning things around.
Chronic absenteeism is a nationwide phenomenon, one that is fueling falling test scores in this state and others. But Florida so far has failed to take a comprehensive approach to the problem.
Last year, Attendance Works, an education advocacy group, urged all 50 states to recognize absenteeism as the most crucial issue facing education and tackle it with an “all-hands-on-deck approach” from the governor’s office on down.
Florida has not followed any of its recommendations, such as launching a statewide public awareness campaign, holding schools accountable for reducing absenteeism or publishing a real-time attendance dashboard. The state hasn’t even adopted common measurements for tracking absent students.
And when Attendance Works this year contacted all 50 states seeking their latest data and information on absenteeism, Florida was the only one that did not respond, according to the advocacy group’s report released Tuesday.
The state’s indifference has left districts on their own, notching defeats and some small victories, like Ivan, who ultimately realized his behavior was undermining his future. “This was little kid stuff,” the Valencia College student said of his former patterns. But there are not enough Ivans.
The news organizations’ analysis of attendance data since 2018 found that:
• Absenteeism is most pronounced among high school students, with 37 percent of students missing a large amount of school in 2023-24, up from less than a quarter pre-pandemic. Chronic absenteeism also surged in elementary schools, from 18 percent to 28 percent, and in middle schools, from 18 percent to 31 percent.
• Chronic absenteeism in Florida has gotten worse in 66 of the state’s 67 counties. The only exception is Hendry County, a tiny district serving fewer than 8,000 kids in southwest Florida.
• Absenteeism grew in all of the state’s large metro areas, rising from 21 percent to 35 percent in Orange County, for example, and from 29 percent to 45% in Duval County, from 19 percent to 31 percent in Hillsborough County and from 19 percent to 28 percent in Miami-Dade.
• At schools where the majority of kids live in poverty, about 35 percent miss school regularly, compared to 19 percent for schools where fewer than a quarter live in poverty.
At Leesburg High School in Lake County, about three-quarters of the students are economically disadvantaged and chronic absenteeism jumped from just over one-third in 2018-19 to almost 60 percent last year.
But even in wealthier places, schools now wrestle with attendance problems far more often than before the pandemic struck in March 2020.
Consider Oviedo High School in Seminole County, the region’s most well-off county, where 13.5 percent of students were chronically absent before COVID-19. That rate has since doubled, sitting at 28.6 percent last year.
The implications are vast. “If the pandemic was an earthquake, the subsequent rise in absenteeism has been a tsunami that is continuing to disrupt learning,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard University, in a Harvard publication posted in February.
Math and reading test scores have dropped since the pandemic, and that can be linked to the large numbers of students who are chronically absent, said Kane, co-author of the Education Recovery Scorecard, which tracks how districts nationwide are recovering from COVID-19.
Florida’s middle schoolers posted their lowest reading and math scores in more than 20 years on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the “nation’s report card.” The state’s fourth graders scored a 20-year low in reading. Florida high school seniors in 2024 posted the state’s lowest SAT scores in a decade.
Nationally, students also performed worse in 2024 on reading and math NAEP tests compared to before COVID-19. And across the country, chronic absenteeism almost doubled from 16 percent before the pandemic to about 28 percent during the 2022-23 school year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.
Florida’s nearly 34 percent chronic absenteeism rate for that school year ranked 40th nationally, meaning it performed better than only 10 other states.
To combat absenteeism, local educators say they have tried almost everything, from home visits to find out the why behind the absences to pep rallies and pizza parties that try to make school fun. They offer programs to help students catch up on missing work, partner with nonprofits to provide families with needed social services and sometimes use truancy courts to prod those with the worst attendance records to come to school regularly.
They’re making inroads, but progress can be slow.
Janet Rosario and her daughter Jahlisha, the youngest of her five children, appeared in Orange County’s truancy court last month, one of the regular hearings they must attend. That court, overseen by Magistrate Lisa Smith Bedwell, heard 128 cases this year where it can order counseling, community service, and even legal action.
Jahlisha, a student at Sally Ride Elementary School in Taft, entered the truancy court system after she missed about 50 days of school during both the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. She’s missed more than 20 days during the just-finished school year, an improvement but still a serious problem.
Talking with Janet Rosario conveys the depth of the attendance challenge. Until March when they moved into an apartment, Rosario, her husband and their children were living out of Central Florida hotel rooms, with the seven-person family often crammed into one room with two beds.
Rosario said the family doesn’t own a car, so their transportation challenges coupled with her long work hours at a restaurant and the family’s housing problems sometimes meant school attendance wasn’t top priority. Two of Rosario’s other children are in truancy court too.
That May afternoon in the hearing room, Jahlisha sat next to her mother with a pair of headphones around her neck. She said little but exchanged smiles with the court’s bailiff when she walked in.
Rosario explained to Bedwell why Jahlisha had missed three more days of school since their last hearing: a stomach bug going around the family.
“You can see it in her eyes … she’s not 100 percent today,” Rosario said to the magistrate.
She also told Bedwell that she hoped that the family’s constant moves were over and that Jahlisha would be in school regularly in the coming academic year.
Rosario told a reporter later that she knows it is important for her children to be in school, and she worries when they are not. “Why do you want to have them locked up in a hotel? They think too much. They’re stuck in four walls, and they just look around,” Rosario said.
Across Central Florida, school officials labor to translate realizations like Rosario’s into better performance.
Kelly Maldonado, principal of Forsyth Woods Elementary School in Azalea Park, visits four or five of her students at their homes every week, trying to figure out why they’re missing so much school.
All of Forsyth Woods’ students are from economically disadvantaged families. Before COVID-19, about 22 percent of its student body missed 10 percent of the school year. Last year, 38 percent were absent that often.
