Four in Ten Mississippi Districts Reported Chronic Absence of at Least 30%

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

High chronic absence was not confined to a handful of Mississippi school systems in 2025.

57 of the 143 district rows in the state's latest report had chronic-absence rates of at least 30%. That is 39.9% of reporting districts. The median district rate was 26.7%.

The Mississippi Department of Education counts excused absences, unexcused absences and suspensions in the measure. Chronic absence describes how many individual students missed a substantial share of their enrolled school days, rather than a district's average daily attendance, according to the department's chronic-absence report.

A wide upper tail

The 30% threshold was not the end of the distribution. 31 districts reported rates of at least 35%, and 13 reached at least 40%.

Claiborne County^↗ reported the highest district rate at 46.6%. Moss Point^↗ followed at 44.0%, and Forrest County Agricultural High School^↗ reported 43.6%.

Those figures describe reported attendance, not school quality or student effort. The public file includes total-student results but does not break out the reasons students missed school, so it cannot show whether transportation, health, housing, discipline or another barrier produced a district's rate.

The pattern crossed district sizes

The threshold result was similar among small and midsize systems. 12 of 29 districts enrolling fewer than 1,000 students reached 30%, a 41.4% share. Among the 93 districts enrolling 1,000 to 4,999 students, 39 reached the threshold, or 41.9%.

Of the 19 districts enrolling at least 5,000 students, 6 reached 30%, a smaller but still substantial 31.6% share.

Looking at student enrollment leads to the same broad conclusion. The 57 districts at or above 30% represented 41.5% of enrollment across the 141 district rows with known positive denominators.

The file contains 2 special-purpose systems that published rates but had suppressed enrollment counts. They remain in the 143-district rate distribution, but the enrollment share and size-band comparisons exclude them. Neither had a rate at or above 30%, so the threshold count remains 57 in both universes.

What the file can and cannot answer

MDE recommends strategies including mentoring, family engagement, health partnerships, alternatives to suspension and prompt personal outreach after an absence. Those are statewide recommendations, not evidence that the same mechanism explains results in every district.

The distribution is a screening signal: it shows how widely high reported absence extends and where more local investigation is needed. District-level information about why students were absent would be required to choose or evaluate a response.

This analysis uses the Mississippi Department of Education's 2024-25 district-level chronic absenteeism table, available through the department's public reporting archive. The statewide summary in the report does not reconcile to the district table, so this article excludes statewide numeric claims and limits its findings to the reported district rows.

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

Forrest County Agricultural High School - EdTribune MS - Mississippi Education Data

Four in Ten Mississippi Districts Reported Chronic Absence of at Least 30%

A wide upper tail

The pattern crossed district sizes

What the file can and cannot answer