DeSoto County^↗ET reported Mississippi's largest district-level chronic-absence count in 2025.

11,336 of the district's 35,850 students met the chronic-absence definition, a rate of 31.6%. DeSoto had both the largest enrollment and the largest chronic count among 141 district rows with known positive enrollment.

The count was 4,615 students higher than second-ranked Jackson Public Schools^↗ET, which reported 6,721 chronically absent students.

Scale and rate both matter

Raw counts partly reflect district size. DeSoto's first-place count does not mean it had Mississippi's highest rate. It does show how many students and families are represented by a rate that might look less extreme than the state's upper-tail district rates.

DeSoto enrolled 35,233 students and reported 5,421 chronically absent students in 2017. By 2025, enrollment was 617 students higher, while the chronic count was 5,915 higher.

The rate increased by 16.2 percentage points across those endpoints, from 15.4% to 31.6%.

A sharp peak and partial improvement

The district's reported rate was 17.9% in 2018 and 8.0% in 2019. It then reached 42.4% in 2022 before falling to 28.5% in 2023 and 26.8% in 2024. The rate rose again to 31.6% in 2025.

No district rows were available for 2020 or 2021. The series therefore shows reported endpoints and available intervening years, not a complete annual path through the pandemic.

The largest school counts were High-named campuses

The eight DeSoto school rows with the largest chronic counts all had names containing the standalone word “High.” DeSoto Central High School reported 873 chronically absent students, followed by Southaven High School with 839, Hernando High School with 717 and Lewisburg High School with 713.

Those individual school rows identify large campus-level counts, but they cannot safely be added into a district share. The school rows sum to 36,350 enrolled students and 11,572 chronically absent students, while the district row reports 35,850 and 11,336. Because the two source levels do not reconcile, this article treats the district aggregate as authoritative for district claims and school rows as individual campus observations only.

The Mississippi Department of Education's latest chronic-absence report recommends strategies including mentoring, family engagement, health partnerships, alternatives to suspension and prompt personal outreach. Those statewide recommendations do not explain DeSoto's result.

This analysis uses MDE district- and school-level chronic absenteeism reports for 2017 through 2025, available through the department's public reporting archive. It excludes the disputed statewide aggregate and makes no claim about DeSoto's share of a statewide total.

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