Maldonado once visited the family of a first-grader who had missed more than 150 days of school since kindergarten. The student’s father had passed away, the mother was struggling with her mental health, and the child had moved in with their grandparents, who weren’t bringing him to school.
The mother felt ashamed that her son had missed so much school. “I just gave Mom a hug, and I said, ‘No one’s here to judge, no one’s here to place blame. We just want the baby in school. We just need him to come back to school.’” she said.
The student returned the next day, and has only missed 10 days of school in the last four years, something Maldonado calls her “greatest success story” as a principal.
The bottom line: “If they’re not here, if they’re not sitting in that classroom, they cannot learn,” she said.
At Central Avenue Elementary School in Kissimmee, Amber Blondman spends her days trying to reach the families of absent students. All the school’s students are from low-income families and the percentage of chronically absent students hit 44 percent last year, up from 34 percent before the pandemic.
But families struggling financially often change addresses and cellphone providers, making them hard to track down. Blondman, who oversees the campus’ attendance efforts, estimates she gets one response for every seven phone calls, emails and texts she sends to parents.
When she does reach families, she often learns of serious struggles. And sometimes, Blondman finds a child who just doesn’t want to come to school — and a parent who doesn’t force the issue.
One of the school’s kindergartners this year racked up almost 60 unexcused absences by March. She didn’t like school, her mother told Blondman, because she fell on the playground back in August.
Blondman and other school staff met with the mother and daughter, stressing the importance of daily attendance and suggesting a way to change the 5-year-old’s attitude.
“We created a plan where, if she came to school every day for a week, on Friday, mom would take her out to ice cream,” Blondman said. “It made her want to come to school.”
At Evans High School in Pine Hills, Tequila Dillon’s daughter liked school before the pandemic hit, but the Orange teenager’s time doing online classes changed things.
Jon’Tayasia Dillon-White returned to campus as a 10th grader, but most days she skipped, with her grades plummeting as a result. She fooled her mother for a while, telling her on many mornings she was getting ready for school but going back to bed as soon as her mother left for work.
“I didn’t want to listen to my mom,” the teenager said. “I didn’t want to get up and go to school.”
When someone from Evans knocked on their door, Dillon learned how many school days Jon’Tayasia had missed and that both of them could be headed to truancy court.
Evans offers a noon-to-5 p.m. catch-up program for students, one that predates the pandemic but has proved crucial since. It is a way, administrators say, to reconnect students to Evans High in a smaller setting with a schedule more appealing to those constantly skipping.
In that program, Jon’Tayasia made up missing work and by last May had earned enough credits to graduate.
Evans High, where almost all students are from low-income families, has knocked down its chronic absentee rate in the past few years but it was still at 55 percent last year, meaning almost 1,500 students skipped at least three weeks of classes. That’s an improvement from the 2021-22 school year when it topped 67 percent, but far above the 45 percent rate before COVID.
Kenya Nelson-Warren, Evans’ principal, said she’s open to almost any tactic to combat attendance problems, even if that means heading to a nearby fast-food restaurant. There she and a dean sometimes look for students who, after they’ve been dutifully dropped off by their parents, have walked off campus.
“This is not Evans High School,” Nelson-Warren will shout to the teenagers hanging out or sleeping at the restaurant’s tables. “You aren’t learning here at McDonald’s.”
During the pandemic, when all classes went online, students could find assignments and class resources on their laptops. Now, some think they can do whatever work their teachers post, and that means being in class is optional, she said.
But missing class means they miss instruction, practice and discussion — and that makes it hard to fully learn the material, particularly in math, where students lost the most ground because of COVID interruptions.
“You’re trying to complete the assignment blindly,” Nelson-Warren added.
Schools’ efforts to combat absenteeism matter, but so does a state’s, said Hedy Chang, executive director and founder of Attendance Works.
“State leadership to reduce chronic absence is crucial to ensure that all schools and districts, not just a few innovators, have the tools and skills to support excellent attendance,” she said in a statement released with the group’s recent report.
GOP State Rep. Dana Trabulsy sponsored bills this year and last that would have been a small step toward that goal for Florida, requiring common standards for measuring absenteeism. Currently, each school district can decide how many hours of a school day students can miss and still be counted as present.
“We can’t allow them to be the lost generation,” Trabulsy said after the 2024 legislative session.
But her proposed legislation never got out of committee last year and this year, though it passed unanimously in the House, it died in the Senate, which never took it up.
Senate leaders view attendance as a local matter best tackled by school districts, said Katie Betta, a spokeswoman for the Senate president’s office.
“There is no question that absenteeism is a problem, but the question is whether interventions and solutions should be determined at the district level, or dictated from Tallahassee,” she said. “The Senate has generally taken the position that individual school districts know their communities best and are better able to design, implement, and maintain their own policies.”
Experts question that approach. Kane, the Harvard researcher, agrees with Attendance Works that state and local governments should do more. He suggests making absenteeism a public cause. “Most mayors can’t teach algebra one, but they could do a public information campaign,” he said.
Indiana, he said, posts a regularly updated attendance dashboard on its education department website. The state’s legislature also just passed a law requiring the Indiana Department of Education to study absenteeism, collect data on the reasons students are missing school and publish the information each year.
Last year, Indiana’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped to below 18 percent, its lowest mark since the pandemic, though still above the about 11 percent rate it had in 2019.
Ivan’s attendance record turned around after he was offered a place in Evans’ noon-to-5.p.m. program and encouraged to consider the offerings at the local technical college. A welding class intrigued him.
Soon missing so many school days stopped making sense. Ivan graduated from Evans in May 2024 and then enrolled in Valencia’s welding technology program. He is slated to graduate from the college program at the end of this month.
“I needed to calm down,” he said. “I was getting too old.”
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