September is Attendance Awareness Month, a time when governance teams often look to re-examine policies and data related to school climate, chronic absenteeism, student wellness and more to address underlying causes of high absence rates among young people. School districts in California’s Central Valley experienced a 22 percent increase in student absences coinciding with intensified immigration enforcement at the beginning of the year, according to a recent working paper that found a sharp increase in student absences starting in January.
The region, which boasts a high population of Latin American immigrants, saw significant spikes in absenteeism rates among in all age groups but particularly for younger students, with the increase among K-5 students more than triple the effect among high schoolers.
Pre-kindergarten students experienced an approximately 30 percent increase in absences, followed by a 27 percent increase among children in grades K–5, a 17 percent jump for students in middle school and an 8 percent increase among high schoolers.
“The findings indicate lost learning opportunities, but this isn’t just about kids missing out on instructional time,” said study author Thomas S. Dee, the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education. “The stress that’s being put on these young children and their families is serious, and the increased absences are a leading indicator of broader developmental harm.”
Dee evaluated daily attendance data from five school districts in the Central Valley during the 2022–23 and 2023–24 school years, as well as the 2024–25 school year through the end of February. He observed seasonal patterns typically associated with student absences in Bakersfield City School District, Southern Kern Unified School District, Tehachapi USD, Kerman USD and Fresno USD, such as the days before major school breaks or community holidays like Day of the Dead.
“That allowed us to credibly answer the question of whether the patterns from this school year differ significantly from prior years,” Dee said. He noted that in the months prior to the administration’s intensification of immigration enforcement beginning Jan. 7, absence data for the current school year was indistinguishable from previous years.
“But in January, we saw a sharp and unusual increase in absences that was coincident with the raids,” Dee continued. “And the fact that the increase was similarly high in February indicates that these effects were not transitory.”
Nationwide, more than 5 million children under age 18 who are U.S. citizens live with a parent who is an unauthorized immigrant, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center report. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 1 million of those children are in California, and approximately 133,000 of these children are undocumented themselves.
Factors such as increased immigration enforcement efforts in communities with higher numbers of Hispanic/Latino residents could hamper the state’s efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50 percent by 2030.
On Aug. 19, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced the release of the California Attendance Guide, an online resource created with Attendance Works and the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, that provides evidence-based strategies for addressing absenteeism at the school, district and state levels.
