About 14 percent of West Virginia's public school students - 40,000 out of 283,800 pupils in kindergarten through 12th grade - missed at least 15 days of school in the 2013-14 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data released last week.
Data was reported for all West Virginia counties except Tucker, where school officials said employee turnover was to blame for the information not being turned in.
The federal data shows seven counties had about a quarter or more of their students miss at least 15 days, meaning they were labeled "chronically absent." Cabell had the highest rate, at 29 percent, followed by Mercer at about half a percentage point behind, Wayne at 27 percent, Preston at 26 percent and Monroe, Boone and Summers all about 25 percent.
Three more counties - Wyoming, Webster and Wood - had chronic absenteeism rates exceeding 20 percent.
Kanawha, West Virginia's largest school system, had the 13th-highest rate in the state, at 19 percent, while neighboring Putnam had the eighth-lowest rate, at 5 percent.
Berkeley, an Eastern Panhandle county that's now the second-largest district, came in 27th, with an 11 percent rate, while the Northern Panhandle's Ohio County reported none of its students as chronically absent.
Among the roughly 60 regular schools in Kanawha, the two schools with the highest rates were high schools and both had about a third of their students chronically absent: Riverside, at 34 percent, and Sissonville, at 32 percent. Another high school, George Washington, had the lowest rate, at 4 percent.
For the first time, the U.S. Education Department's Civil Rights Data Collection gathered information on student absenteeism rates, showing that 6.5 million, or about 13 percent, of public school students nationwide missed at least 15 days in 2013-14. The national data showed high schoolers were the most likely of all K-12 students to be chronically absent, at about one in five students, compared to 12 percent of middle schoolers and 10 percent of elementary students.
"Frequent absences from school can be devastating to a child's education," U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said in a news release. "Missing school leads to low academic achievement and triggers dropouts. Millions of young people are missing opportunities in postsecondary education, good careers and a chance to experience the American dream."
The chronic absenteeism measure doesn't exclude absences that schools consider "excused." On a new website about the data, the federal education department notes research suggesting various reasons for the issue, including poverty, poor health and limited transportation, but says that "whatever its causes, chronic absenteeism can be devastating."
"Too few states report information about chronic absenteeism and, for too long, this crisis in our nation's public elementary and secondary schools has not been fully understood," the website states.
It says chronically absent students are much less likely to read on grade level by third grade and more likely to drop out of school.
Over the past five years, there have been efforts by the West Virginia Supreme Court, circuit court judges, school-funded probation officers, the state Department of Education, lawmakers and the governor to solve truancy issues, including a program started last year to provide truancy-diversion specialists to all 55 counties. Kanawha Circuit Judge Duke Bloom has said about 80 percent of state prison inmates had chronic truancy problems during their school years.
But truancy has been measured in multiple ways. Around 2012, the state education department reported that 9 percent of students had more than 10 unexcused absences.
Georgia Hughes-Webb, data governance manager for the education department, said the department defines chronic absenteeism as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, which equals at least 18 days for a student in a county for a full school year.
Attendance Works, a project sponsored by the nonprofit Child and Family Policy Center, also uses the 10 percent definition, and Hughes-Webb said it's a pretty standard definition among states.
The chronic absenteeism rates seem to paint a greatly different picture than the average daily attendance rates that the department posts on its ZoomWV online public data website, at zoomwv.k12.wv.us. For instance, while Cabell's chronic absenteeism rate was 29 percent in the 2013-14 school year, its average daily attendance rate was 96 percent, and the statewide rate was 97 percent.
Sherri Woods, student support services director for Cabell County Schools, said she was surprised by the chronic absenteeism data. She said she didn't believe medically excused absences should still count as absences, noting concussions from things like sports and vehicle accidents really hurt Cabell's attendance in the 2015-16 school year.
Cabell schools Superintendent Bill Smith, who suggested high rates of local drug abuse and homelessness might be behind the county's high chronic absenteeism rate, said the school system has been working with the courts to solve truancy issues and has had employees working full-time to improve attendance at Cabell-Midland and Huntington high schools since before the 2013-14 school year.
Hughes-Webb said that, after 2013-14, the state reduced the number of absences that could be excluded from counting against school systems' average daily attendance rates, which measure the average percentage of students who showed up to class every day.
She said chronic absenteeism is reported in a private site for educators that's only been running in the 2015-16 school year, but the department could provide public reporting if stakeholders, including the news media and school systems, express interest.
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1254, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.