EdTribune VT - Vermont Education Data

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.

Winooski's 23-Point Chronic Absenteeism Spike Coincides With Immigration Crackdown

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Winooski is a one-square-mile city entirely surrounded by Burlington, home to about 7,300 people and a single school district. It is Vermont's most racially diverse community: 57% of students are people of color and 33% receive multilingual services. In 2022-23, the district was heading in the right direction. Its chronic absenteeism rate had fallen from 38.2% to 29.2%. Then something broke.

In 2023-24, Winooski's chronic rate surged to 52.5% — a 23.3 percentage point increase that is, by a wide margin, the largest one-year spike of any district in Vermont. Of 770 enrolled students, 404 missed at least 10% of school. Winooski is now the only district in the state whose chronic rate is higher than it was at the 2021-22 pandemic peak.

The numbers in context

While Vermont as a whole improved from 26.9% to 24.3% between 2022-23 and 2023-24, Winooski moved in the opposite direction by a factor that defies normal year-over-year variation. The next-largest increase in the state was Hartford SD's 5.0 percentage point rise. Winooski's jump was nearly five times that.

Among districts of similar size — 500 to 1,200 students — Winooski's rate is an outlier by roughly 20 points. Springfield SD, with 1,201 students, sits at 30.5%. Slate Valley, with 1,215, is at 21.7%. Winooski, with 770, is at 52.5%.

What happened in 2023-24

The data alone cannot prove causation, but the timeline aligns with a period of intensifying federal immigration enforcement that directly affected Winooski's community. Teachers in the district documented student anxiety about ICE. The district's superintendent was detained by federal authorities. Families with precarious immigration status faced a choice between visibility and safety.

In February 2025, Winooski became the first district in Vermont to pass a "sanctuary school" policy by a 4-0 board vote, formally committing to protect student information from federal agencies and to not allow immigration enforcement activities on school grounds. The Vermont Agency of Education issued a statement supporting the district.

The sanctuary policy postdates the 2023-24 attendance data by several months. It was a response to conditions that were already affecting families — conditions the chronic absenteeism data now quantifies.

The count tells the human story

In 2022-23, 230 of 787 Winooski students were chronically absent. In 2023-24, that number nearly doubled to 404 of 770 — an increase of 174 students in a district that shrank by 17. The swing means that roughly 190 students who were attending regularly one year crossed the chronic threshold the next.

In a district this small, 190 students is not a statistical abstraction. That represents a shift in which specific children show up at specific schools. It means teachers notice. It means the cafeteria is emptier. It means the attendance phone calls stack up.

The missing dimension

Vermont's chronic absenteeism data does not include race or ethnicity breakdowns. The state reports by gender, income status, special education, and English learner status, but not by the demographic dimension most relevant to Winooski's story. Whether the spike concentrated among immigrant families, among specific language communities, or spread broadly across the district cannot be answered with public data.

Statewide, LEP students saw only an 8.5% reduction in chronic absence from the 2022 peak to 2024, compared to 36.2% for the overall student body. Winooski's LEP population is large enough that this statewide pattern likely plays a role locally.

What comes next

Winooski's 2024-25 data will be the first test of whether the sanctuary policy has begun to reverse the spike. The policy was adopted in February 2025, midway through the school year. A drop would not prove causation. But a second year above 50% would mean the barriers in Vermont's most diverse district have shifted from episodic to structural, and that the sanctuary policy alone is not enough.

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

One in Four Vermont Students Still Chronically Absent — And the Recovery Is Stalling

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In a state where 37 supervisory districts serve fewer than 80,000 students, Vermont's Agency of Education can track chronic absenteeism with unusual precision. What the data shows is not reassuring. One in four students missed at least 10% of school in 2023-24. That is down from a 2021-22 peak when the number was closer to two in five. But the pace of improvement collapsed in the second year, and the state's own director of safe and healthy schools told VTDigger the progress is "not nearly at a rate that is meaningful."

Seven years of data, one pattern

Vermont's chronic absenteeism rate stood at 15.1% in 2018-19, the last full pre-pandemic year. It climbed to 17.7% when COVID first disrupted schools, then accelerated — 23.5% in 2020-21, 37.4% in 2021-22. That peak year, 30,223 students were chronically absent out of 80,757 enrolled. More than a third of the state's student body.

Two years of recovery brought the rate down to 24.3% by 2023-24. But the trajectory tells a troubling story. The first year of recovery, 2022-23, delivered a 10.5 percentage point drop. The second year managed 2.6 points. A four-fold deceleration.

The state has recovered 58.7% of the gap between its pre-COVID baseline and its pandemic peak. At the 2023-24 rate of improvement, reaching the pre-COVID 15.1% would take another three to four years. That assumes the current pace holds, which the deceleration pattern makes unlikely.

The count behind the rate

Rates can abstract away the human scale. In 2023-24, 19,273 Vermont students were chronically absent. Before the pandemic, that number was 12,811. The difference — 6,462 students still on the wrong side of the 10% threshold — is roughly the enrollment of 10 to 12 Vermont school buildings.

At the peak in 2021-22, the number hit 30,223. The subsequent recovery cut roughly 11,000 students from the chronically absent count. But removing 11,000 students from chronic absence while still having 6,400 more than pre-COVID means the state eliminated the easiest cases. What remains is likely more entrenched.

District variation is enormous

Vermont's 37 districts with reliable rate data in 2023-24 span a range that would be striking in a state ten times its size. Two districts — Rutland City SD and Winooski SD — have chronic rates above 50%. A majority of their students are chronically absent. At the other extreme, Champlain Valley SD has driven its rate down to 9.9%, less than half the state average.

Ten districts sit above 30%. Twenty-one fall below the state average. The distribution is not bimodal or random — it correlates, as it does nationally, with poverty, community health, and whether a district has invested in attendance infrastructure.

What makes Vermont different

Unlike most states, Vermont funds schools based on Average Daily Membership, not Average Daily Attendance. Districts do not lose per-pupil funding when students miss school. The fiscal incentive to pursue attendance is indirect, flowing through academic outcomes and the costs of intervention rather than immediate budget impact.

Vermont is also implementing a new foundation funding formula under Act 73, set to take effect in 2028-29. The formula provides $15,033 per student with a 102% weight for economically disadvantaged students — an additional $15,334 per qualifying student. For districts where chronic absenteeism concentrates among low-income families, that investment is partly unrealized each day students are absent.

The Agency of Education has proposed statutory changes to overhaul truancy and absenteeism policies, creating consistent statewide definitions and reporting standards. The University of Vermont's "Every Day Counts" initiative has piloted school-healthcare partnerships in four schools.

The math ahead

The 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found one-third of Vermont high school students struggle with poor mental health, with female and LGBTQ+ students reporting significantly higher rates. For students experiencing homelessness, chronic absenteeism rates hover around 60%. These are not conditions that a truancy policy can resolve.

The first year of recovery captured students whose absences were more situational than structural, the ones who needed a push back to normal routines. The second year's deceleration suggests the remaining 24.3% are harder cases: students whose barriers are medical, economic, or psychological.

Vermont has one advantage most states do not. In a system of 37 supervisory districts serving 80,000 students, a superintendent can know which families are struggling before the quarterly data report arrives. Champlain Valley's 9.9% rate suggests that advantage is real. But Rutland City and Winooski, where majorities of students are chronically absent, suggest it is not sufficient on its own.

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