Claiborne County^↗ET's chronic-absence rate has improved from its pandemic-era peak. The latest result still leaves the district with Mississippi's highest reported rate.

The district moved from 7.3% in 2017 to 46.6% in 2025, an increase of 39.3 percentage points. Port Gibson High School sits at the center of that change: 351 of its 390 students, or 90.0%, met the state's chronic-absence definition in the latest report.

The Mississippi Department of Education defines a student as chronically absent after missing a specified share of the days in which the student was enrolled, whether the absences were excused, unexcused or tied to suspensions. The measure is different from average daily attendance, which can hide how many individual students cross that threshold, according to the department's chronic-absence report.

A partial recovery, then another increase

Claiborne County's rate reached 57.7% in 2022. It fell to 34.8% in 2023 and 31.5% in 2024 before rising again in 2025.

That path matters because the endpoint alone can obscure the district's partial recovery. The latest rate is below the peak, but the direction changed again after two reporting years of improvement.

Enrollment also contracted across the longer window. Claiborne County reported 1,540 enrolled students in 2017 and 1,137 in 2025, a decline of 403 students. The absence data cannot show whether that enrollment change altered the mix of students served, so it cannot explain the rate increase.

One campus separates from the others

The district's three reported schools occupy very different positions. Port Gibson High's 90.0% rate compares with 34.1% at Port Gibson Middle School and 19.5% at A. W. Watson Elementary School.

The gap identifies where the district's attendance work is most concentrated. It does not identify why students missed school. The public file contains total-student results only and does not break the rate out by grade, race, disability, economic status or reason for absence.

MDE's report recommends a menu of responses for districts, including mentoring, family engagement, alternatives to suspension, health partnerships and quick personal outreach after an absence. Those are statewide recommendations, not evidence that any one cause or remedy explains Claiborne County's result.

The statewide outlier

Among 141 district rows with a positive enrollment denominator in 2025, Claiborne County ranked first by chronic-absence rate. Moss Point^↗ET and Simpson County^↗ET followed at 44.0% and 43.5%, respectively.

That comparison keeps the finding specific. It describes reported absence, not school quality or student commitment. The next MDE release will show whether Claiborne County's latest increase was a one-year reversal or the start of a longer change.

This analysis uses Mississippi Department of Education district- and school-level chronic absenteeism reports for 2017 through 2025, available through the department's public reporting archive. No reports were collected for 2020 or 2021. The statewide summary in the latest report does not reconcile to its district table, so this article excludes statewide numeric claims and uses only district and school rows that match the source tables.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.