118 Virginia Divisions Had Higher Chronic Absence in 2022-23 Than in 2019-20

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction, July 28, 2026: An earlier version of this article listed Radford City among the divisions whose chronic absenteeism improved. Radford's published rate fell because a large, low-absence virtual school joined the division's roster in the final year of the comparison, while the number of chronically absent students in the division rose and every one of its physical schools got worse. That passage has been rewritten, and the article now discloses the enrollment-composition effects behind two of the divisions at or below baseline.

Correction: This prepublication draft described the first available year as a pre-COVID baseline, overstated the number of divisions at period highs, and misstated several large-division trends. The article now labels the first year as its reporting baseline; the corrected period-high count is 47, and all endpoint comparisons have been recomputed.

Virginia's school-data package supports four chronic-absenteeism reporting years, from 2019-20 through 2022-23. Among the 131 divisions with complete data at both endpoints, only 13 had a 2022-23 rate at or below their 2019-20 rate.

The other 118 divisions were above the baseline. Put another way, 9.9% had returned to or improved on that first available rate.

The student distribution makes the contrast sharper. The 13 divisions at or below baseline enrolled 36,143 students in 2022-23, just 2.9% of the enrollment represented in the endpoint comparison.

Two of those 13 divisions, Radford City and Giles County, sit in that group partly because their enrollment bases grew by 125% and 45% between the two endpoints as schools were added to their rosters. On stable enrollment bases the count at or below baseline would be 11.

What “recovery” can and cannot mean here

This analysis uses “at or below baseline” as a narrow endpoint test. It does not call 2019-20 a clean pre-pandemic benchmark because the package contains no earlier chronic-absenteeism year. It also does not make claims about years after 2022-23, which fall outside the package's supported absence window.

Among the 13 divisions at or below baseline:

Lee County^↗ moved from 19.5% to 11.4%, an 8.1-point reduction.
Wise County^↗ moved from 13.3% to 9.2%, a 4.0-point reduction.
Louisa County^↗ moved from 9.1% to 7.7%, a 1.4-point reduction.

Radford City is not on that list, and the reason is worth stating plainly. Its published rate did fall, from 12.1% in 2019-20 to 7.8% in 2022-23. Over the same period the number of chronically absent students in the division rose from 199 to 288. What moved was the denominator. Radford City Virtual, a school with 2,055 students and a chronic-absenteeism rate of 0.3%, appeared on the division's roster for the first time in 2022-23 and accounted for more than half of the division's 3,690 students that year.

Set the virtual school aside and the direction reverses. Radford's four physical schools enrolled 1,635 students in 2022-23, of whom 281 were chronically absent, a rate of 17.2%. That is roughly five points above the division's own 2019-20 baseline rather than four points below it, and each of the four schools ended the window worse than it started: Belle Heth Elementary went from 7.0% to 13.8%, John N. Dalton Intermediate from 14.1% to 22.9%, McHarg Elementary from 10.2% to 19.4%, and Radford High from 18.3% to 20.4%.

The endpoint test does not explain those changes. It identifies where the reported rate moved, not why.

The typical division remained well above baseline

The median division's chronic-absenteeism rate increased 7.3 percentage points from 2019-20 to 2022-23. Forty-nine divisions recorded increases from five through 10 points.

Among the 118 divisions above baseline, the average gap was 8.8 points and the median gap was 8.4 points.

The four largest increases were:

Colonial Beach: 7.5% to 28.4%, up 20.9 points.
Manassas Park City^↗: 12.5% to 31.2%, up 18.7 points.
Fluvanna County: 17.3% to 35.9%, up 18.6 points.
Rockbridge County: 9.5% to 26.8%, up 17.3 points.

Large divisions carry much of the student impact

Fairfax County^↗, the largest division in the comparison, enrolled 180,130 students in 2022-23. Its chronic-absenteeism rate rose from 9.4% to 16.6%, a 7.2-point increase; 29,893 students were chronically absent in the later year.

Prince William County moved from 13.7% to 19.5%, up 5.7 points, among 91,180 students. Loudoun County moved from 9.5% to 18.6%, up 9.1 points, among 82,083 students.

Fairfax and Loudoun were at their highest rates in the four-year package window in 2022-23. Prince William was not: its rate had been 20.6% in 2021-22.

Across all comparable divisions, 47 of 131 — 35.9% — were at a four-year period high in 2022-23.

The statewide arithmetic

The student-weighted rate across available division rows fell from 19.5% in 2021-22 to 18.6% in 2022-23. That 0.9-point decline is improvement within the package window, but the later rate remained 7.2 points above the 11.4% division-row rate in 2019-20.

One counterfactual puts the endpoint gap in student terms. If every above-baseline division had instead posted its own 2019-20 rate against its 2022-23 enrollment, the chronically absent count would have been about 91,582 lower. This is arithmetic, not an estimate of what any particular intervention could achieve.

Direct evidence: The package records establish the division-level numerators, enrollment denominators, endpoint rates, and four-year period highs used here.

Competing explanation: These records do not distinguish changes in attendance behavior from changes in enrollment composition, reporting, calendars, or other conditions. The analysis therefore does not assign a cause to any division's increase or decrease.

Source note: The analysis uses chronic-absenteeism reports and enrollment records obtained through the Virginia school-data package from the Virginia Department of Education.

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

Lee County - EdTribune VA - Virginia Education Data

118 Virginia Divisions Had Higher Chronic Absence in 2022-23 Than in 2019-20

What “recovery” can and cannot mean here

The typical division remained well above baseline

Large divisions carry much of the student impact

The statewide arithmetic