42 Massachusetts Districts Beat Chronic Absenteeism Back to Pre-COVID. Voc-Tech Schools Led the Way.

Thu, 07 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Massachusetts Chronic Absenteeism.

In Clinton, a small district west of Worcester, 8.7% of students are chronically absent. Before the pandemic, it was 16.1%. The district didn't just recover from COVID's attendance shock. It halved its problem.

Clinton is one of 42 Massachusetts districts, out of 393 with comparable data, that have brought chronic absenteeism back to or below where it stood before the pandemic. That is 10.7% of districts. The other 351 are still carrying excess absence that arrived during COVID and has not left.

The state itself has made real progress: chronic absenteeism fell from a peak of 27.7% in 2021-22 to 18.8% in 2024-25, recovering about 60% of the ground lost. But the statewide average masks a lopsided distribution. The typical district sits five percentage points above its pre-COVID rate. For most communities, the pandemic attendance crisis did not end. It became the baseline.

A recovery that barely started

The distribution of district-level change since 2019 is stark. Of 393 districts, 159 are zero to five points worse than they were before COVID. Another 120 are five to 10 points worse. Seventy-two districts carry more than 10 points of excess chronic absence, a category that includes cities like Holyoke (+16.7 points), Chelsea (+16.4), and Revere (+15.3).

Only 42 districts sit at or below their 2019 rate. Of those, 38 are actually better than they were before the pandemic, not just back to baseline. Four recovered to exactly their old level.

The year-by-year trajectory offers little comfort. In 2020, before the full COVID surge, 37.3% of districts were at or below their pre-COVID rate. By the 2022 peak, that number cratered to 1.5%. Three years of recovery have only lifted it to 10.7%.

"This level of absenteeism is something we've never seen before," former Commissioner Jeff Riley told WBUR. "The numbers are staggering across this country."

That was in October 2023. Two years later, the stagger has become a limp: the rate keeps improving, but the pace of improvement is collapsing. Year-over-year gains shrank from 5.5 points in 2023 to 2.5 in 2024 to 0.9 in 2025. At the current trajectory, the state would need roughly two decades to return to its pre-pandemic rate, as the Boston Globe reported.

The Gateway City divide

Massachusetts designates 26 mid-sized former industrial cities as Gateway Cities, places like Springfield, Worcester, Brockton, and Lynn, where income and education levels trail the state average. These are the districts where chronic absenteeism was already elevated before COVID, where the pandemic spike was steepest, and where recovery has been weakest.

Two of 26 Gateway Cities have recovered: Salem and Lawrence.

Salem cut its rate from 25.1% to 19.2%, a 5.9-point improvement that places it among the strongest recoveries in the state. Lawrence, the only Gateway City under state receivership, went from 23.9% to 23.3%, barely crossing the line. Superintendent Ralph Carrero has credited a coalition of social service agencies that convenes monthly meetings about every homeless and new immigrant student. Lawrence also brought absenteeism down by more than three points from March 2024 to March 2025, making it one of just three large districts showing significant recent progress.

The other 24 Gateway Cities are all worse than before COVID, most of them substantially. Holyoke posted the steepest deterioration of any Gateway City, going from 25.7% to 42.4%, an increase of 16.7 points that means its chronic absence rate grew by nearly two thirds. Chelsea is close behind, jumping from 19.6% to 36.0%. Lynn went from 18.7% to 30.8%, a 12.1-point increase that lands it among the largest absolute jumps in the cohort. Boston, the state's largest district, carries 7.8 points of excess absence, with one in three students chronically absent.

Nine of the state's 10 largest districts remain above their pre-COVID rate, most by five points or more. This is not a problem that a statewide average can capture. The recovery, such as it exists, is happening in small and suburban communities. The large urban districts where most students of color and most low-income students attend school have barely moved.

