Forsyth County Held Good Attendance While Georgia Slipped 13 Points

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Forsyth County schools, 48.7% of students had good attendance in 2024-25, missing five or fewer days of class across the year. That is the highest rate among Georgia's large traditional districts, and it has held up better than most. Even so, Forsyth's rate has slipped about seven points since 2019, and even Forsyth now sits just under the 50% threshold that the rest of the state has already crossed.

By comparison, Georgia's statewide share of students with good attendance fell from 52% before the pandemic to 38.8% in 2024-25, a 13-point drop that means, for the first time in the eight years of available data, the majority of Georgia students are missing more than a week of school per year. The state lost roughly 263,000 students from the "good attendance" category since 2019, and most of them did not become chronically absent. They slid into the middle: the 6-to-15-days-missed zone that triggers no interventions, generates no flags, and gets almost no policy attention.

The distribution that won't snap back

The chronic absenteeism rate gets the headlines. At 20.4% in 2025, it is down from a 24.4% peak in 2022, and falling. State Superintendent Richard Woods has pledged to cut it by half over five years, joining the national 50% Challenge backed by Attendance Works and the American Enterprise Institute.

But the chronic rate captures only the most severe slice. The full attendance distribution tells a different story.

Before the pandemic, Georgia's student body split roughly 52/36/12 across three attendance bands: good attendance (five or fewer days missed), moderate absence (6-15 days), and severe absence (more than 15 days). By 2025, the split is 39/42/20. Every band shifted toward more absence.

The moderate category, what researchers at the American Enterprise Institute have called the "middle missing", swelled from 36.0% to 41.5%. That is 768,000 students in 2025, up from 681,000 in 2019. These students miss roughly one to three weeks per year. They are not flagged as chronically absent. They do not qualify for attendance interventions under Georgia's new SB 123, which requires attendance review teams only in districts with 10% or more chronic absenteeism and schools above 15%. The moderate-absence students are, by design, invisible to the system.

A two-day shift that costs millions of hours

The estimated average days missed per student rose from 7.7 in 2019 to 9.7 in 2025. Two extra days per student, across 1.85 million students, amounts to roughly 3.2 million additional absent-student-days statewide each year, a 22% increase in total missed instructional time.

Dr. Garry McGiboney, chair of the Georgia Reading Cabinet's Student Attendance Subcommittee, told a House study committee that "lost learning is happening to over 60%" of Georgia students when moderate and severe absence are combined. The same subcommittee, working with the Atlanta Regional Commission, found that a 5% reduction in absences would lift third-grade reading proficiency from 38.4% to 45%, an improvement McGiboney called "almost unheard-of."

The 2020 data point, an artificial high of 60.7% "good attendance," reflects a shortened COVID year that mechanically reduced the number of days students could miss. Excluding it, the trajectory is stark: three years of stability around 52%, then a collapse to 36% in 2022, and a crawl back to 38.8% by 2025. Recovery has gained just 2.4 percentage points in the last year. At that pace, the state will not return to pre-pandemic good attendance levels until approximately 2030.

Forsyth to Tift: one state, two realities

The gap between Georgia's best- and worst-performing large districts is enormous. Among districts with at least 5,000 students, the share with good attendance in 2025 ranges from 84.8% (Georgia Connections Academy, a virtual school) down to 26.4% in Tift County, where nearly three-quarters of students miss more than five days per year.

Forsyth County, the state's highest-performing large traditional district, held 48.7% good attendance in 2025, a drop of 7.2 percentage points from its pre-COVID level of 55.9%. That is a meaningful decline, but it is less than half the 13.1-point statewide drop. Forsyth's 2025 rate puts it just below the 50% majority threshold.

Asked what was behind Forsyth's resilience, the district pointed to relationships as the operating mechanism. "We prioritize relationships, between students and staff, staff and families, and the school system and community at large," Sarah Von Esh, Forsyth's Director of Student Support, said in a written statement. "These connections enable our staff to identify the root causes of attendance issues and provide tailored support. For example, some students benefit from daily check-ins with an adult, while others may need access to healthcare providers for medical or mental health needs, or basic resources like food and clothing."

