In this series: Massachusetts Chronic Absenteeism.

Once a month in Lawrence^↗ET, more than a dozen social service agencies crowd around a table to discuss every homeless and newly arrived immigrant student in the district. Housing. Healthcare. Transportation. Food. The meetings are granular. One student at a time.

The result shows up in the attendance data. Lawrence cut its chronic absenteeism rate from a pandemic peak of 43.5% in 2021-22 to 23.3% in 2024-25, a 20.2-point drop that pushed the district 0.6 percentage points below where it stood before COVID. Among Massachusetts' nine largest Gateway Cities, Lawrence is the only one to fully erase the pandemic's attendance damage.

Lynn^↗ET, a city of comparable size 30 miles to the east, went in the opposite direction. Its chronic absenteeism rate sits at 30.8%, a full 12.1 points above its pre-COVID baseline. Boston^↗ET remains 7.8 points elevated. Springfield^↗ET is 9.8 points above. Of the state's 26 designated Gateway Cities, only Lawrence and Salem^↗ET have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Salem's recovery was steeper in percentage-point terms, falling 5.9 points below its 2019 rate, but Lawrence's climb was taller: it had to claw back from the highest peak of any of the nine largest gateways.

A district that was already improving

Lawrence's attendance gains did not begin with the pandemic recovery. The district was on a downward trajectory before COVID hit. Chronic absenteeism fell from 25.2% in 2017-18 to 19.6% in 2019-20, then to 17.2% in 2020-21, a period when most districts saw rates climb. The pandemic then produced a catastrophic reversal: a 26.3-point spike to 43.5% in 2021-22.

What happened next is what separates Lawrence from its peers. The district cut 10.6 points in a single year, then 3.7, then 5.9. The improvement actually accelerated in the most recent year, the opposite of the statewide pattern, where recovery has decelerated from 5.5 points to 0.9.

Superintendent Ralph Carrero, who was confirmed in the role in May 2024 after leading the Lawrence Family Development Charter School, has credited the coalition approach. The district serves roughly 500 students who are currently homeless each year and a large population of recent immigrants. Rather than treating attendance as a school-level problem, the coalition treats it as a community-wide one: the monthly meetings connect individual students to specific services outside the school building.

The receivership backdrop

Lawrence has been under state receivership since 2012, the longest-running takeover in Massachusetts history. The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced in January 2026 that deputy commissioner Lauren Woo would assume receiver duties, signaling that the exit timeline remains uncertain despite more than a decade of state oversight.

The receivership's academic record is mixed. Early years produced significant MCAS gains: 10th-grade math proficiency rose 18 percentage points and English language arts gained 24 points in the first four years. But the graduation rate (71.4%) still lagged the statewide average (87.5%), and earlier research found scant evidence that the turnaround initially affected attendance.

The attendance progress is more recent, and it is worth noting what it does not require: Lawrence's gains came without the court-based interventions that other Massachusetts districts have increasingly turned to. Statewide, schools filed 5,400 Children Requiring Assistance petitions from fiscal 2022 through 2025, with a 13% increase in districts using the process. Lawrence's model relies on wrapping services around families rather than compelling them through the courts.

The peer gap

The contrast between Lawrence and the other large Gateway Cities is not subtle.

Fall River^↗ET and New Bedford^↗ET have recovered most of their COVID-era spike, sitting 2.3 and 3.4 points above their baselines. Lowell^↗ET is 4.3 points elevated. Brockton^↗ET is 5.7 points above.

Then the gap widens. Boston's 33.0% rate means one in three students is chronically absent, 7.8 points above pre-pandemic. Springfield, at 32.8%, is nearly 10 points above its baseline. Worcester^↗ET, which had the lowest pre-COVID rate of the nine (15.3%), has seen the largest relative deterioration: 25.3% in 2024-25, a 10-point increase that more than erased what had been a best-in-class attendance record.

Lynn is the most concerning case. At 30.8%, it is the only one of the nine where the rate actually increased in 2024-25 after three years of post-peak improvement. Its 12.1 points of excess above pre-COVID is the worst among the large gateways.

Inside Lawrence's numbers

Lawrence's overall 23.3% rate still means nearly one in four students misses 10% or more of school days. The aggregate masks real variation. Special education students are chronically absent at 31.1%, roughly unchanged from the 31.9% pre-COVID rate, suggesting the coalition model has been less effective for this group. White students, at 25.9%, remain 2.6 points above the district average.

Black students tell a different story entirely. Their chronic absenteeism rate dropped from 20.7% in 2018-19 to 14.8% in 2024-25, 5.9 points below the pre-COVID level. That is the largest improvement of any subgroup in the district.

Hispanic students, who make up the vast majority of Lawrence's enrollment, track closely with the district average: 23.5% in 2024-25, down from 24.0% pre-COVID and a peak of 43.9%. English learners show a similar pattern, dropping from 23.7% to 23.9%, essentially flat compared to their pre-pandemic rate.

The gap between Lawrence and the state has also narrowed substantially. In 2019, Lawrence's chronic absence rate was 11.0 points above the statewide figure. By 2024-25, that gap had shrunk to 4.5 points, the smallest since at least 2017-18.

What Lawrence cannot answer

One student in four still misses too much school. The district's recovery is real, but so is the ceiling it appears to be approaching. From 2017-18 through 2020-21, Lawrence was driving its rate down toward the mid-teens. COVID interrupted that trajectory and the question is whether the district can resume it, or whether 23% represents a new equilibrium: better than the pandemic, worse than the pre-pandemic path.

The other question is replicability. Lawrence's coalition model depends on a dense network of community organizations in a small city (roughly 89,000 people). Whether Boston (population 675,000) or sprawling Worcester could build equivalent case-by-case coordination is an open question. The Healey administration celebrated the statewide attendance improvement in 2024, but no Lawrence school appeared on the state's "Attendance All-Stars" list of schools with the biggest single-year drops. Lawrence's gains have been steady and incremental, not headline-grabbing in any single year. That may be exactly why they stuck.

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