Virginia's 2022-23 chronic absenteeism file reports 5,429 students identified as homeless who missed at least 10% of the school year. The same file reports 234,822 chronically absent students statewide.

What the file does not report is a homeless-student chronic absenteeism rate. Its published percentage field is blank for every statewide subgroup row.

An earlier version of this article supplied a 60.3% rate by dividing the 5,429 count by 8,998 students in a separate enrollment file. That calculation is not defensible because the two files do not maintain compatible division-level populations.

Six impossible division comparisons

Across the 125 divisions that match between the two files, six have more chronically absent students identified as homeless than the enrollment file lists as homeless students.

Newport News has 404 in the absence file and 293 in the enrollment file. Norfolk has 260 and 179. Richmond has 300 and 217. Portsmouth has 118 and 96. Hopewell has 33 and 12. Martinsville has 10 and 8.

Those contradictions do not prove which file is wrong. They do prove that the files cannot be combined to calculate division rates, and they undermine the same cross-file calculation at the state level.

What each file can establish

Within the enrollment file, 8,998 students identified as homeless represent 0.71% of Virginia's published enrollment total of 1,263,448.

Within the absence file, the 5,429 homeless-student count represents 2.31% of the published statewide chronic-absence count. Those are valid within-file shares because each uses a published total from the same file as its denominator.

The absence file also supports direct count comparisons. Fairfax County^↗ET reports the most chronically absent students identified as homeless, 557. Loudoun County follows with 474, Henrico County^↗ET with 408 and Newport News^↗ET with 404.

Those counts identify where the statewide total is concentrated. They do not establish the probability that a homeless student in one division is chronically absent.

The unanswered question

Virginia's public data establishes that thousands of students identified as homeless were chronically absent. It does not establish what share of the homeless-student population that count represents. Answering that question requires a denominator drawn from the same reporting population and classification window as the absence count.

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