Von Esh described a layered intervention structure: Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) at the universal level, a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) with check-in/check-out, and what she called "robust wraparound support addressing food, clothing, and mental health resources." The Forsyth school board has invested above the state's required staffing levels. The district funds a Special Education Nurse and a Mental Health Facilitator, and Von Esh said Forsyth employs more school counselors, certified nurses, and school social workers than the state allots. On the "middle missing" 6-to-15-day group that SB 123 does not target, Von Esh said Forsyth schools "regularly examine student data to identify and address small problems before they escalate," framing it as a function of the same wraparound infrastructure.

At the bottom, Tift County (7,584 students) lost 21.3 percentage points of good attendance since 2019. Savannah-Chatham County, a system of 38,491 students, lost 26.6 points, the largest drop among major districts, falling from 61.4% to 34.8%. Richmond County (31,937 students) sits at 30.2%.

Only 24 of 231 districts, roughly 10%, still have a majority of students missing five or fewer days.

The groups hit hardest were not the ones already struggling

The subgroup data complicates a simple narrative about poverty driving absence. Every demographic group lost ground, but the groups that lost the most good attendance were not the ones with the highest absence rates before the pandemic.

Hispanic students lost 15.7 percentage points of good attendance, dropping from 52.0% to 36.3%. English learners lost 15.6 points (57.2% to 41.6%). Black students lost 15.5 points (53.4% to 37.9%). All three groups started near or above the state average for good attendance in 2019, and all three ended below it in 2025.

White students lost 10.0 points. Not-economically-disadvantaged students, the group with the best pre-COVID attendance, lost 9.8 points.

The pattern is counterintuitive: the groups with the highest pre-pandemic good attendance rates experienced the steepest declines. One possible explanation is ceiling effects. Students already near the boundary between "good" and "moderate" attendance had less room to stay in the good category when norms shifted. Another is that school avoidance and anxiety, which cut across income levels, intensified during the pandemic and have not fully receded. Research from Brookings found that nationally, 40% of students experienced chronic absenteeism in at least one post-pandemic year, compared to 17% pre-pandemic, suggesting the problem has spread far beyond its traditional concentration among disadvantaged populations.

Recovery stalled at the wrong level

The year-over-year trajectory shows initial progress that has not sustained.

Good attendance fell 16.3 percentage points in a single year from 2021 to 2022, the post-COVID reckoning. It then lost another 1.2 points in 2023 before gaining 1.6 in 2024 and 2.4 in 2025. The recovery has slowed the bleeding but not reversed it. Georgia's good attendance rate sits 13.1 points below its 2019 level, and the annual rate of improvement would need to triple to reach pre-pandemic norms by 2030.

Georgia's FTE-based QBE funding formula counts enrollment, not daily attendance, so chronic absence does not directly reduce state per-pupil funding the way an average-daily-attendance formula would. But the downstream costs are real. The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute has documented a school counselor ratio of 1:450, nearly double the American School Counselors Association's recommended 1:250, leaving schools short of the professionals who could address the underlying causes of absence.

What the data cannot see

The attendance band data describes the magnitude of the shift but cannot explain it. Georgia does not publish by-grade absence data through its public reporting, which means it is impossible to determine whether the erosion of good attendance is concentrated in early grades (where family scheduling and childcare drive absences), middle grades (where disengagement accelerates), or high school (where part-time work and course-recovery programs compete with seat time). The three credit-recovery charter schools at the bottom of the district rankings, Mountain Education Center (2.9% good attendance), Foothills Charter (10.0%), and Coastal Plains Charter (12.1%), serve students whose attendance patterns reflect their alternative-schedule models, not traditional absence.

Georgia's policy framework is designed around chronic absence. The state's new attendance law triggers interventions at 10% and 15% thresholds. But neither that law nor the state's pledge to halve chronic absence addresses the 768,000 students in the moderate-absence band -- students who miss enough school to measurably reduce reading proficiency, according to the state's own research, but not enough to be counted.

Here is the gap in the math: if students simply move from missing 20 days to missing 12, the chronic rate drops but the good attendance rate stays flat. Georgia could halve its headline number and still have a majority of students missing more than a week of school every year. The metric the state is chasing and the problem its students face are not the same thing.

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