ATLANTA — When COVID-19 struck, schools closed, students “attended” from home, and too many got out of the habit of going to school when the doors reopened. In 2022, nearly a quarter of Georgia’s students had absenteeism rates high enough to be considered “chronic” — nearly double the rate before the pandemic. But new data show that the state is gradually recovering. More students are still missing school than before COVID-19, but the rate has been steadily falling, dropping to 17.7% during the 2025-26 school year. That is nearly 2 percentage points lower than the prior year, which in turn was nearly 2 points lower than in 2023-24, the state data show. The rate remains more than 5 percentage points above the rates in the two years before the pandemic, but observers find Georgia’s trajectory to be promising, especially when many other states have found their absenteeism problems to be more stubborn. The Georgia Department of Education released the new rates last week, well ahead of most other states, noted Nat Malkus, with the American Enterprise Institute. “Perhaps even more impressively,” he wrote in an analysis published Thursday, “Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate is declining steadily, bucking the national trend.” During the 2024-25 school year, Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate was 19.5%, beating the estimated national average by more than 2 percentage points, according to the group FutureEd, whose numbers had Georgia among the third of the states with the lowest…
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