Oregon’s high school graduation held flat in 2023, tying the 81% of the 2022 class. It was still down from the state’s 85% rate in 2019 before the pandemic.

We went looking for the numbers for La Pine Senior High School. When we spoke in October to school Principal Scott Olszewski, he believed in the investments the school was making to boost school counselors and also have a graduation coach work with freshmen. The change came about in part to the efforts of the school district and also a partnership with Deschutes County. It has a Healthy Schools program that embeds public health specialists in schools.

It seems to have helped. La Pine’s High School graduation went up by nearly 11 percentage points. It’s still too low at 70%. We’ll gladly take the increase. It doesn’t mean more students will experience more success. It’s a strong indicator they might.

Students can’t learn if they don’t show up. And in La Pine and elsewhere across the state chronic absenteeism is a serious problem.

Regular attenders is a metric used for attendance. It is defined as the number of students who attended more than 90% of their enrolled school days.

For the Bend-La Pine district’s high school students, grades 9-12, only about 61% managed to be regular attenders out of 2,918. At La Pine Senior High School, it was only 51.6% of students out of 213.

The Oregonian reported that Charlene Williams, the director of the Oregon Department of Education, told reporters that improving graduation rates will mean getting more students to attend school.

“COVID changed our relationship with attendance for a minute,” she said. “We need attendance and enrollment to improve. Students need to be in school, in class, every day. We have work ahead of us.”

It wasn’t just COVID, though. Chronic absenteeism has been a chronic problem in Oregon. Dig back into the Oregon Department of Education’s website and you can see there was a blitz of information, research and plans a decade ago.

The problem did not go away.

The Legislature did make some investment in reading in the 2023 session thanks to the work of Gov. Tina Kotek and state Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend.

Those are going to take time to pay off and that’s not going to be enough.