Two years ago, a majority of students in Kingdom East SD were chronically absent. The 1,247-student district in Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom recorded a 50.6% chronic rate in 2021-22 — 631 students missing at least 10% of school days. By 2023-24, the rate had fallen to 22.5%. That 28.1 percentage-point drop is the largest turnaround of any district in Vermont, and it brought Kingdom East from well above to just below the state average of 24.3%.

The improvement was not isolated. Nearby St. Johnsbury SD, 18 miles south on Route 2, cut its rate from 46.1% to 22.2% over the same period — a 23.9 point drop that landed it essentially tied with Kingdom East. Something happened in the Northeast Kingdom that did not happen the same way elsewhere.

The trajectory

Kingdom East's improvement was front-loaded: a 23.4 point drop in the first year (50.6% to 27.2%), then a 4.7 point drop in the second (27.2% to 22.5%). St. Johnsbury followed a nearly identical pattern: 18.6 points of improvement in year one, 5.3 in year two. Both districts showed the same deceleration that the statewide data reflects — rapid initial recovery, then diminishing returns.

The counts tell the story more concretely. Kingdom East went from 631 chronically absent students in 2022 to 336 in 2023 to 277 in 2024. That is 354 fewer students chronically absent — more than a quarter of the district's entire enrollment — in two years.

The regional pattern

The Northeast Kingdom is Vermont's most sparsely populated region, stretching across three counties — Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia — with a combined population under 65,000. It is geographically isolated, economically challenged, and has historically struggled with health outcomes and educational attainment.

Kingdom East and St. Johnsbury both dropped below the state average. Other NEK districts did not. Orleans Central SU sits at 28.0%, and North Country SU at 31.1%. The regional pattern is improvement everywhere, but the scale varies substantially even across neighboring districts serving similar communities.

Where this ranks statewide

Kingdom East leads all 27 districts with complete three-year data. The top four turnarounds — Kingdom East (28.1 points), White River Valley (25.5), St. Johnsbury (23.9), and Springfield (22.3) — are all in rural Vermont. The pattern suggests that rural districts may have been hit harder by the COVID-era attendance crisis but also recovered faster, possibly because the barriers that kept students out were more situational than structural.

The largest suburban districts, by contrast, started from lower baselines and showed smaller improvements. Champlain Valley dropped 11.4 points to reach 9.9%. Essex Westford dropped 4.2 points (starting from 15.9%). The absolute rates are lower, but the rate of improvement is also lower.

What the data cannot explain

The data shows the what, not the why. Kingdom East's 28-point drop could reflect a single highly effective intervention, a change in district leadership, a community-level recovery from COVID disruption, or simply a return to pre-pandemic norms for a population whose absences were always more temporary than chronic.

What makes the Kingdom East story worth telling is the scale. A 28-point improvement in chronic absenteeism is rare nationally, not just in Vermont. And the regional pattern — two geographically proximate districts showing nearly identical trajectories — suggests something broader than any one superintendent's initiative.

The next data release will show whether Kingdom East can hold its gains. A 28-point improvement sustained below the state average would mean the Northeast Kingdom solved a problem that most of Vermont has not. A rebound would suggest the crisis ran its course on its own. Either way, the two-year trajectory offers evidence that even Vermont's most isolated communities can reverse attendance collapses of the kind that larger, better-resourced districts have struggled with.

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