Nearly Two in Five Native American Students in Arizona Are Chronically Absent

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On the Hualapai reservation in northwestern Arizona, Peach Springs Unified^↗ posted a chronic absenteeism rate of 64.9% in 2024-25. Nearly two out of three students missed at least 18 days of school. At San Carlos Unified^↗, on the San Carlos Apache reservation in eastern Arizona, the rate was 61.7%.

These are not outliers in the data. They are the extreme end of a pattern that runs through every measure of attendance for Native American students in Arizona.

Statewide, 37.3% of Native American students were chronically absent in 2024-25. That is 13.5 percentage points above the overall state rate of 23.8% — a gap that has actually widened since before the pandemic.

A Gap That Grew

In 2018-19, the last full pre-COVID school year, Native American students had a chronic absenteeism rate of 22.4%, compared to 12.7% overall. The gap was 9.7 percentage points — significant, but within a range where targeted interventions might make a dent.

COVID blew it open. By 2022-23, the Native American rate had reached 44.8%, meaning nearly half of all Native American students were missing at least 10% of school days. The gap peaked at 16.9 points in 2020-21 before narrowing slightly to 16.6 in 2022-23.

Recovery has been real but insufficient. The Native American rate dropped from 44.8% to 37.3% over two years. But the overall rate dropped faster, so the gap has only narrowed from 16.6 to 13.5 points — still 3.8 points wider than it was before COVID.

The Highest Rate of Any Racial Group

Among all racial and ethnic subgroups tracked by the Arizona Department of Education, Native American students face the highest chronic absenteeism rate by a substantial margin.

Pacific Islander students are next at 29.3%, followed by Hispanic students at 27.9%. White students, at 17.8%, and Asian students, at 9.0%, are well below the state average. The spread between the highest and lowest racial subgroups is 28.3 percentage points — a chasm within a single state's education system.

On the Reservations

The state-level figure of 37.3% obscures the severity in reservation communities. Among districts serving predominantly Native American populations, the rates in 2024-25 ranged from devastating to catastrophic:

District	Chronic Rate (2024-25)
Peach Springs Unified	64.9%
San Carlos Unified	61.7%
Window Rock Unified	47.2%
Red Mesa Unified	42.8%
Kayenta Unified	39.0%
Chinle Unified	38.0%
Whiteriver Unified	34.2%
Tuba City Unified	27.9%
Ganado Unified	25.3%

Peach Springs has been above 62% for all four years of available district data, with no meaningful trend toward improvement — 75.4% in 2022, 70.4% in 2023, 62.2% in 2024, 64.9% in 2025. San Carlos followed a similar pattern, dropping from 75.7% to 52.5% before spiking back to 61.7%.

Tuba City: A Different Story

The exception on this list is Tuba City Unified^↗, the Navajo Nation district that cut its chronic rate from 57.2% in 2022 to 27.9% in 2025 — a 29.3 percentage point drop over three years.

That trajectory is remarkable. Tuba City went from one of the worst-performing reservation districts to one that is now below the state average. The improvement was not a statistical artifact: it proceeded steadily, averaging about 10 points per year over three consecutive years, though the pace varied.

What Tuba City did differently would be valuable to understand. The district shares the same structural challenges as its neighbors — remote location, high poverty rates, limited transportation infrastructure, the legacy of boarding schools and forced assimilation. Yet it managed sustained, dramatic improvement while districts just hours away on the same reservation system remained stuck above 60%.

The Gap Is Widening

The pre-COVID gap of 9.7 points was already bad. It reflected decades of underfunding, geographic isolation, and the lasting damage of assimilationist education policies. The current gap of 13.5 points is worse, and nothing about the trajectory suggests it will narrow on its own.

For reservation districts, the barriers are well documented: long distances to school in communities without reliable public transportation, high rates of poverty and housing instability, limited access to health care, intergenerational trauma, and schools that have historically reflected the priorities of outside institutions rather than tribal communities.

None of these barriers are new. But the pandemic stripped away whatever fragile systems held attendance rates closer to 22% before COVID, and those systems have not been fully rebuilt.

This is not a story of temporary pandemic disruption. The gap was already unacceptable before COVID, and three years of recovery have not closed it. At 37.3%, fewer than four of every five Native American students in Arizona are attending school regularly. Tuba City proved dramatic improvement is possible. But Tuba City is one district. The reservation system has dozens.