'Preventable gap.' How Texas misses the mark in tracking kids withdrawn for absences

AUSTIN (KXAN) – It took about a year for teachers and administrators at Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders to see a “sharp decline” in one of their students. The high schooler had been “academically successful and engaged,” they said. Then she started missing school.

School officials would learn the girl’s mounting attendance problems reflected a chronic health condition. Ultimately, they withdrew her because of her absences.

The impact of that withdrawal – and the student’s struggle to reenroll the next year – had a profound effect on her life, according to her mother, who asked that KXAN not use their names because of the sensitive nature of the case.

“The cumulative result was a preventable gap in the student’s education — one that played out publicly, painfully, and without a clear path to resolution,” AISD officials wrote in an investigation report.

KXAN reported extensively on the teen’s situation and its unusually public fallout. Top school officials were threatened with termination and resigned after the district alleged they withdrew the student without parental notification.

But most withdrawals happen quietly.

Tens of thousands of students are withdrawn each year from Texas schools – severed from the public school system for myriad reasons with no public or media attention. But how often are Texas kids, like the Ann Richards student, withdrawn specifically over absences and truancy?

When KXAN sought records of how frequently that’s happening, we found there is no clear answer because the state isn’t tracking it. Additionally, Texas isn’t collecting exit data on students in 6th grade and below.

Education experts and a state lawmaker told KXAN those are blind spots that should be addressed.

Catch-all code

Dropouts are not a new issue in Texas. School officials have been wrestling with reducing them for decades and slowly enhancing and tweaking data collection along the way.

The state currently has 19 separate so-called “leaver” codes to classify why students leave the school system. Codes include classifications for students departing to be homeschooled or attend private school; other codes indicate expulsions and deaths. Some codes track tiny numbers of students leaving under certain circumstances, like the 47 students who dropped out because of a medical injury in 2023-24, or the five children of military members — statewide — who graduated outside Texas through an interstate compact that year.

Meanwhile, potentially thousands of withdrawals due to truancy and absenteeism aren’t specifically recorded. Texas lumps those into a sort of catch-all “other” dropout category, labeled code 98, in state data. Districts can use the “other” code for excessive absences, or when they don’t know why a student left, or if the reason doesn’t fit any other codes, according to the Texas Education Agency’s definitions.

Texas schools coded nearly 38,000 student withdrawals with that “other” dropout code in the 2023-24 school year, making it the second most used “leaver” code. Only one code, for graduates, had more students counted under it, with over 382,000, according to TEA’s most recent data. 

The state tracks leavers in 19 codes that are broken into two main categories — dropouts (red) and other leavers (blue). Graduates, which far outweigh all other leavers, are not included in this chart. A TxCHSE is short for “Certificate of High School Equivalency” typically earned by passing all G.E.D. tests. Source: Texas Education Agency (KXAN Interactive/David Barer)

Texas’s withdrawal and dropout data doesn’t track absenteeism and truancy even though those have been major topics in Texas education policy for years and school districts – and the court system – dedicate ample resources to address them.

TEA does separately track chronic absenteeism and truancy – data published in federal report cards and the Texas Performance Reporting System – but that research doesn’t link those issues directly to dropouts and withdrawals.

Back in 2015, the state completely overhauled truancy punishments, switching penalties from the criminal justice system to the civil courts. Last year, more than 12,000 kids were sent to municipal or justice of the peace courts on truancy referrals. A previous KXAN investigation found neither TEA, nor the state’s Office of Court Administration, tracks what orders are given to students in those courts, or whether the orders are working as intended. The state also doesn’t track how many students each district refers to truancy court.

KXAN investigators sat for hours in truancy court watching more than a dozen cases unfold in front of municipal court and justice of the peace judges. In most cases, the students were truant for reasons that were out of their control, including family issues and medical problems.

That previous truancy investigation prompted State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, to author a bill that would have added numerous data reporting requirements to guide lawmakers in identifying truancy punishment and outcome trends. The bill didn’t pass.

In light of KXAN’s latest investigation about the lack of state truancy withdrawal tracking, Zaffirini again expressed concern about not having data to guide policymakers.

“These findings are troubling because every student matters. If we don’t track withdrawals and leaver data accurately, we risk overlooking young Texans who need our support the most,” Zaffirini said in a statement. “Reliable reporting is essential to identifying problems, holding systems accountable and ensuring no student falls through the cracks.”

Youngest students left out

That murky data is also incomplete because Texas only collects leaver data for seventh grade and higher. Though Texas’ reporting complies with federal standards, it leaves out pre-K through sixth grades, which means tens of thousands of student withdrawals aren’t accounted for.

KXAN spoke with the parent of one AISD 7^th grader who highlighted how younger students are also affected by attendance issues.

The mother, who asked not to be identified, told KXAN that last year, health problems hit the family and hindered them from getting her Paredes Middle School daughter to campus.

The mother had suffered strokes, damaging her eyesight and affecting her ability to walk.

For weeks, records show the campus officials called and met with her mom to discuss how to get her daughter to class. The mother wanted a bus to pick her daughter up. Campus leaders asked if she could walk with other kids. They never agreed on a solution, and, by late October 2024, the girl had missed 18 consecutive days of school.

The family requested the girl not be named, but KXAN has investigated the case for months and verified the details of their story with school records and family documents. The middle school girl was withdrawn from AISD last year, after her mother signed a withdrawal form indicating her daughter would be homeschooled. However, when school officials asked the mother to complete that form, they knew her daughter was not enrolled in any homeschool or online learning program, and the mother had voiced confusion about her daughter’s education options.

