Gateway City Students Miss School at Triple the Rate of Suburban Peers

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Massachusetts Chronic Absenteeism.

In Dover-Sherborn^↗, a wealthy suburban district 20 miles southwest of Boston, 5.3% of students are chronically absent. In Boston^↗ itself, 33.0% are. Six times the rate. Same state, same funding formula, same definition of chronic absence.

That contrast anchors a geographic divide in Massachusetts school attendance so wide that it splits the state into two separate educational realities. The median chronic absenteeism rate among the nine largest Gateway Cities is 26.9%. The median among 10 affluent suburban districts is 8.6%. The gap: 18.3 percentage points, wider than it was before the pandemic.

Inside the gap

Boston^↗ (33.0%) and Springfield^↗ (32.8%) anchor the top of the Gateway City distribution, where roughly one in three students misses 10% or more of school days. Lynn^↗ (30.8%) sits just behind them. Lowell^↗ (21.4%), the lowest-rate Gateway City, still runs 2.6 points above the 18.8% state average.

At the suburban end: Sudbury^↗ at 6.0%, Needham^↗ at 6.7%, Weston^↗ and Wayland^↗ both at 7.8%. Newton^↗, at 11.3%, is the only suburban district in this comparison that exceeds 10%.

The 3.1-to-1 ratio between Gateway and suburban medians is not merely a function of income. It reflects compounding structural differences: housing stability, transportation access, health care, and the condition of school buildings themselves. A 2025 MassINC and Worcester Regional Research Bureau report found that Boston and Gateway City schools make up 32% of the state's school buildings but received less than 19% of state construction grants from 2015 to 2024. An estimated 276 high-need school buildings exist statewide. Roughly 60% are in Boston or Gateway Cities. At current funding rates, addressing all of them would take nearly 50 years.

Students notice when their building is crumbling. Whether that translates directly into absence is debated, but the MassINC report found that 22% of Black and Hispanic students attend schools rated in the worst two condition categories, compared to 13% of white students.

The gap before, during, and after COVID

The Gateway-suburban divide predates the pandemic. In 2019, the median gap was 16.1 percentage points. Gateway Cities clustered around 21.2%; suburban districts around 5.1%.

COVID detonated both sides of the distribution, but not equally. By 2022, Gateway Cities hit a median of 42.8%. Suburban districts reached 11.2%. The gap ballooned to 31.6 points, nearly doubling. Fall River^↗ (48.4%), New Bedford^↗ (47.9%), and Springfield (46.5%) all saw nearly half their students chronically absent.

Three years later, both groups have recovered substantially. The gap has narrowed to 18.3 points. But that is still 2.2 points wider than the pre-COVID baseline of 16.1.

The shape of the recovery is telling. Suburban districts climbed from a median of 5.1% in 2019 to 11.2% in 2022 and have come back to 8.6%, erasing about 42% of the spike. Gateway Cities rose from 21.2% to 42.8% and have returned to 26.9%, erasing roughly 74% of the spike in absolute terms. In raw percentage-point terms, however, Gateway Cities remain 5.7 points above their 2019 baseline. Suburban districts remain 3.5 points above theirs. The Gateway excess is larger in absolute terms, and that gap accrues year after year: every year a Gateway student misses 30+ days is a year their suburban peer does not.

Who has recovered, who has not

Only two districts across both groups have returned to their pre-COVID chronic absenteeism levels. Lawrence^↗, the sole Gateway City to recover, came in at 23.3% in 2025, down from 23.9% in 2019. Concord-Carlisle^↗, at 10.6%, dropped below its 2019 rate of 11.3%.

Every other district in the comparison is still above its 2019 baseline. The range of excess runs from Dover-Sherborn's modest +0.7 points to Lynn's +12.1 points. Gateway Cities average 6.1 points of unresolved excess. Suburban districts average 2.6.

Lynn's trajectory stands out. Before the pandemic, its 18.7% chronic absence rate placed it in the middle of the Gateway pack. By 2025, it had surged to 30.8%, the third-highest rate among the nine, with 12.1 points of excess. That is the worst recovery performance in either group. Patrick Tutwiler, then Lynn's superintendent and now the state's education secretary, had reduced the district's chronic absenteeism by three percentage points between 2015 and 2020. The pandemic erased all of that progress and then some.

