FILE - Students wait for the first day of school to begin on August 29, 2023, at Sitton Elementary School in Portland.
Caden Perry / OPB
To improve school attendance in a state with one of the nation’s highest absenteeism rates, Oregon education officials on Tuesday presented lawmakers with a plan to repeal existing attendance laws.
The high-level presentation and 20-page report presented to the Senate Interim Education Committee described a strategy to replace existing attendance laws “rooted in compliance” with new rules that measure “attendance as a performance growth indicator.” It left lawmakers with many more questions than answers: State Sen. Courtney Neron Misslin, D-Wilsonville, almost immediately requested a follow-up meeting to get more clarity.
Senate Bill 315 passed during the 2025 legislative session required the Oregon Department of Education to produce by May 31 a report that outlined how districts are handling attendance policies, best practices for recording and improving student attendance and statutory recommendations that could apply in Oregon. Lawmakers will take up any recommendations during the next legislative session in 2027.
Oregon schools have among the highest absenteeism rates in the country, state data shows, and it’s a problem that has persisted since students returned to school following the COVID pandemic nearly five years ago.
Roughly one-third of Oregon students in 2024 were considered chronically absent, meaning they missed 17 or more school days during the school year in a state with one of the shortest school years in the country. About one-fifth of students nationwide were chronically absent in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Repeal and replace
Among the recommendations state education officials offered are to repeal 11 state statutes relating to compulsory school attendance and to replace them with statutes that “would include compulsory attendance requirements and exemptions,” and also outline the responsibilities of guardians and school districts when it comes to student attendance. The report described some state attendance laws as “outdated” and “duplicitive,” and said some homeschooling regulations are wrapped into attendance laws.
The State Board of Education would be tasked with coming up with the new statutes, and attendance would be wrapped into new legislatively mandated accountability measures.
“Oregon’s current compulsory attendance statutes and rules are grounded in compliance-oriented definitions of attendance, static thresholds, and enforcement mechanisms. Maintaining compulsory attendance statutes rooted in compliance creates tension with this model, as they rely on fixed definitions of absence and enforcement responses that create conflict with attendance as a growth-based measurement,” the report reads.
Notably absent is any recommendation for punitive action or a framework for accountability from students or their families when a student continues to miss school. Lawmakers in 2021 repealed an Oregon law that allowed schools to issue truancy fines to parents or guardians for a child’s ongoing and unexcused absences from school.
“This represents a shift from enforcing attendance through prescribed sanctions to using attendance data as a continuous signal for improvement, support, and system effectiveness,” the education department recommendations read.
Candice Castillo, deputy director of academics at the state education department, told lawmakers that some students who continually violate district attendance policies will unenroll from school or just stop showing up, disappearing altogether.
“There’s all these barriers and these challenges that our students and communities are facing, and compulsory policies can be helpful to some extent, but there is a broader system that needs to be in place in order to really support students,” she said. “What we aim to do with this recommendation beyond that compulsory requirement is really to help the district build a system and build an approach that allows us to support the student needs, so that our students would want to be in the classroom consistently.”
Related: Attendance, key academic measures show slight improvement on latest Oregon school report cards
State Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, asked Castillo “what the teeth” of the proposal would be.
“I think you can have that level of the ‘wrap around supports’ — What supports does this student need? What supports does this family need? — but we also can hold students accountable,” she said. “I sometimes worry Oregon gets in its own way when we remove the accountability.”
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