According to data presented to the Senate Education Committee, 27.6 percent of Mississippi students, about 126,000 total, missed 18 or more days of school during the 2024-25 year. Rates were lowest in elementary grades but climbed sharply in high school, where absenteeism spiked near 40 percent in May when many students weren't required to take semester exams.
Education officials told the Senate Education Committee that the problem is being fueled by practices like exam exemptions and allowing seniors to have light class schedules once graduation requirements are met.
Sen. Hob Bryan (D-Amory) said policies that let students coast after meeting minimum requirements devalues what public education offers students. .
“They may have completed their requirements for graduation, but they certainly haven't learned everything there is to learn in the whole world,” Bryan said. “The message that's being sent is that it's not important to go to school and I think that's very troubling.”
Officials with the Mississippi Department of Education told lawmakers they are preparing a slate of reforms aimed at curbing absenteeism. One proposal would reframe the role of attendance officers as “student success coaches,” who would be tasked not just with enforcement but with proactive outreach to families before a truancy case reaches youth court.
Wendy Clemons, MDE’s chief academic officer, said the department also wants to require school districts with absenteeism rates above 10 percent to submit robust action plans that spell out what their problem areas are and how they plan to tackle them.
“We've got to address some of our reporting pieces, which I find to be the low-hanging fruit, and then dig into some really innovative ideas for getting students in school,” Clemons said.
MDE is also recommending the creation of a statewide attendance dashboard, modeled after a system in Georgia, that would publicly show daily attendance broken down by grade and student subgroup.
Sen. Nicole Boyd (R-Oxford) said those changes would help the state zero in on the students who most need intervention.
“We are really trying to home in on true truancy,” Boyd said. “Not children who are out for a field trip, or children who have a chronic illness, but we wanna look at those children who are choosing just to not go to school.”
Lawmakers and MDE officials are weighing how to hold districts more accountable while also addressing the family and community factors that keep kids out of school. Clemons says absenteeism is a difficult issue, but incredibly important to address because of its wide-reaching effects on the state economy.
“Chronic absenteeism between 25% and 30%, it hurts graduation rates, jobs and safety,” Clemons said.
