By the time a Nebraska student reaches senior year, the odds are roughly one in three that they will be chronically absent. Among kindergartners, it is closer to one in seven. Among third-graders, one in nine.

In 2024-25, 34.5 percent of Nebraska's 24,898 seniors missed 10 percent or more of the school year. That is 8,593 students whose final year of public education was defined as much by the days they were not in the building as by the days they were. The kindergarten rate was 14.4 percent. Third grade: 11.0 percent. The staircase from elementary to high school is not gradual. It is steep, and since COVID, it has gotten steeper.

The gap that widened

Before the pandemic, the divide between high school and elementary chronic absenteeism was already present but narrower. In 2018-19, high school grades (9-12) had a combined chronic rate of 22.7 percent while elementary grades (K-5) came in at 7.0 percent, a 15.7 percentage-point gap.

By 2024-25, that gap had widened to 18.8 points. Elementary schools had recovered meaningfully from their COVID peak, falling from 14.6 percent in 2021-22 back to 11.6 percent, clawing back about 40 percent of the spike. High schools recovered far less. The combined 9-12 rate went from a peak of 31.5 percent to 30.4 percent, a recovery of just 12 percent of the COVID increase.

Middle school sits in between, both geographically and statistically: 19.0 percent in 2024-25, down from a 20.3 percent peak but still well above the pre-COVID 11.7 percent.

Grade by grade, the recovery that wasn't

The grade-level recovery data reveals just how unevenly Nebraska has bounced back. First grade recovered 46.2 percent of its COVID spike. Fourth grade: 40.3 percent. These are not triumphant numbers, but they represent real progress, with thousands of younger students returning to regular attendance patterns.

Then the numbers crater. Sixth grade recovered 13.1 percent of its spike. Seventh grade: 12.5 percent. Ninth grade: 10.3 percent. And the worst of all: tenth grade, which recovered just 6.2 percent of its COVID increase, the weakest recovery of any grade in Nebraska. A tenth-grader's chronic absenteeism rate of 29.1 percent in 2024-25 is virtually indistinguishable from the 29.7 percent posted at the COVID peak.

8,593 seniors

The raw count puts the rate in human terms. In 2018-19, Nebraska had 7,158 chronically absent seniors. By 2021-22, the number had surged to 9,492. It has come down modestly since, to 8,593 in 2024-25, but remains 1,435 above the pre-COVID level.

Senior-year chronic absenteeism carries particular weight because it comes at the threshold of whatever comes next. For college-bound students, it means incomplete preparation. For students entering the workforce, it means a year's worth of missed practice at the basic discipline of showing up. For neither group is missing a third of the school year a neutral event.

The autonomy cliff

The pattern is not unique to Nebraska. Nationally, chronic absenteeism rises with grade level. But the post-COVID widening of that gradient points to something specific about how the pandemic reshaped adolescent attendance norms.

Elementary students, whose attendance is largely controlled by parents, have returned to something approaching pre-COVID patterns. High schoolers, whose attendance is increasingly a matter of personal decision-making, have not. The 5th-to-6th grade transition, where chronic rates jump from 11.3 percent to 16.0 percent, marks the boundary where parental control gives way to student autonomy, and where post-COVID disengagement appears to have taken root.

Nebraska has committed to cutting chronic absenteeism statewide as part of a 14-state national pledge. The elementary grades are trending in the right direction. The high school grades are not. Until the state figures out how to reach adolescents who have decided, or whose circumstances have decided for them, that regular attendance is optional, the statewide numbers will remain stuck.

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