THOMASVILLE, Ala. — Chronic absenteeism in the Thomasville City Schools District has been cut by 63%, according to system attendance director Kate Huggins.
Absenteeism has dropped by 3,500 over two years, Huggins said at the school board’s Sept. 8 meeting.
“We have pushed really hard the last two years to improve attendance,” said Huggins, who noted the school system had a large amount of chronic truancy issues.
The Numbers
Since the 2023-24 school year:
- Chronic absences fell from 20.1% to 7.5%
- Truancy fell from 27% to 11.6%
- Average absences per student fell from 11.1 to 7.9
- Average unexcused absences per student fell from 5.5 to 2.6
The chronic absenteeism figure is the headline result, and the scale of the change is worth pausing on. A rate of 20.1% means roughly one student in five was chronically absent — generally defined as missing 10% or more of the school year, or about 18 days. Cutting that to 7.5% in two years is a substantial shift in a measure that typically moves slowly.
The unexcused absence figure dropping from 5.5 to 2.6 per student is the more diagnostic number. Total absences include illness, which a district cannot control. Unexcused absences are the category most responsive to intervention, and they fell by more than half.
Why It Compounds
When students miss more than two days a month, they can end up falling a year behind in instruction, especially in the lower grades, Huggins said.
That observation reflects well-established research. Early elementary grades teach foundational skills sequentially — decoding, number sense, fluency — and a student who misses the introduction of a concept does not encounter it again as new material. The gap does not close on its own; it widens as subsequent instruction assumes mastery.
Chronic absenteeism in kindergarten and first grade is among the stronger early predictors of later reading difficulty and eventual dropout.
What Was Recovered
The average Thomasville student now gains about three school days of learning per year, and approximately 22,665 instructional hours were regained across the district in the 2025-26 school year, Huggins reported.
“What we are doing is working,” she said.
Expressing the result in instructional hours rather than percentage points is a useful translation. Twenty-two thousand hours of student time restored to classrooms is the concrete output of the attendance work — time that was previously lost and is now being taught in.
How the Data Was Built
Data on attendance was developed with the help of Terry Norton, a former educator with the Thomasville school system who is working with the Alabama Department of Education.
The involvement of someone with both district history and state-level perspective is a relevant detail. Attendance data is notoriously inconsistent across districts because coding practices for excused, unexcused and truant absences vary. Establishing a reliable baseline is a prerequisite for knowing whether an intervention worked, and districts frequently discover their prior numbers were not measuring what they assumed.
What Typically Drives This Kind of Result
Districts that achieve reductions of this magnitude generally combine several approaches rather than relying on enforcement alone: early identification of students approaching chronic status rather than waiting for truancy thresholds, direct family contact to identify barriers such as transportation, illness patterns or housing instability, and consistent follow-up rather than escalating consequences.
Huggins’s framing — that the district “pushed really hard” over two years — describes sustained attention rather than a single program, which is consistent with what produces durable change in this measure.
Thomasville City Schools serves students in Clarke County. The board also approved a $15.6 million fiscal year 2027 budget at the Sept. 8 meeting.