Nine Missouri Districts Where More Students Are Absent Than Present

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction, August 9, 2026: The analysis now uses one published all-students row per stable district ID for each district and year. The list and table below reflect that corrected universe.

Nine of Missouri's 560 districts had chronic absenteeism at or above 50% in 2024-25. In those districts, at least half of the students met the state's chronic-absence threshold.

Hogan Preparatory Academy led the list at 69.9%. KIPP: Endeavor Academy was at 60.5%, The Biome at 59.1%, Riverview Gardens at 57.1%, St. Louis City^↗ at 53.7%, Kansas City^↗ at 51.1%, Missouri Schools for the Severely Disabled at 51.0%, Lee A. Tolbert Community Academy at 50.7%, and Normandy Schools Collaborative^↗ at 50.4%.

The latest high-rate list

The 50% line is a screening threshold, not an explanation. The attendance records show the size of the problem in each district; they do not identify one cause shared by all nine.

Hogan's trajectory shows how quickly a district can move across the line. Its chronic-absence rate was 14.0% in 2014-15 and 33.1% in 2019-20. It fell to 22.6% in 2020-21, then rose to 56.1% in 2021-22, 67.0% in 2022-23, and 73.4% in 2023-24 before easing to 69.9% in 2024-25.

The Biome followed a different path. Its rate was 100.0% at the start of the available panel, fell to 7.9% in 2018-19, and reached 59.1% in 2024-25. The series records the changes; it does not establish why they occurred.

Riverview Gardens was already at 22.9% in 2014-15. Its rate rose to 65.3% in 2021-22 and stood at 57.1% in 2024-25, still above the screening line after the later decline.

Where the 50% line sits

The 560 districts in the 2024-25 file fall into six rate tiers:

Tier	Number of districts
0-10%	115
10-20%	290
20-30%	106
30-40%	19
40-50%	21
50%+	9

The highest-rate list is not a ranking of school quality or a diagnosis of any community. It is a snapshot of published chronic-absence rates, with the latest values sitting on top of a longer and uneven record.

Missouri Schools for the Severely Disabled is one example of that variation. Its published rate ranged from 39.1% to 80.5% across the available panel and was 51.0% in 2024-25. That spread is a reason to read the current value alongside the history rather than treat the threshold as a complete explanation.

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

St. Louis City and Kansas City Both Remained Above 50% Chronic Absence

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier draft said 2024-25 was the first year both districts crossed 50%, omitted the 2023-24 record, called Kansas City's high-school rate the state's highest, and attached unsupported explanations and fiscal consequences to the attendance pattern. The complete package record shows both districts were already above 50% in 2021-22, Kansas City fell below the line the next year, and both were above it again in 2023-24 and 2024-25. This version corrects that history, limits the rankings to the complete district universe, and removes claims the attendance data cannot establish.

St. Louis City^↗ and Kansas City^↗ each reported chronic-absence rates above 50% for a second consecutive reporting year in 2024-25. St. Louis City's rate was 53.7%; Kansas City's was 51.1%.

Under the state's proportional-attendance definition, that means more than half of the students in each district met the chronic-absence measure. The margin above the arithmetic halfway point was 3.7 percentage points in St. Louis City and 1.1 points in Kansas City.

The complete threshold history

The two districts had both been above 50% before. Each crossed the line in 2021-22: St. Louis City rose from 49.7% the prior year to 53.7%, while Kansas City moved from 37.5% to 50.4%.

Their paths then separated. St. Louis City stayed above 50% in every reporting year through 2024-25. Kansas City fell to 46.3% in 2022-23, moved to 54.9% in 2023-24 and finished at 51.1% in 2024-25. Across the full available panel, both districts were above half in three reporting years: 2021-22, 2023-24 and 2024-25.

The recent endpoints do not describe steady movement. St. Louis City was at the same 53.7% rate in 2021-22 and 2024-25, but its intervening values produced a 3.6-point high-low range and one direction reversal. Kansas City's endpoint rose 0.7 points across those years, while its path covered an 8.6-point range and reversed direction twice.

High-school rates were higher

The 2024-25 grade-band records show a larger chronic-absence rate among high-school students in both districts. Kansas City reported 68.6% for high school and 43.8% for K-8, a 24.8-point gap. St. Louis City reported 63.5% for high school and 50.0% for K-8, a 13.5-point gap.

These are separately published grade-band rates, not parts of one whole. They show where each district's reported attendance problem was most concentrated without identifying why the difference exists.

Fifth and sixth among 560 districts

In the complete set of 560 Missouri district records for 2024-25, St. Louis City had the fifth-highest overall chronic-absence rate and Kansas City had the sixth-highest. Nine districts were at or above 50%.

The ranking uses the all-students district rate and a tie-aware ordering. It does not classify districts by governance type or attempt to label a subset as “traditional,” distinctions the attendance records do not provide.

A longer endpoint comparison

St. Louis City's rate was 16.5% in 2014-15, 37.2 points below its 2024-25 value. Kansas City's rate was 21.9%, 29.2 points below its latest value.

Those endpoint differences cross a period with unusually large adjacent changes in the district records around 2020-21 and 2021-22. The analysis keeps the full history and flags those jumps rather than drawing a normal continuous trend through them. The endpoint comparison establishes that the latest rates were higher than a decade earlier; it does not establish a cause for the increase.

Unresourced: The attendance records do not identify why either district's rate was above half. Explanations involving transportation, housing, health, district operations or family circumstances require evidence beyond these rates. The 50% line is an arithmetic majority cutoff, not a policy threshold with an automatic operational consequence.

The verified finding is narrower: both urban districts remained above half for a second consecutive reporting year, and the grade-band records show that the high-school rates were higher still.