More Photos A single empty desk is not normally a cause for alarm. More than 99 percent of students miss at least a day of school. But Oregon has an epidemic of chronic absenteeism that goes unnoticed.

1. ‘Atrocious’ attendance puts learning at risk

A massive but overlooked problem is jeopardizing the success of tens of thousands of Oregon students, leaving them at risk of never learning to read well or failing to graduate from high school.

It’s not class size, curriculum or teacher training.

It’s attendance.

Last school year, nearly one in five Oregon students missed at least 10 percent of the school year, an investigation by The Oregonian shows. Those roughly 100,000 students were absent 3½ weeks of school or more – in most cases without raising alarms at their school.

No other state has been shown to have a chronic absenteeism rate as bad as Oregon’s.

School absenteeism Percent of students who miss more than 10 percent of days Less than 10% 10-18% 18-25% 25% and greater Click on a marker to see a school’s absentee rate and more » Portland

» Salem

» Eugene

» Bend

» Reset Zoom to Source: Oregon Department of Education Mark Friesen/The Oregonian

“It’s atrocious,” said Oregon schools chief Rob Saxton.

Students are deemed chronically absent if they miss at least 10 percent of school days. Last school year, 24 percent of Oregon high school students missed that much – and so did 20 percent of eighth-graders and 18 percent of first-graders.

At some Oregon schools, including North Eugene High, Glendale Elementary and Bend’s Mountain View High, more than one-third of students were chronically absent.

Frequent absenteeism has devastating consequences. One Oregon study found that students who miss 10 percent of kindergarten lag, on average, almost a year behind in reading by third grade and are unlikely to ever catch up. Studies from multiple states show that chronically absent high school students are unlikely to graduate.

Yet leaders at many Oregon schools have no idea their school has a problem, let alone what is causing it. From Bend to Banks and beyond, principals and assistant superintendents contacted for this story expressed bafflement over their schools’ high absenteeism.

Saxton, too, said he gets shrugs when he asks frontline educators what explains Oregon’s epidemic of empty desks. “I don’t think they have particularly good answers,” he said.

For its investigation, The Oregonian gained unprecedented access to attendance records of 480,000 Oregon public school students. The newspaper calculated chronic absenteeism rates for 1,155 schools, providing grade-by-grade breakdowns for most of them.

Among the findings:

» Chronic absenteeism affects schools in every Oregon community but is worst in rural Oregon. In Lincoln and Grant counties, chronic absenteeism averages 29 percent. It’s at least 20 percent in every school.

» Statewide, attendance hits a high point in fourth grade and declines steadily every grade after that, culminating in 29 percent of high school seniors missing a tenth of the year.

» Half of Oregon students attend school as regularly as experts recommend, coming to class more than 95 percent of the time. One-third land in a caution zone, missing 5 percent to 9 percent of school days but stopping short of chronic absenteeism.

» Low-income students are almost 50 percent more likely to be chronically absent than other Oregon students. At some schools, nearly half the low-income students miss that often, including at La Pine High (48 percent), Summit High in Bend (47 percent), Talmadge Middle School in Independence and Taft Junior/Senior High in Lincoln City (both 45 percent).

» Chronic absenteeism is a significant problem in nearly every school serving eighth-graders, including K-8 schools such as Portland’s Vernon School (where 31 percent of eighth-graders were chronically absent), big middle schools such as South Meadow Middle School in Hillsboro (25 percent) and small schools such as Banks Junior High (24 percent).

» Certain students miss mind-boggling amounts of school. At Thurston High in Springfield, 50 students each missed more than 10 weeks of school last year, records show. At Llewellyn Elementary in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood, nine first- and second-graders missed at least five weeks of school apiece.

Studies show that missing school can be linked directly to reading poorly, failing at math and flunking too many credits to graduate.

A study of 21,000 students in Illinois found that absenteeism, not standardized test scores, could be used to pinpoint which students would fail multiple classes in freshman year — and which would earn a diploma. Once freshmen missed 10 percent of school days, their odds of graduating dropped below 40 percent.

Going to class doesn’t guarantee that a student will read brilliantly or waltz to a diploma. But sometimes it’s almost that simple.

Luis Zarate, for example, routinely skipped class at Clackamas High his sophomore year. He failed almost every subject.

But the school cracked down, applying a mix of pressure and encouragement. Under a dean’s watchful eyes, Zarate began attending every class. Soon he realized: “This is not that hard.” Now a junior, he passed all his courses last semester.

