News · Mississippi
Student absences drop 24% in Mississippi's first months under the new attendance law
Mississippi students missed a lot less school this fall.
Districts reported 243,766 fewer student absences in August and September than in the same two months last year, a decline of 24%, according to the state Department of Education. Total absences fell from 1,012,946 to 769,180, which the department calculates as about 1.34 million more hours of instruction, based on a 330-minute instructional day.
The drop follows the state's updated compulsory attendance law (SB 2103), in effect since the start of the 2026-27 school year, and training the department provided to districts to improve how absences are collected and recorded. Districts were required to adopt locally tailored attendance policies by Nov. 1, and the law raised the share of the instructional day a student must attend to be counted present from 63% to two-thirds of the day.
The improvement builds on a small gain in the department's most recent full-year report. Mississippi's chronic absenteeism rate, the share of students missing 10% or more of the school year, fell to 26.5% in 2025-26 from 27.6% the year before. That still represents 115,385 students, and the problem concentrates in the upper grades: the rate reaches 40.2% in grade 11 and 48% in grade 12, while grades two through five post the lowest rates in the state.
One caution rides with the early figures. Beginning with the 2026-27 school year, the department calculates chronic absenteeism using the federal definition of an absence, missing half the school day or more, so year-to-year comparisons will shift as the new counting settles in.
The department's attendance campaign, Every School Day Counts – Attend to Achieve, has pushed schools to identify absence patterns early and work with families before absences become chronic.
Source: Mississippi Department of Education
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