Alaska lawmakers consider strategies to boost attendance as chronic absenteeism persists
- Alaska Beacon
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
Chronic absenteeism has remained high since the COVID-19 pandemic, but the reasons for why students are missing class are difficult to define and vary widely across the state
By Corinne Smith
Alaska Beacon
Alaska has some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the nation — state data shows that more than 44,000 students were considered chronically absent from public schools last year.
Lawmakers with the joint bipartisan task force on education funding are considering how to support districts in tackling Alaska’s chronic absenteeism. Research shows missing days of school can result in student learning loss, lower academic proficiency, lower graduation rates and longer-term social and behavioral problems.
As Alaska schools are grappling with steep budget deficits, cuts to programs and high teacher turnover, the causes and contributing factors of chronic absenteeism are wide-ranging and difficult to define statewide. Schools and districts are faced with unique challenges around determining why so many students are missing school and ways to improve attendance.
The joint bipartisan task force on education funding discusses chronic absenteeism on Jan. 23, 2026. (Gavel Alaska)
Nationwide, student absences from school jumped during the COVID-19 pandemic amid the transition and challenges with online learning, a trend also seen in Alaska schools. But chronic absenteeism rates in Alaska have remained significantly high in the years since.
Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school days, due to excused or unexcused absences or suspensions. For Alaska, that’s missing 17 days or more, according to Department of Education and Early Development Commissioner Deena Bishop.
In Alaska, the rate of chronic absenteeism peaked at over 48% of students during the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2021 to 2022 school year, according to data from the state’s education department. Alaska’s chronic absenteeism rate was the highest in the nation, along with Washington D.C., that year.
That rate has only dropped slightly since then — to nearly 43% of students last year.
“The point of this metric is for us to notice kids who are missing out on the opportunity to benefit from whatever is being taught in the classroom and schools,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a national non-profit that helps districts address absenteeism, when she gave a presentation to lawmakers on Jan. 23.
Statewide, over 56% of Alaska Native/American Indian students were chronically absent last year, compared to nearly 35% of white students. Nearly 46% of students with disabilities, and 51% of English language learners were chronically absent, according to the state’s report card.
Missing school has a ripple effect on a student’s learning and development, Chang said. “It leads them to be less likely to be reading at the end of third grade, less likely to be achieving in middle school, more likely to be suspended, more likely to not graduate, and it actually affects and is connected to the development of their social, emotional and executive functioning skills later on.”
She said absences also affect the classroom environment because teachers may need to reteach concepts and it’s harder to establish a classroom culture.
Chang outlined recommendations for state policy including sharing data on attendance levels by school and districts, promoting school and district teams to address attendance, and requiring outreach before disenrolling students.
Chang emphasized that attendance issues are complex, and solutions will be different for each school and district. Absences can be connected to chronic illness or access to health care, housing insecurity, bullying or safety concerns, or other problems with peers or teachers.
“The key to improving attendance is finding out and figuring out why kids miss too much school in the first place. That’s both a question for every school and every district to figure out,” Chang said.
Chang said relationships are essential to building attendance. Her research shows that districts should start with family outreach, and communicate clear attendance expectations, and then escalate to direct intervention with community resources as needed.
Student attendance varies widely by district and geography
According to district data provided by DEED after the hearing, school districts’ chronic absenteeism rates varied widely across the state last year. But districts with the most children missing school days were all located off the road system, with communities accessible only by plane or boat.
The districts with the highest chronic absenteeism rates were the Lower Kuskokwim River-area Yupiit School District (81%), Northwest Arctic Borough School District (71%), Bering Strait School District (68%), Hydaburg City School District (68%) and Lower Yukon School District (68%).
The districts with the lowest chronic absenteeism rates were the Yukon-Koyukuk School District in Fairbanks (17%), Southeast Island School District (23%), Galena City School District (25%) and the Petersburg School District (29%).
The state’s largest school districts by student count ranked near the statewide average: Anchorage School District (39%), Fairbanks North Star Borough School District (36%) and Kenai Peninsula Borough School District (45%).
The state’s department of education has ongoing attendance initiatives to support districts with the goal to reduce chronic absenteeism, including helping districts with outreach like the “Strive for 5” campaign to attend five days a week, according to a spokesperson. But DEED does not directly focus on any individual districts.
“DEED applies its policies and efforts towards attendance improvement equally throughout the state without specific district or regional focus,” said Bryan Zadalis by email.
“While DEED can encourage attendance, families and local communities play the most vital role in ensuring children are present and ready to learn,” he said.
