01 · The cliff
Attendance and grades move together — and the drop is steep.
A student attending 95–100% of the time averages a 3.2 GPA; below 80%, that falls to 2.3 — nearly a full grade point across the attendance bands.
Key insights · Attendance & outcomes
Where attendance moves student outcomes — and where we intervene.
Every card traces to a section of the Full Report. 18,897 students · district ADA 91.5% · 2025–26. Correlation, not causation — but the read is consistent across every cut.
Site-level figures are in the Full Report — use the site filter there.
02 · One in four
One in four students is chronically absent.
24.9% missed 10% or more of enrolled days. 6.9% are severely chronic — attending less than 80% of the time.
03 · Double the failures
Chronic absence nearly doubles the failure rate.
Chronically absent students post a 29.5% D/F rate versus 17.6% for peers — and a 2.5 GPA versus 3.1.
04 · Every band down
Failure climbs with every band of missed school.
D/F rate rises 15.7% → 20.6% → 24.7% → 32.7% → 35.8% as attendance falls. No flat stretch — every band of missed school costs.
05 · Erosion by grade
Attendance erodes as students get older.
Average attendance slides from 93.2% in elementary to 92.0% in middle to 88.9% in high school — high schools sit, on average, below the 90% chronic line. Chronic rate climbs 21.7% → 29.1%.
06 · English Learners
English Learners show up — the gap is academic, not attendance.
EL students attend at 92.3% — above the district's 91.5% — yet carry the lowest GPA at 2.5 and a 23.1% D/F rate. The lever here is academic support, not attendance.
07 · IEP absence
Students with IEPs are the most chronically absent.
30.4% of students with an IEP are chronically absent, versus 23.9% of peers — the widest chronic-absence gap of any subgroup in the data.
08 · The gender gap
Boys fail more; girls miss as much.
Male students post a 22.4% D/F rate versus 18.7% for female students (GPA 2.8 versus 3.0), while chronic-absence rates are nearly identical — 24.7% versus 25.2%.
09 · Suspension tracks absence
Suspension follows the same line as absence.
5.1% of chronically absent students were suspended this year, versus 1.8% of regular attenders — 492 students suspended district-wide.
10 · The average hides the problem
The headline number looks fine; the distribution is the story.
District attendance reads a healthy 91.5% — but that average masks 24.9% chronic absence and a 6.9% severely chronic tail. The headline number alone looks fine; the distribution is the story.
11 · Absence is concentrated, not uniform
A few sites carry most of it — the response should be targeted.
A few sites carry most of it — chronic absence reaches 60.9% at the highest-need site versus 24.9% district-wide. The response should be targeted, not spread evenly.
12 · Reclassified English Learners need a second look
Best attendance of any language group — but the highest failure rate.
RFEP students attend the best of any language group (19.3% chronic) yet post the highest D/F rate at 27.8%. Reclassification may be removing support before students are ready.
13 · Tardies are the cheapest early signal
Tardies precede absence — the earliest, lowest-cost flag a site can act on.
15.6% of students already have 10 or more tardies (district mean 6.3). Tardies precede absence — the earliest, lowest-cost flag a site can act on.
14 · The line a board member carries home
Attendance is the lever: a student who shows up nine-and-a-half days in ten carries nearly a full grade point and half the failure risk of a chronically absent peer — and the gap widens every year through high school.
Early warning · catching it before it starts
The students who struggle are knowable months early.
The other tabs read year-end data and name who's already behind. These signals fire in August–October — early enough to act. 62.1% of this year's chronically absent students were chronically absent last year too; the rest declare themselves in the first month of school.
Source · adds prior-year (2024–25) attendance and first-month attendance to the same de-identified dataset · surrogate IDs only · 2025–26.
01 · Last year already named them
Most of the risk is knowable before day one.
62.1% of this year's chronically absent students were chronically absent last year too. That group relapsed at 64.1% — versus a 23.7% base rate for everyone else.
02 · The first month is the tell
Two absences in the first month, and the odds flip.
Students with 2 absences in the first four weeks were chronically absent 47.4% of the time, versus 15.0% with perfect early attendance. At 5+ early absences it reaches 66.4%.
03 · Grades and behavior compound it
An early D or F — or a suspension — stacks the risk.
