Nearly 3 in 10 Kids Chronically Absent — What’s Really Going On in the Mountains

El Tejon Unified serves roughly 700 students across three small schools in the mountain communities around Frazier Park, Lebec, and Cuddy Valley. The district’s own reporting to the state showed a chronic absenteeism rate of 28.2% — rated “very high” for every single subgroup of students — with district-wide attendance dropping from around 94% before the pandemic to 92.86% in 2022-23.

The numbers behind that are stark: average daily attendance fell from 685 students to 632. That’s not a rounding error — that’s dozens of kids who, on a typical day, simply aren’t in class.

A district’s own Healthy Kids Survey data adds context that a raw attendance number can’t: only 60% of students reported having academic motivation, only 52% felt they had a caring adult relationship at school, and just 21% felt “meaningful participation.” Chronic absenteeism and low engagement usually aren’t two separate problems — they’re the same problem showing up in two different data columns.

This is exactly the kind of number that’s easy to bury in an LCAP report nobody outside the district office reads. A trustee’s job is to pull it out, ask what El Tejon is actually doing about it, and keep asking until the number moves.