Essex Westford SD - EdTribune VT - Vermont Education Data

Vermont's 40-Point Attendance Gap: Same Size, Opposite Outcomes

Thu, 28 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (May 29, 2026): An earlier version stated that the chronic absenteeism range among mid-sized districts spanned "from Harwood's 17.0%." The lowest rate in that group belongs to Mt Abraham at about 16%. The passage has been corrected.

Harwood Unified Union Supervisory District^↗ enrolls 1,794 students. Rutland City SD^↗ enrolls 1,931. They are nearly identical in size, both supervisory districts in rural Vermont, both serving communities of similar scale. In 2023-24, Harwood's chronic absenteeism rate was 17.0%. Rutland City's was 56.7%. The gap between them is 39.7 percentage points.

That is not a rounding error or a temporary fluctuation. It is a structural divide that persists across years and resists simple explanation.

The comparison

At Harwood, 305 of 1,794 students missed at least 10% of school. At Rutland City, 1,095 of 1,931 did. Roughly the same number of families, the same state education system, the same pandemic. The outcomes could not be more different.

Add a third point of comparison: Addison Central SD^↗, 30 miles southwest of Harwood and geographically closer to Rutland. Addison Central enrolls 1,757 students and posts a 19.0% chronic rate. Three districts, all between 1,700 and 1,950 students, with rates of 17.0%, 19.0%, and 56.7%.

The trajectories deepen the comparison. All three spiked in 2021-22: Harwood to 26.2%, Addison Central to an unknown figure (no reliable 2022 data), and Rutland City to 66.6%. But the recovery paths diverged. Harwood dropped 9.2 points in two years. Rutland City dropped 9.9 points, slightly more. Yet the starting points were so far apart that Rutland's faster improvement did not close the gap.

Size is not the explanation

Vermont's chronic absenteeism data shows almost no correlation between district size and chronic rate. The largest districts have some of the lowest rates (Champlain Valley^↗ at 9.9%, Essex Westford^↗ at 11.7%) and the highest rates belong to mid-sized districts. The problem is not scale. Districts with 770 students (Winooski^↗, 52.5%) and districts with 3,166 students (Southwest Vermont^↗, 37.0%) struggle equally.

Among mid-sized districts, those with 1,000 to 2,500 students, the range runs from about 16% (Mt Abraham, the lowest) up to Rutland City's 56.7%. Harwood sits near the bottom of that range at 17.0%. No variable visible in the data fully accounts for the spread.

What the gap reflects

The most likely drivers are the ones the state's chronic absenteeism data does not measure directly: poverty rates, housing instability, access to healthcare, substance use in the community, and the availability of adults who can ensure a child gets to school each morning.

Rutland has struggled with opioid addiction at rates that exceed most of Vermont. The region's economy has contracted as marble quarries and rail operations declined. Housing costs have risen while wages have not kept pace. These are conditions that make school attendance harder, not because families do not value education, but because the logistics of daily life are more precarious.

Harwood, by contrast, sits in the Mad River Valley, a tourist economy with ski resorts, small farms, and a population that skews toward outdoor recreation. The community is not wealthy in Vermont terms, but it has different economic dynamics. More two-parent households. More access to transportation. Different public health challenges.

Why it matters

A 40-point gap between equally-sized districts in a state of 80,000 students undercuts any statewide intervention strategy. A policy designed to reduce chronic absenteeism from 24% to 15% may work in Harwood, where the remaining challenge is nudging an already-reasonable rate lower. It is unlikely to have the same effect in Rutland City, where the majority of students are chronically absent and the root causes extend far beyond school walls.

Vermont's advantage has always been its smallness: districts where superintendents know families, where school communities are tight-knit. The 40-point gap suggests that this advantage has limits. Knowing the families does not solve transportation barriers. Tight-knit communities do not overcome generational poverty. The data does not tell Vermont how to close the gap. It tells Vermont the gap exists, which is the prerequisite for any honest conversation about what it would take.

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

Kingdom East Cut Its Chronic Absenteeism Rate by 28 Points in Two Years

Thu, 07 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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.

Champlain Valley Cut Its Chronic Absenteeism Rate in Half — to Under 10%

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In a state where one in four students is chronically absent, Champlain Valley SD^↗ has driven its rate to under one in ten. The state's largest district — 4,150 students spread across Hinesburg, Charlotte, Shelburne, St. George, and Williston — recorded a 9.9% chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24. Two years earlier, it was 21.3%.

That kind of reduction does not happen by accident. It does not happen because of demographics alone. And it raises a question that matters for every district in Vermont performing worse: what did Champlain Valley do?

The numbers

Champlain Valley's chronic rate in 2021-22 was 21.3% — close to the state average at the time. That meant 897 students missing at least 10% of school days. By 2022-23, the number dropped to 557 (13.2%). By 2023-24, it fell to 410 (9.9%). The district shed 487 students from its chronically absent count in two years, a 54% reduction, while its total enrollment barely changed.

The 9.9% rate puts Champlain Valley 14.4 percentage points below the state average and nearly six times below Rutland City^↗'s 56.7%. It is the lowest rate of any district in Vermont.

Among districts with 1,500 or more students, the next-closest rate belongs to Essex Westford SD^↗ at 11.7%. After that, the jump is steep: Colchester^↗ at 18.1%, Milton^↗ at 20.2%, and most others above 25%.

What the district did differently

CVSD's approach centered on something most districts do not systematically measure: whether students feel they belong. The district conducts student engagement surveys three times a year, tracking not just academic metrics but whether students feel their ideas are valued, whether they feel connected to adults in the building, and whether they see school as worth attending.

The data from those surveys produced a finding that guided the district's intervention strategy: students who feel their ideas are valued are chronically absent at half the rate of students who feel overlooked. That correlation does not prove causation — students with more stable home lives may both attend more regularly and report higher engagement. But it gave the district a lever to pull that was within its control.

Rather than focusing exclusively on the mechanics of attendance — phone calls, home visits, truancy proceedings — CVSD invested in the conditions that make attendance feel worthwhile. The engagement-first model treats chronic absenteeism as a symptom rather than a cause.

Context and caveats

Champlain Valley's 11.4 percentage-point improvement ranks among the top performers in the state, though several smaller districts achieved larger drops. Kingdom East SD^↗ dropped 28.1 points, White River Valley fell 25.5, and Springfield cut 22.3 points. The difference is where they started: those districts came down from rates above 45%. Champlain Valley started below the state average and still cut its rate in half.

Geography matters. Champlain Valley sits in Chittenden County, Vermont's economic engine, with Burlington's labor market and the University of Vermont nearby. The district's families tend to have higher incomes and more stable employment than districts in the Rutland region or the Northeast Kingdom. An honest accounting of CVSD's success has to acknowledge that some portion of the improvement reflects community advantages that other districts cannot replicate through policy alone.

But the timeline matters too. CVSD's rate was 21.3% in 2022 — not vastly different from the state average. Whatever advantages the community provides, they did not prevent the COVID-era spike. The recovery required deliberate action. The question for other districts is not whether they can match CVSD's 9.9% — that may not be realistic everywhere — but whether the engagement-focused model works at all outside affluent suburban settings.

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