Having 18 percent of students miss nearly a month of school every year, as Oregon does, is not normal. Eight other states have allowed researchers to calculate and publish their absenteeism rates, and all seven have lower rates — in most cases, much lower.

In every state that has been studied, students from low-income homes are much more likely to miss school than students who are better off. Parents’ economic struggles and their own poor experiences in school are contributing factors.

Maryland and Utah have much lower child poverty rates than Oregon, so it’s unsurprising that they post better attendance rates. But other states that outperform Oregon, such as Indiana, have similar poverty rates. And Florida and Georgia have much worse child poverty, yet Georgia’s chronic absence rate was less than half of Oregon’s.

Most Oregon schools are working furiously to upgrade their curriculum and teaching techniques to get more students ready to meet new, more rigorous Common Core State Standards.

Few, however, are putting similar efforts into solving an obvious problem: No matter how refined the instruction or the curriculum, students can’t learn it if they’re not there.

Saxton expects that to change, now that the issue is getting more attention.

In 2012, at the behest of Gov. John Kitzhaber, every school district was asked to report, and improve, its sixth-grade chronic absenteeism rate as part of its new “achievement compact” with the state.

In addition, the updated version of Oregon’s school report cards, released four months ago, listed for the first time the share of students at every school who attended at least 90 percent of the time.

Both represent a new way of looking at school attendance in Oregon — focusing on how many individual students miss too much school, not schoolwide attendance rates. For most schools, that new lens was an unflattering one.

“I got calls from district superintendents,” said Jon Wiens, who managed the state report cards. “They were shocked, some of them, how low that number was who are regular attenders.”

Low attendance hurts all students, but its impact is most devastating for low-income students.

A 2010 study of a national sample of kindergartners found that being chronically absent caused 70 percent more damage to reading progress among low-income students than among better-off students absent that often.

In Connecticut’s class of 2011, graduation rates for middle-class students fell by 30 percentage points if they missed 10 percent of ninth grade. But for low-income students, they plunged 48 percentage points; just 38 percent graduated.

Oregon’s low-income students are almost 70 percent more likely than other students to be chronically absent in the primary grades. And just 55 percent of low-income third-graders read at grade level, compared with 80 percent of students from better-off homes.

In Oregon high schools, 29 percent of low-income students were chronically absent last year. In the class of 2013, 37 percent of low-income students failed to graduate on time.

Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher and co-director of the Everybody Graduates Center, has pioneered much of the national research on chronic absenteeism.

Schools, he said, could significantly raise achievement and graduation rates — without more money, teacher training or curriculum improvements – simply by dramatically reducing chronic absenteeism among low-income students.

Oregon, with the second-worst on-time graduation rate in the nation at 68 percent, has plenty of room to improve.

Saxton, who led Tigard-Tualatin schools for seven years before becoming state schools chief in 2012, said kindergarten and first grade are the place to start.

School-going habits “get ingrained early,” he said. When a family expects a child to attend only periodically, he said, that needs to be corrected — and fast.

Making attendance a habit has a double payoff, he added. Students who attend regularly in the primary grades are more likely to do so all through school. They are also are primed to learn to read well.

That’s crucial because by middle school, nearly everything in school is set up to reward those who can read and frustrate those who can’t. “When students get older, they are in control of whether they’re in class,” he said. “A lot of the absenteeism is due to lack of success.”

The fact that one of six Oregon first- and second-graders was chronically absent last year, he said, “really brings home the fact that there is some opportunity here.”

If Oregon can reduce absenteeism in early grades, “that could help us with our third-grade success in reading. Which in turn could help us keep students in school through graduation. Those two things are tied together.”

About the data

The Oregonian and OregonLive.com obtained attendance records for 480,000 students in 1,150 schools. In most cases, each record shows the student’s grade level, the number of school days missed during the 2012-13 school year and whether the student qualified for subsidized school meals, an indicator of low income. The records were stripped of names and all other potentially identifying information.

It was the first time the Oregon Department of Education released data about thousands of individual students to a news outlet. It did so only after working with the newspaper to ensure that no student’s identity could be deduced. In cases with very few students in a grade or very few receiving (or not receiving) subsidized meals in a grade or school, the grade level or meal status was left blank.

The newspaper was able to calculate chronic absenteeism rates for entire schools and for individual grade levels within schools. The paper could also see how well schools managed attendance among low-income students, who are more prone to miss school, as well as non-low-income students and overall.

The state did not provide attendance records for: students in schools with fewer than 50 students; kindergartners; and students in alternative programs where attendance is tracked by instructional hours rather than days present.