Staff at K-12 public schools in Massachusetts missed an average 12 days of work during the 2024-2025 school year, apart from summer vacation and breaks.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released the staff absenteeism data for the first time on Tuesday, though Commissioner Pedro Martinez noted it was "not popular" with certain stakeholders.
"There's a lot of nuance that goes on here, but if you think about a typical 180-day school year, and you have students missing an average 12 days a year, and you have teachers missing an average 12 days a year, for example... In your 180-day school year where students have access to our amazing teachers for high-quality instruction, that number of school days comes down," DESE data chief Rob Curtin said during a board of education meeting Tuesday.
A slide projected on a screen showed that if a teacher's missed days and a student's missed days did not overlap, it's possible that the student would only have 156 days of instructional time with their teacher.
The report defined an absence as "missing more than half of the workday for time that falls outside of paid vacation time or district-approved professional activities."
DESE staff emphasized that the data is not meant to place blame on teachers, and has more nuance to it than student absentee data, as teachers and administrators may have different contractual schedules or excused leaves of absence. Still, they said, it's valuable to evaluate "how it's impacting student learning."
The department has been studying student absenteeism for years, and in the most recent academic year students averaged 12 missed school days. Students who miss more than 10 days are considered "chronically absent," but Curtin said the same designation does not apply to teachers and administrators.
Student absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic, and state education officials are trying to target the issue with a "Your Presence is Powerful" campaign to raise awareness around attendance.
The first-of-its-kind staff absence data released Tuesday showed the 160,000 school administrators, teachers, assistants and other staff who worked in Bay State schools last academic year had a 93.4% attendance rate.
Among administrators, it was 94.5% while among teachers it was 93.5%. That number is similar to student absenteeism numbers, at 93.2%.
"We want our districts to really look at this data," Martinez said. "And, by the way, celebrate it if you're seeing you're well below the average, because I see some of those that are close to zero... And then let's understand the stories of when the numbers are above the average. I always tell superintendents, lead with empathy. Let's understand what it is first, and then also understand the impact it might be having on your student achievement."
Among the districts with the highest staff attendance rate, Medford reported 100%, followed by Boxford rand Pioneer Charter School of Science II with 99.2% and 99.1% of staff present at work every day.
On the lower end, King Philip has a 89% staff attendance rate in the data set, followed by City on a Hill Charter Public School at 89.2% and Grafton at 89.4%.
Curtin and Martinez noted that as DESE makes this reporting an annual routine, they will address questions about whether leave should count towards staff absences, and other discrepancies that could be skewing the data.
"But at the end, what really we want to get down to is we want districts to have ownership of the data and to understand how it's impacting what's happening in their classrooms," Martinez said.
Sam Drysdale is a reporter for State House News Service and State Affairs Pro Massachusetts. Reach her at sdrysdale@statehousenews.com.