Questions around enforcement
Alaska law requires all children ages seven to 16 to attend public school, unless enrolled in private school or a district homeschool program educated by parents or guardians.
Districts are required to have an attendance policy, and protocols to prevent and reduce truancy — which vary from students being barred from certain activities, to community service hours, to court proceedings and penalties, according to district websites.
But Chang cautioned lawmakers against a punishment approach — she said research from California showed that when schools threatened students or parents with truancy court it didn’t address the root causes of absences. “It turned out that if you wrote the easy to understand, ‘hey, I care about you’ and you shrunk all the legal language to the bottom’ that actually had a 40% better attendance than when you started with threatening families.”
Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, questioned whether truancy laws are being enforced. “Many countries that excel in education, I think we talk a lot in this committee about Finland — Finland has very serious consequences. It’s against the law for your children to not be in school,” he said.
“We have sort of developed a culture of ‘It’s okay to not be in school’ and that it’s up to the teacher to make school to be awesome and fun. Well, school is not always awesome and fun. Sometimes it’s hard to get kids to want to go to school. I’m a parent. I know how hard it is every day to get your kid up,” he said.
Chang agreed that consequences should be communicated to families. She said enforcement can include tactics like barring students from activities like sports until they make up classes, or engaging with employers who hire teens to make sure they’re also in school.
Reasons for Alaska student absences vary
Lawmakers and speakers noted Alaska is unique: from extended sports travel and cultural and traditional Alaska Native subsistence activities — students may miss school days but not necessarily educational opportunities.
Mike Hanley, superintendent of the Aleutian Region School District and a former state commissioner of education, told lawmakers in invited testimony that the stories behind the data matter. “A data point doesn’t reflect the work of a teacher, the struggles of a child and the work that’s going on,” he said. “The variability of that context across our state is huge.”
He said for Alaska’s western-most community of Atka, on days when 25% of students are absent, that’s only three students in a school of 12 pupils.
“Atka is the last place where Unangam Tunuu is still spoken fluently,” he said. “These three individuals are taking language classes. They’re part of culture camps. They are traveling around the state, working with other villages and tribes. Their mom is the tribal leader. They are dancers, and they are the next culture bearers for that community. So if you were to ask me, ‘Well, don’t you want them in school more?’ I would say I don’t know.”
He said the district works with those students to help them make up course work: “It would be a lot easier if they were in school. But am I willing to say ‘You need math more than you need the culture of your community’? That’s a tough call. So again, it’s the context of that data that we have.”
Hanley also pointed to Alaska’s high rates of domestic violence and child abuse, as well as rural poverty, which he says can cause stress on students and families, leading to more missed days of school. He recognized schools are often at the forefront of support for students experiencing trauma.
“Poverty impacts education. It’s not the amount of dollars, but what poverty causes, it causes stress in families. It causes insecurity with food. It causes safety concerns, it causes homelessness,” he said. “So those kids walk in with that.”
Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka and co-chair of the task force, noted in an interview that in her Southeast district students travel often from rural island communities to visit family or for sports competitions.
“You are going to have to get on a ferry or a plane, and it’s not necessarily going to be Friday evening and back on Sunday evening, you are likely to miss school,” she said. “So I think the data would be more helpful if it went one step further and showed sort of at the student level — this student missed this much school and is having these outcomes — and that would be a little more informative than just ‘our kids are missing a lot of school.’”
“Our attendance may not be as bad as we think,” she added. “It looks terrible, but it may not be that bad for exactly that reason.”
Himschoot said she’d like to see more innovation across school districts — like the Lake and Peninsula School District who adopted a ‘subsistence calendar’ in 2017, shortening the school year to accommodate families’ subsistence fishing and hunting activities. The Yupiit School District also enacted a subsistence calendar-aligned school year in 2023, with an extra half hour of instruction each day, partly to boost low attendance.
She also pointed to potential solutions like direct state funding to districts with high teacher vacancy rates, child care needs, or teacher apprenticeship programs to help develop and train teachers from the schools’ community and to prevent high turnover.
Himschoot and other lawmakers expressed interest in more specific data by schools and districts, and Alaska-specific factors for absences. She said she expects the task force to make actionable recommendations to be ready by the start of the next legislative session in 2027.
• Corinne Smith started reporting in Alaska in 2020, serving as a radio reporter for several local stations across the state including in Petersburg, Haines, Homer and Dillingham. She spent two summers covering the Bristol Bay fishing season. Originally from Oakland, California, she got her start as a reporter, then morning show producer, at KPFA Radio in Berkeley. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
