Connecticut’s chronic absenteeism rate declined to 17.2 percent through November for the 2024-2025 school year, according to data recently released by the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE). Chronic absenteeism has been declining since it peaked at 23.7 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, but still remains above pre-pandemic levels.
According to CSDE, 83,405 students were chronically absent, defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days, during the 2024-2025 school year. The previous school year, 17.7 percent of students were chronically absent.
Chronic enrollment has declined the most among students experiencing homelessness in the last five years. While chronic absenteeism for the homeless student population was nearly 47 percent during the 2024-2025 school year, it has declined from 60.2 percent since the 2021-2022 school year.
Between the 2020-2021 school year and the 2024-2025 school year, chronic absenteeism among the student population who are multilingual learners or who do not primarily speak English has declined from 59.6 percent to 46.9 percent.
Chronic absenteeism peaked at 23.7 percent during the 2021-2022 school year. In 2018-2019, before schools were affected by COVID-19, chronic absenteeism was 10.4 percent.
Truancy also declined through November for the 2024-2025 school year, falling to 19.7 percent. That number is down from 20.7 percent in the previous school year.
Overall enrollment in public schools has also declined at the same time as chronic absenteeism, although at a much lower level. In the past decade, public schools have lost approximately 33,000 students. The largest decline in enrollment happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. Overall enrollment declined by roughly 14 percent between those two school years.
Since then, enrollments has continued to decline by approximately 5,000 students.
Since the 2022-2023 school year, enrollment has declined by less than one percent per year. Chronic absenteeism has declined at a steadier rate, dropping by 15 percent between the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. In 2024-2025, chronic absenteeism declined by just under three percent.
Enrollment in nonpublic schools has grown in the past couple years, but not at a rate that accounts for the decline in public enrollment. Nonpublic enrollment across all grades has increased from roughly 50,500 in the 2020-2021 school year to just over 53,000 in the 2024-2025 school year. Enrollment in nonpublic schools remains below pre-pandemic levels. In 2017-2018 and 2019, there were 56,252 students enrolled in nonpublic schools.
Connecticut is not the only state where students have gone “missing” since the pandemic. An Associated Press story from 2023 found approximately 230,000 students from across 21 states who had dropped out of public schools but not enrolled in private schools.
That AP story attributed the missing students to an increase in homeschooling. But CSDE does not require homeschooling parents to report this data to the state and does not have accurate figures on how many children are homeschooled.
CSDE has previously attributed the decline in chronic absenteeism to the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP), which it introduced in 2021. The program initially sent school personnel from 15 districts directly to the homes of chronically absent students. According to CSDE, attendance rates increased by percent in the first month following initial LEAP visits and continued to rise, with attendance rates up by nearly 15 percent during the 2021-2022 school year.
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