Colorado schools made minimal progress improving their student attendance rates and reducing their absenteeism last year, new state data shows.

After trending in the wrong direction last year, statewide attendance rates improved during the 2025-26 school year while chronic absenteeism declined, both by rates below 1%, according to data released by Colorado Department of Education on Thursday.

Chronic absenteeism, which is defined as a student missing 10% or more school days in a year, fell from 28.4% of Colorado students to 27.5% in 2025-26. The statewide attendance rate increased from 91.4% to 91.5%.

This marks the lowest statewide chronic absenteeism and ties the highest attendance rate in the past four years but is still short of the rates set in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2024, CDE launched Every School Day Matters, an attendance campaign to decrease the state’s chronic absenteeism to at least half the state’s 35.5% rate set during the pandemic. This goal includes reducing chronic absenteeism to 17.8% by the 2026-27 school year.

This campaign has included state investments in sharing family-engagement resources, professional learning opportunities and partnering school districts sharing effective strategies, Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said during a media briefing.

“We’ve made progress, but — as this chart shows — we still have significant work ahead of us,” she said, referring to the campaign’s ultimate goal.

As to what might be driving or stalling progress, Córdova noted how chronic absenteeism in earlier grades often stems from a lack of parent engagement while older grades are more often tied to student challenges and that both require different types of intervention.

CDE’s director of dropout prevention and student re-engagement, Johann Liljengren, added that barriers affecting different districts, like insufficient transportation staff and family health resources, were exacerbated following the pandemic.

“We all were impacted by increases in absences, but they seem to be playing out differently in different spaces,” he said.

Specific areas of improvement include chronic absenteeism declining in every grade level and across nearly every student group. The only exceptions were students experiencing homelessness, American Indian and Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students.

Also noted was 18 districts cutting their chronic absenteeism in half since the 2021-22 school year and 43 reporting lower rates than the 2018-19 year.

To date, over 110 schools in 83 districts have joined the Every School Day Matters campaign and are receiving ongoing support, resources and tools focused on attendance. Cordova said they hope the number of participating school districts will grow, as they plan to continue analyzing their data and promoting successful practices.

“We’re encouraged by the progress that we’re seeing, but we know that we can do more and need to do more,” she said.