The vocational exception

One category of district has defied the pattern. Of 28 vocational-technical districts with pre-COVID and current data, eight (28.6%) have recovered, nearly three times the statewide rate of 10.7%.

Franklin County Regional Vocational Technical made the most progress of any district in the state, cutting its rate from 25.9% to 13.3%, a 12.6-point improvement. Northampton-Smith Vocational Agricultural dropped 4.8 points below its pre-COVID level. Greater Lowell Regional Vocational Technical, Bristol-Plymouth, and Blue Hills all recovered as well.

The pattern is suggestive. Vocational programs offer something that a standard academic track does not: a direct, visible connection between showing up and acquiring a marketable skill. Students in carpentry, health care, or automotive programs can see the cost of a missed day in a way that is harder to perceive in an Algebra II class. The Healey-Driscoll administration has separately recognized voc-tech performance, investing $13 million in the BRYT program and launching the "Your Presence Is Powerful" campaign. But the voc-tech edge predates those initiatives and likely reflects something structural about the model itself.

Who the pandemic locked out, and who it let back in

The scatter plot of pre-COVID rate against subsequent change reveals something counterintuitive. Districts that had very low chronic absence before COVID, under 5%, have the worst recovery rate: only 3.8% of them are back to baseline. Districts that had high rates, above 20%, actually recovered at a 25% clip.

The explanation is mechanical: a district that started at 3% chronic absence and spiked to 15% during COVID has a much wider gap to close. But it also suggests something behavioral. Families in communities where absenteeism was essentially zero, where the norm was perfect attendance, appear to have permanently recalibrated after the pandemic. The old social contract, that school attendance is non-negotiable, did not fully reassemble.

The median district is 5.0 percentage points above its pre-COVID rate. The mean is 5.6 points. That is not a tail-end problem. That is the center of the distribution.

Where the recovery is

Measuring recovery as a share of the COVID shock, 41 districts have fully recovered. Another 72 have clawed back 75-99% of the ground they lost. The largest group, 149 districts, has recovered 50-74% of its spike. That sounds like progress, but it means most districts are still carrying at least a quarter of their pandemic-era excess. And 25 districts, including Martha's Vineyard Charter, North Brookfield, and Greater Commonwealth Virtual, are actually worse in 2025 than they were at the 2022 peak.

Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler has described the problem in structural terms. "Absenteeism is really a manifestation of an unmet need," he said at the campaign launch. That framing acknowledges what the data makes obvious: this is not primarily a problem of willpower or awareness. Massachusetts invested $13 million in the BRYT program for students with mental health challenges. It dedicated federal funds to award districts $10,000 each to address chronic absenteeism. It handed out golden basketballs signed by the Boston Celtics to 10 schools that cut their rates by an average of 19 points.

Those 10 schools had extraordinary results. The other 1,800 schools in the state are the ones that define the pattern.

What no campaign reaches

Massachusetts does not fund schools based on daily attendance, as many states do. Chapter 70 aid flows based on enrollment headcounts, not seat-time. That removes the most direct fiscal incentive for districts to treat attendance as an emergency. A student who misses 30 days still generates the same per-pupil allocation as one who misses none.

That structural gap may partly explain why the state's investments, real though they are, have not bent the curve faster. The Healey-Driscoll administration has launched awareness campaigns, celebrated bright spots, and funded mental health supports. Meanwhile, districts are increasingly turning to the courts: schools filed 5,400 Children Requiring Assistance petitions from fiscal 2022 through 2025, with a 13% increase in the number of districts using the process.

The question that the next year of data will answer is whether 10.7% is a floor or a waypoint. The national picture, analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute, suggests absenteeism may stabilize around 20% nationally, roughly 50% above pre-pandemic levels. Massachusetts is slightly ahead of that pace but decelerating fast. Each of the 351 non-recovered districts represents a community where every classroom has, on average, two or three more empty seats on any given day than it did in 2019. The pandemic closed schools for months. It may have loosened the habit of attendance for years.

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