Attendance

Overview

Daily attendance and engagement in learning is essential to student success at all grade levels. Colorado law directly connected to attendance focuses on compulsory school attendance, truancy and school finance. Important student attendance definition of rates and terms include:

Attendance Rate: The Total Days Attended divided by the Total Possible Attendance Days for each student.
Truancy Rate: Truancy is defined as an unexcused absence. The rate is calculated by dividing the reported Total Student Days Unexcused Absences by the Total Student Days Possible.
Habitually Truant (Student Count): A student is counted as habitually truant if the student has 4 unexcused absences in one month and/or 10 unexcused absences in one school year.
Chronically Absent Rate: A student absent 10 percent or more of the days enrolled during the school year is chronically absent. All absences are included - unexcused and excused. The rate is the percentage of students enrolled who are chronically absent.

Policy: State policy related to attendance

Data: Overview of Colorado

Best practices: For improved attendance

Colorado Attendance Data by State

2023-2024 Attendance Rate, Truancy Rate and Chronic Absenteeism by State, Grade, IPST (XLSX)

Colorado Attendance Data by Local Education Agency (LEA)

Colorado Attendance Data by School

Notes

Chronic Absenteeism Count/Rates and Habitually Truant Counts are suppressed starting in the 2023-2024 school year.
Distinct counts were taken for each level of data, i.e. distinct counts for the state, district and school level. Since distinct counts were taken, there is not necessarily a 1-1 ratio of summing up schools to equal a district count, or summing up district counts to equate state level.
Total Days Attended + Total Days Excused + Total Days Unexcused = Total Days Possible for each student record. There is a 0.5 tolerance for this calculation.
Chronic Absenteeism Rate adjusted from school year 2022-2023, forward, to not include PK students in denominator.
Total Number of Chronic Absenteeism students and Total Number of Habitually Truant (for each category) adjusted from school year 2022-2023, forward, to not include duplicate counts. For example, not count one student twice or more for meeting multiple criteria.
School level data was collected up until the 2018-2019 school year with student level data collection beginning in 2019-2020.

For additional information, email: Peter Hoffman

For data requests, please see CDE’s Data Request page

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