Twin Rivers - EdTribune CA - California Education Data

Sacramento County's District-Operated Chronic Absenteeism Reaches 21.9% in 2024-25

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Sacramento County spans from the foothills of Folsom and El Dorado Hills to the agricultural flatlands of the Delta, with the state capital and its surrounding suburbs in between. Across the county's district-operated schools, about 216,000 students were enrolled in 2024-25.

In that year, 47,356 of those students, or 21.9%, were chronically absent. That is about 2.4 points above the statewide district-operated rate of 19.5%, and 8.4 points above the county's pre-COVID baseline of 13.5%. The rate is elevated, and it has come down slowly. It is not, on a district-operated basis, the worst among California's large counties.

These figures cover district-operated schools only. They exclude independent-study and online charter schools, which California reports under their authorizing county or district code and which carry very high chronic-absence rates under seat-time accounting. Blending those charters into the county total pushes the figure several points higher and obscures what is happening in the brick-and-mortar schools most families attend.

A slow recovery from a high peak

Sacramento County's chronic-absence rate sat near 13% before the pandemic, rose to 34.2% in 2021-22, and has fallen each year since: to 27.1% in 2022-23 and to 21.9% in 2024-25. The decline is real, but the county remains well above where it started. The 8.4-point gap between the current rate and the 2019 baseline is the clearest measure of how much ground is left to recover.

How Sacramento compares to other large counties

Among California's 13 counties with at least 100,000 district-operated students, Sacramento ranks sixth by the size of its increase above the pre-COVID baseline.

San Bernardino leads with an increase of 11.2 points, followed by Riverside (10.3), Fresno (9.5), San Joaquin (9.4), and Ventura (8.6). Sacramento's 8.4-point increase places it just behind that group and ahead of San Diego (7.6), Contra Costa (7.5), and Kern (6.9). Los Angeles County, with by far the most students, saw a 6.4-point increase.

Measured by the level of the 2024-25 rate rather than the change, Sacramento ranks fifth among the large counties, behind San Bernardino (24.5%), San Joaquin (23.6%), Riverside (23.2%), and Fresno (22.0%). The picture is consistent: Sacramento is elevated and slow to recover, sitting in the upper-middle of the state's large counties rather than at the extreme.

A wide gap between districts

Sacramento County's rate is not distributed evenly. The county's largest districts span a wide range, and a student's likelihood of being chronically absent depends substantially on which district boundary they live inside.

Twin Rivers Unified^↗, which serves North Highlands, Rio Linda, and Del Paso Heights, carried the highest rate among the county's large districts at 30.4%, with about 24,000 students. Sacramento City Unified^↗ was at 25.2% with about 38,000 students. San Juan Unified^↗ (23.9%, about 41,000 students) and Elk Grove Unified^↗ (19.8%, about 65,000 students) sat nearer the state average. Folsom-Cordova^↗ (12.1%, about 22,000 students) operated in a different attendance reality entirely.

The gap between Twin Rivers at 30.4% and Folsom-Cordova at 12.1% is about 18 points, within a single county. Smaller districts in north Sacramento show similar pressure: Robla Elementary^↗, a roughly 2,000-student district, was at 23.8%.

The north Sacramento concentration

The higher rates cluster in the communities north of downtown Sacramento. Twin Rivers and Robla both serve areas with some of the lowest median incomes in the Sacramento metropolitan area, higher rates of housing instability, and limited transit connections to the jobs that have concentrated in the Roseville and Folsom corridor to the northeast.

The contrast with Folsom-Cordova, with its higher incomes, newer housing stock, and stronger transportation infrastructure, illustrates how geography and socioeconomic conditions shape attendance outcomes more than any single school policy.

Every district is still above 2019

The county-wide gap reflects broad-based change, not a single outlier. Each of the county's large districts is above its own pre-COVID rate. Twin Rivers rose from 17.2% in 2019 to 30.4%. Sacramento City rose from 17.2% to 25.2%. San Juan rose from 14.8% to 23.9%. Elk Grove rose from 10.4% to 19.8%. Even Folsom-Cordova, the lowest, rose from 9.3% to 12.1%.

That pattern matters for where recovery has to happen. Bringing the county back toward its pre-COVID rate will require progress across districts, not improvement in one place alone. The districts serving north Sacramento have the most ground to make up, but the elevated rates reach into suburban and higher-income communities as well.