A first-quarter D or F tracks to a 2.4 GPA and 35.7% chronic (vs 3.2 / 22.1%). A suspension tracks to a 2.1 GPA and 49.0% chronic.
04 · An October list catches two-thirds
A small early net lands most of the year's chronic students.
A flag from last year's attendance plus first-month absences watches 35.2% of students and catches 68.1% of everyone who becomes chronically absent. Add early D/F and suspensions and the catch reaches 76.6%.
05 · The line a board member carries home
We don't have to wait for the failures to show up. Two-thirds of chronic absence is visible by October — the work is acting on the list, not finding it.
The first-month curve
Two absences in the first month, and the odds flip.
Year-end chronic-absence rate, grouped by how many days a student missed in the first four weeks of school. The axis starts at zero — at two early absences the rate roughly doubles the baseline, and it keeps climbing.
Year-end chronic-absence rate by first-month absences · 2025–26 · all students
The catch-rate
A small early net catches most of the year's chronic students.
Two ways to build the October watch-list. Each casts a net of a certain size (watch) and lands a share of everyone who later becomes chronically absent (catch). Even the attendance-only flag — last-year plus first-month absences — watches roughly a third of students and catches two-thirds of the year's chronic cases.
Attendance-only flag
Prior-year + first-month absences
Watch · students flagged
35.2%
Catch · future chronic landed
68.1%
Smallest net. Flags about one student in three, lands two in three of the year's chronic cases.
Full ABC flag
Attendance + behavior + course marks
Watch · students flagged
48.3%
Catch · future chronic landed
76.6%
Wider net — adds early D/F and suspensions. Flags about half of students, lands three in four of the year's chronic cases.
Early-warning methodology and provenance.
- New data pulls
- Two measures joined to the same de-identified dataset on surrogate ID: prior-year (2024–25) attendance, and first-month attendance (absences in the first ~4 weeks of 2025–26). Both are aggregate-only here — this file renders zero student-level rows.
- Framework
- ABC = the Attendance / Behavior / Course-marks early-warning framework. The attendance-only flag uses prior-year + first-month attendance; the full ABC flag adds a first-quarter D or F and any suspension.
- What this is
- Retrospective validation. This year's full data shows the early signal would have worked — the way you test a flag before deploying it next fall. Watch% is the share of students the flag lists; catch% (recall) is the share of all students who became chronically absent that the flag landed.
- On tardies
- Tardies were a noisy signal and aren't used in the flag — a chronically absent student registers as absent, not late, so heavy-tardy and heavy-absence populations only partly overlap. The flag leans on prior-year and first-month attendance instead.
- How to read it
- Correlation, not causation. These are associations in one year of district data, surfaced early enough to act on — not causal estimates and not a prediction about any individual student.
- Who to ask
- Office of Educational Services, Val Verde Unified.
Showing district totals
The site leaderboard and grade-band chart stay district-wide — they're cross-site by design.
Site profile
Attendance shape · where this site's students fall
Where this site's students fall on attendance.
Where to look first
Attendance & student outcomes · 2025–26
Where attendance moves student outcomes in Val Verde.
The receipts behind the read: how attendance connects to grades, failure, discipline, and which students carry the most risk — for cabinet and the Board of Education.
Source · Aeries SIS export · 2026-06-04 · de-identified · n = 18,897 students
The four numbers
Where the year landed.
Four numbers that frame the rest of the report. All figures are district-wide for 2025–26.
Average daily attendance
91.5%
Average daily attendance across 18,897 students. The headline number — but the spread underneath it is the story.
Chronically absent
24.9%
Missed 10% or more of enrolled days. 6.9% are severely chronic — under 80% attendance.
Carrying a D or F
20.6%
One or more D, F, or I marks — a secondary-grades measure. Roughly one in five secondary students.
Students suspended
492
Suspended at least once this year. Concentrated among chronically absent students — see the discipline read.
The cliff
As attendance falls, grades fall and failure climbs.
Mean GPA by attendance band, against the share of students carrying a D or F. The two lines move together — and the steepest drop sits right at the 90% chronic-absence line.
Mean GPA & D/F rate by attendance band · secondary students
No secondary grades at this site — attendance still applies.
The read
0.9
grade points separate the top attendance band (3.2) from the bottom (2.3) — nearly a full letter grade.