“She had just gotten started with cheer. She wants to do theater, so she’s missing out on all of that,” said the mother, who suffered her third stroke last year. “My son started being stressed and ended up in the hospital. He has usually been my backup – when I’d be down – to get her to school.”

For younger kids, similar scenarios could be playing out thousands of times across Texas, but the state doesn’t collect withdrawal data for sixth grade or below.

Through the Texas Public Information Act, KXAN obtained internal data from some of Texas’ largest school districts that include those lower grade levels, showing how many student dropouts may not be tracked by the state.

Click the school district’s name to see their data chart. “Other” dropouts below 7th grade (colored red) are not reported to the state or federal government. Dropouts in 7th grade and above (colored in blue) are reported to state and federal education agencies. Sources: Austin, Dallas and Conroe independent school districts. (KXAN Interactive/David Barer)

For example, in the 2023-24 school year, AISD’s internal data counts over 5,000 total students withdrawn under the “other” dropout code, with more than 4,200 of them below seventh grade. AISD said that preliminary data could be inflated because some students are counted multiple times.

That means more than 80% of AISD’s dropouts listed as “other,” which include an unknown number of students withdrawn for absenteeism, aren’t reported to the state or federal government through “leaver” data.

KXAN requested leaver data from 10 of the largest school districts in the state. We charted data from Austin, Dallas and Conroe ISDs because they provided uniform data that did not include extra internal codes and categories.

Dallas ISD recorded nearly 2,800 students withdrawn under the “other” dropout code that year, with about 1,800 below grade seven. That’s about 64% of “other” dropouts not counted in state leaver data totals. Dallas ISD said it did not have any comment on its dropout numbers.

That same year, Conroe ISD recorded nearly 2,000 students withdrawn under the “other” dropout code, with 1,200 below seventh grade. That’s 60% of the Conroe ISD’s “other” dropouts unrecorded in state leaver data.

Conroe ISD said it follows TEA guidance and dedicates hundreds of staff hours and “significant taxpayer investment” to comply with state reporting requirements, researching why students leave and “to minimize the use of ‘Code 98’ withdrawals.”

“Under Texas’s accountability system, only students in grades 7–12 are included in state dropout calculations,” a Conroe ISD spokesperson said in a statement. “Consequently, the district devotes intensive verification resources to those grades to ensure compliance with TEA requirements and accurate dropout reporting.”

Conroe ISD said elementary grade students “often move during the summer without formally withdrawing, and these younger students are not counted as dropouts under Texas or federal accountability definitions.”

Xavier Warren, president of the Texas Association for Truancy and Dropout Prevention, told KXAN it would be better if the state collected that data because students’ early education has a significant impact on their success.

“Where you start is kind of how you finish,” he said.

Overall, Warren said he thinks most school districts are doing the best they can with the resources they have, but data collection could be improved.

“Oftentimes, those youngsters fall through the cracks, because we just expect that a kindergartener, first grade, second, third, fourth, would want to go to school, that their parents have enough parental control or management of the student or child to make them or have them go to school and achieve at their highest level,” Warren said.

Big states, different approaches

Dr. Joshua Childs, an associate professor of education leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, echoed Warren’s sentiment. Finer data collection gives researchers a better footing for data analysis, he said.

“Various states collect data in different ways – and it would be nice in a state like Texas to really get some of that more qualitative ‘what’s happening’ in the data,” Childs said.

The two other largest states in the country, Florida and California, both collect more granular data than Texas about withdrawals due to absences.

Florida districts must specifically report when they withdraw students as young as the pre-K level for non-attendance.

In California, public school districts have a code specifically for truant students who exit the system.

‘Standard process’

TEA told KXAN it follows a standard process when districts submit their data to the Public Education Information Management System, commonly called PEIMS.

The data goes through a validation process, and TEA said it conducts additional analyses to ensure the data is accurate and reliable.

If there are problems with the data, TEA can begin a “compliance review.” After that, they can issue a corrective action plan requiring a district to improve its data accuracy and collection practices. TEA said it would not release corrective action plans to KXAN, or even the number of plans made in the past year, because those are considered “audit working papers” exempt from public disclosure.

TEA has a research team that digs into the PEIMS dropout data for insights. Its most recent report from the 2022-23 school year shows the state’s entire 2023 graduating class had just over 403,000 students and a 6.3% longitudinal dropout rate, which tracks the class’s dropouts over four years, rather than measuring just a single year.

History of tracking

Texas’ effort to address dropouts has been four decades in the making. In the mid-1980s, following the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” which investigated the declining state of American education, lawmakers and education leaders set about improving the state’s dropout records.

One report presented to the 1986 Legislature estimated a third of Texas students dropped out before completing high school. “Excessive absences” was one of the five most frequently cited reasons for students leaving school, according to TEA’s report.

In response to that report, the Legislature passed measures that “substantially increased state and local responsibilities for collecting student dropout information, monitoring dropout rates, and providing dropout reduction services.”

Since then, lawmakers have consistently tweaked dropout and leaver reporting. And, in response, TEA has steadily altered and refined its dropout data collection methods. A TEA chronology notes more than two dozen changes to the definitions and data collection of dropouts since the late 80s.

For example, in 2019, lawmakers passed a measure adding two new leaver codes, one for pregnancy and another for students with significant medical conditions or injuries.

Still, excess absences and truancy remain off the leaver code list.

Investigative Photojournalist Richie Bowes, Investigative Intern Elijah Carll, Graphic Artist Wendy Gonzalez, Director of Investigations & Innovation Josh Hinkle and Digital Director Kate Winkle contributed to this report.