2025 Attendance Bright Spots

Where Chronic Absenteeism Is Declining in North Carolina

Chronic absenteeism remains a persistent challenge across North Carolina. Still, many schools have made unusually strong progress in recent years, even in the face of real constraints.

Attendance Works’ 50% Challenge offers a simple target: cut chronic absenteeism in half by strengthening the routines, relationships, and supports that help students attend. AttendNC Counts is North Carolina’s effort to support that work through practical tools and peer learning.

The interactive map below highlights attendance bright spots that have reduced chronic absenteeism by 50% or more since their 2022 peak. The map also includes filters that let you explore schools with smaller (but still meaningful) reductions. Across different thresholds, however, the purpose is the same: identify attendance bright spots and understand what they did differently.

Open the map in a new tab    Share your practice

How to Use the Map

Each dot represents a school. Colors indicate grade band. Click a dot to open a school profile card with school context (county, grade band, poverty classification, enrollment) and key attendance metrics including: 

• Peak (2022): the school’s highest chronic absenteeism rate
• Current (2025): the most recent annual percentage of students chronically absent
• Improvement (pp): percentage-point change (for example, 48.4% to 18.3% is a 30.1 pp improvement)
• % Decrease: percent decrease from the 2022 peak (for example, a 62.2% drop)

You can zoom in to explore regional patterns and clusters. In many cases, you will see bright spots across urban, rural, and small-town contexts, as well as schools with low and high concentrations of poverty. This is a useful reminder that sustained improvement is possible in many settings, though the path may look different depending on local barriers and resources.

Interpreting Responsibly

This visualization is designed to support learning, not labeling. 

Attendance trends can shift for many reasons, including changes in enrollment, mobility, reporting practices, transportation access, community conditions, or the mix of student needs. Treat the map as a signal for where to look, then validate the story with local context.

Why Bright Spots?

Research suggests chronic absenteeism is a multi-causal challenge rather than a single student behavior problem. Effective responses typically combine relationship-based strategies with barrier reduction, such as transportation reliability, access to health and behavioral health supports, and coordinated outreach that makes it easier for families to re-engage.

Bright spots help translate that broad insight into practical learning: instead of asking what schools should do in general, we can ask what schools in real-world conditions are doing that appears to be working, and what routines and supports made implementation stick.

Bright Spots Identification: Strengths and Limits

The bright-spot approach starts with a clear, transparent improvement rule. That simplicity is a feature: it is easy to explain, easy to reproduce, and useful for quickly identifying schools to learn from. The tradeoff is that a simple threshold does not fully account for context or peer comparability.

Over the coming months, AttendNC Counts and Carolina Demography will strengthen bright-spot identification in two ways:

• Context-adjusted models (“beating the odds”) to identify schools that are improving more than you’d expect given their starting point and local conditions
• School peer groups (typologies) to help schools compare themselves to similar schools and learn from peers facing similar conditions

What Happens Next?

AttendNC Counts will use bright-spots analyses as a launch point for deeper learning, including:

• Quality checks on the trends (for example, whether improvements hold up across multiple years and student groups)
• School learning visits and implementation snapshots to understand the routines, roles, and supports behind the gains
• Shareable tools and practice profiles so schools and districts can adapt what they learn

Using Bright Spots for Continuous Improvement

Bright spots are most useful when they trigger a structured learning conversation. Use the map and tables below to identify a small set of comparable schools, then use the following questions to understand what changed, what enabled follow-through, and what might be adaptable in your context.

Questions to Guide Follow-Up

If your district or school sees a bright spot on the map you are interested in learning from, consider contacting the school and using the questions below as a conversation starter:

• What systems changed (attendance teams, early warning routines, outreach cadence)?
• Which barriers were reduced (transportation, health, scheduling, family supports)?
• How did the school strengthen belonging and engagement (peer connections, adult mentorship, climate routines)?
• What did leaders do to support implementation (roles, follow-through, and monitoring)?

If you are a bright spot school and would like to help others, use this link to share your success.

Digging Deeper into the Data

As this work evolves from a simple first step for spotting strong improvement to more context-adjusted “beating the odds” analyses, we also want to make the underlying results easy to explore. The resources below provide table views of the same bright-spot results shown on the map, designed for scanning, sorting, and sharing. Use the summary table for a quick read of the improvement patterns, and the full table when you want to compare schools in more detail or build a short list for follow-up learning.

Summary Statistics

Table 1 provides a quick, system-level view of attendance improvement across all schools in the dataset, with breakouts by poverty classification, grade band, and improvement threshold. While the map defaults to the 50%+ bright-spot subset, the table shows how that group compares to other improvement levels. In the default map view, 326 schools (about 1 in 8 schools) reduced chronic absenteeism by 50% or more from their peak in 2022. Use this table to scan where the strongest improvements are concentrated and to identify candidate schools for follow-up learning.

Table 1. Distribution of Bright-Spot Improvements and School Context

Open the summary table in a new tab 

Full Bright Spots Data Set

Table 2 below provides the full school-level results behind the map so you can search, filter, and download data for follow-up learning. Use the table tools to narrow to a comparable set of schools, then export for local use:

• Search: Use the Search box (top right) to quickly find a school, district/county, or keyword.
• Filter: Use the boxes under each column to filter (for example, County or Enrollment range). Use the dropdowns to filter by Grade Band and Poverty.
• Sort: Click a column header to sort (for example, % Decrease, Improvement (pp), or Current Rate (2025)).
• Download: Click Download CSV (top left) to export the full table or your filtered results.

To use this in your school or district context:

• Start with peer schools (grade band, poverty, and enrollment) before drawing conclusions.
• Use two lenses: sort by Improvement (pp) for the biggest turnarounds or by Current Rate (2025) for schools now doing well.
• Build a shortlist of 5–10 schools, then use local context to guide outreach and learning questions.

Table 2. Full Results for Bright-Spot Schools Included in the Interactive Map

Open the full table in a new tab