90%
is the cliff line — the chronic-absence threshold. Below it, the D/F rate jumps from 20.6% toward 35.8%.
The equity read
Who carries the most risk, by subgroup.
Attendance, chronic absence, D/F rate, and GPA across the district's reportable subgroups. Amber flags the worst cell in each column that matters — where to look first.
Subgroup × measure · 2025–26 · amber = highest chronic / highest D-F
| Subgroup | n | ADA % | Chronic % | D/F % | Mean GPA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hispanic | 15,261 | 91.5 | 25.5 | 20.9 | 2.9 |
| Non-Hispanic | 3,636 | 91.9 | 22.6 | 19.4 | 3.0 |
| English Learner | 3,338 | 92.3 | 23.7 | 23.1 | 2.5 |
| RFEP | 3,411 | 91.7 | 19.3 | 27.8 | 3.1 |
| English Only | 11,090 | 91.3 | 26.4 | 18.9 | 2.9 |
| Students w/ IEP | 3,123 | 90.8 | 30.4 | 22.0 | 2.6 |
| No IEP | 15,774 | 91.7 | 23.9 | 20.3 | 3.0 |
| Female | 9,010 | 91.4 | 25.2 | 18.7 | 3.0 |
| Male | 9,881 | 91.7 | 24.7 | 22.4 | 2.8 |
Highest chronic %
Highest D/F %
Higher attendance / GPA
Lower attendance / GPA
Two stories sit side by side. Students with an IEP carry the highest chronic-absence rate (30.4%); English Learners attend well but carry the lowest GPA (2.5) — an academic gap, not an attendance one. The right intervention differs by subgroup.
Site by site
Chronic absence, ranked by site.
The ten sites with the highest chronic-absence rates. The two highest — Val Verde High School and Val Verde Academy — are the district's alternative settings; read them apart from the comprehensive sites.
Chronic-absence rate by site · top ten · 2025–26
1
Val Verde High School
60.9%n 220
2
Val Verde Academy
60.4%n 134
3
Special Ed Pre-School
49.0%n 100
4
Val Verde USD Preschool
44.0%n 234
5
Val Verde Elementary School (Sixth Grade)
31.5%n 184
6
Orange Vista High School
29.3%n 2,263
7
Columbia Elementary School
28.4%n 700
8
March Middle School
26.8%n 690
9
Rancho Verde High School
26.2%n 2,030
10
Rainbow Ridge Elementary School
25.5%n 733
Read these separately. Val Verde High School and Val Verde Academy are the district's alternative settings — high chronic absence is expected there; read them apart from the comprehensive sites.
Through the grades
Attendance erodes as students move up.
Chronic-absence rate (bars) and average attendance (line) across elementary, middle, and high school. The trend runs one way — chronic absence climbs and attendance slips every step toward graduation, with high school carrying the highest chronic rate in the district.
Chronic-absence rate & average attendance by grade band · 2025–26
Methodology and provenance.
- Source
- Aeries SIS export, 2026-06-04, de-identified before this file was built — surrogate student IDs only, no names and no PII in this artifact. This dashboard renders zero student-level rows; every figure is an aggregate.
- n
- 18,897 students with attendance records; 10,243 with a GPA (secondary students).
- Measures
- Attendance rate = days present ÷ days enrolled. Chronic = below 90% attendance (missed 10% or more of enrolled days). D/F = one or more D, F, or I marks — a secondary-grades measure; elementary marks aren't graded this way.
- What isn't here
- (a) English-Learner status uses the standard Aeries language-fluency coding (LF=3) and should be confirmed against the district Code Table. (b) A detailed race breakdown is held pending the Code Table — race codes don't map cleanly yet, so ethnicity here is the clean Hispanic / non-Hispanic flag only. (c) Site names are the district's public school names. (d) Discipline is suspensions only; the referral extract wasn't clean enough to chart. (e) The course-marks extract was truncated, so grade outcomes lean on GPA plus the D/F watchlist. (f) These are correlations, not causal estimates.
- How to read it
- Every prose number is bound to the underlying data object, so the figures here match the figures in the cards above. Where a measure is a secondary-grades measure (D/F, GPA), elementary students are excluded by design.
- Who to ask
- Office of Educational Services, Val Verde Unified.