Worcester^↗, at 25.3%, carries 10.0 points of excess over its 2019 rate of 15.3%. It entered the pandemic with the lowest Gateway City rate and exited with a rate higher than five of its peers had in 2019.

Lawrence: receivership as attendance strategy

Lawrence's recovery is the exception that sharpens the rule. Under state receivership since 2012, Lawrence Public Schools has operated with a degree of institutional flexibility unavailable to most districts. Superintendent Ralph Carrero has credited a coalition of more than a dozen social service agencies and nonprofits that meet monthly about every student who is currently homeless and every student newly arrived in the country, according to the Boston Globe.

The data confirm the turnaround's reach into attendance. Lawrence's chronic absence rate fell from 25.2% in 2018 to 19.6% in 2020, rose to 43.5% during the 2022 peak, and has come back all the way to 23.3%. That full-cycle recovery is something no other Gateway City and only one suburban district (Concord-Carlisle) has matched.

Whether Lawrence's model is replicable without the legal authority of receivership is an open question. The receivership framework gives the superintendent control over staffing, scheduling, and vendor contracts that union agreements typically constrain. Holyoke, the other major Gateway City under receivership, exited state oversight in June 2025. Its attendance outcomes will offer a natural experiment in whether receivership gains persist after the state leaves.

What drives the divide

Three structural forces make Gateway City absence patterns qualitatively different from suburban ones.

State Education Secretary Tutwiler has described chronic absenteeism as "a manifestation of an unmet need, whether it's food security, housing stability" or health care access. Gateway Cities are home to 30% of all Massachusetts residents living below the poverty line despite accounting for just 15% of the state's population, according to MassINC. Unstable housing makes consistent school attendance logistically difficult. A family that moves mid-year faces enrollment paperwork, new bus routes, and the inertia of starting over.

Transportation compounds the problem. Suburban families overwhelmingly drive their children to school or live on reliable bus routes. Gateway City families are more likely to depend on public transit, walking, or informal arrangements. When those systems break down, a child misses school.

Schools themselves have tried to intervene through the courts. From fiscal 2022 through 2025, Massachusetts schools filed 5,400 Children Requiring Assistance petitions in truancy cases, with a 13% increase in the number of districts using the process. Latino youth are 3.5 times more likely than white youth to have a CRA petition filed against them. The question of whether court involvement improves attendance or criminalizes poverty remains contested.

The funding formula does not see this

Massachusetts uses Chapter 70 enrollment-based funding, not average daily attendance. A student who misses 30 days generates the same state aid as one who misses none. This insulates districts from the direct revenue consequences of chronic absence, but it also means the state's primary funding lever provides no financial signal that attendance is deteriorating.

The $4 million the state allocated in 2024 to combat absenteeism amounts to roughly $4.40 per Massachusetts student. By comparison, each chronically absent student represents hundreds of hours of lost instructional time, and the intervention programs designed to reach them, including re-engagement teams, home visits, and wraparound services, run far more per student than any statewide grant can cover.

For Gateway Cities, the funding gap extends to the buildings themselves. The MassINC report found that Gateway City schools experienced average MSBA reimbursement reductions of 19 percentage points compared to 12 for suburban districts. Non-reimbursable costs like land acquisition and site preparation are structurally higher in urban settings, which means Gateway Cities effectively pay more per dollar of state aid received.

Three signals to track

The trajectory over the next two years will determine whether the Gateway-suburban gap stabilizes at its current width or continues to compress. Three data points matter.

First, Lawrence. If its rate holds below 24% through 2026 and 2027, it will validate the coalition model as a durable attendance strategy, not just a post-pandemic bounce. Second, Lynn. At +12.1 points of excess, it is the furthest from recovery among the nine Gateway Cities. Whether that gap begins to close or hardens into a structural feature will signal something about the stickiness of pandemic-era attendance habits. Third, the suburban ceiling. Wayland (+5.3 points of excess) and Lexington (+5.2 points) have not recovered either. If affluent districts with abundant resources cannot return to pre-COVID attendance norms, that suggests something has changed about American school attendance that has nothing to do with poverty.

The state's 18.8% chronic absenteeism rate is a single number. It averages together Sudbury^↗ and Springfield^↗, Dover-Sherborn and Brockton^↗. The average obscures the fact that Massachusetts is running two attendance systems: one where chronic absence is a manageable problem and one where it has become the default experience for more than a quarter of all students.

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

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