Data source

Analysis based on chronic absenteeism data from the California Department of Education DataQuest, school years 2016-17 through 2024-25 (2019-20 omitted; statewide reporting was suspended during the pandemic). County-level and district-level data. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of enrolled school days.

County and district rates in this article are reported on a district-operated basis. They exclude authorized independent-study and online charter schools, which California reports under the same county or district code and which carry disproportionately high chronic-absence rates under seat-time rules. Excluding them reflects the brick-and-mortar schools most students attend; blending them in raises the published figures by several points.

# See: content/ca/2026-06-22-ca-sacramento-crisis-analysis.R

California's 1.14 Million Missing Students: Recovery Stalls at Nearly Double Pre-COVID

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

California's attendance recovery has slowed to a crawl. The state cut chronic absenteeism from 30.0% in 2021-22 to 24.9% in 2022-23 and 20.4% in 2023-24. Then the latest year delivered only one more point of improvement.

The state's chronic absenteeism rate -- the share of students missing more than 10% of school days -- fell to 19.4% in 2024-25. That is meaningfully better than the 30% peak of 2021-22, when nearly 1.8 million students were chronically absent. But the pace of improvement has collapsed. After dropping 5.1 percentage points in 2022-23 and 4.5 points in 2023-24, the rate fell just 1.0 point last year.

At that latest pace, California would need about eight more years to return to its pre-pandemic baseline of 12.1% -- and that assumes the recovery does not flatten further.

The numbers behind the plateau

Three figures define where California stands.

The first: 1,143,668 students were chronically absent in 2024-25. That is 387,718 more than the 755,950 who were chronically absent in 2018-19, a 51% increase in the population of students who routinely miss school.

The second: the state has recovered 59.2% of the COVID-era increase. That sounds respectable until you consider the trajectory. The first year of recovery clawed back 28.5% of the gap. The second year brought the cumulative total to 53.6%. The third year added just 5.6 percentage points of progress.

The third: year-over-year improvement went from -5.1 points to -4.5 points to -1.0 point. The improvement is not just slowing -- it is approaching zero.

Why California's crisis hits the budget

California is one of just six states that funds schools based on Average Daily Attendance rather than enrollment. Every absence directly reduces a school's revenue. A student who misses 20 days in a 180-day school year costs their school roughly 11% of the per-pupil funding attached to that seat.

With 1.14 million students chronically absent, the aggregate fiscal exposure runs into the billions. The Legislative Analyst's Office has estimated that chronic absenteeism costs California schools approximately $2.7 billion annually in lost ADA funding. Among districts with at least 20,000 eligible students, Twin Rivers^↗ at 49.7% and Hesperia^↗ at 34.1% face some of the steepest attendance-linked pressure.

The 2030 goal looks unreachable

California committed to cutting chronic absenteeism 50% by 2030, from the 30% COVID peak to 15%. At 19.4%, the state has covered most of that distance in three years. But reaching 15% requires another 4.4 percentage points of improvement, and the most recent year delivered just 1.0.

As suggestive context, the state's $4.1 billion community schools investment, reaching roughly a quarter of public schools, was designed in part to address attendance barriers. A new Attendance Recovery program under SB 153 allows schools to recover up to 10 days of ADA funding per chronically absent student starting in 2025-26 -- a financial incentive for intervention. But only 14 districts statewide have begun billing Medi-Cal for student behavioral health services despite $4 billion in available funding. That is context for implementation capacity, not direct evidence about why the absenteeism rate changed.

What the count reveals

Even as the rate improves, the raw number of chronically absent students tells a different story. In 2017-18, 702,531 students were chronically absent. By 2024-25, that number had grown to 1,143,668 -- an increase of 63% that reflects both the rate increase and enrollment fluctuations.

The count peaked at nearly 1.8 million in 2021-22 and has fallen by 656,067 since. But in absolute terms, California has 441,137 more chronically absent students than it did in 2017-18. The count is declining, but from a level so elevated that even meaningful percentage improvements leave a massive number of students disengaged.

What the plateau shows

The data can show the stall, but not the reason for it. California moved quickly from the 2021-22 peak to a lower chronic absenteeism rate, then slowed sharply before reaching either the 15% policy goal or the 12.1% pre-pandemic baseline.

California's ADA funding structure means the state has a stronger financial incentive than most to solve this problem. But the latest one-point improvement makes the next phase look slower than the first. The 1.14 million students still chronically absent in 2025 are the measure of what remains.

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