Caddo ParishET had a COVID recovery in hand. In 2022, the Shreveport-area school district posted a 19.6% chronic absenteeism rate, just six-tenths of a point above its pre-pandemic baseline of 19.0%. Among Louisiana's large parishes, that was close to a full recovery.

Then the numbers reversed. Every year since, they have gotten worse.

Three years of worsening

Caddo's chronic absenteeism rate climbed from 19.6% in 2022 to 27.9% in 2023, an 8.3 percentage point jump in a single year. In 2024, it ticked up to 28.2%. In 2025, it reached 31.0%, an all-time high.

The parish now sits 12 percentage points above its pre-COVID rate, having lost not only the recovery it achieved but drifted far past the pandemic-era peak of 25.3% in 2021.

That 2022 number, 19.6%, so close to normal, makes the subsequent collapse harder to reconcile. Caddo didn't just stall. It accelerated in the wrong direction, adding 11.4 percentage points in three years.

Pulling away from the state

Louisiana's statewide chronic absenteeism rate is 22.5% in 2025, and the state improved by 2.1 points this year. Caddo moved the other way, widening the gap between the parish and the state to 8.5 percentage points, up from essentially zero in 2022.

The divergence is striking. In 2022, Caddo was tracking slightly below the state on chronic absenteeism. Three years later, Caddo sits among the ten Louisiana parishes with the highest chronic absenteeism rates, trailing parishes like Winn (40.8%), St. Helena (33.2%), Tensas (32.7%), and Orleans (32.4%).

Inside Caddo's schools

The school-level data reveals where the crisis concentrates. Fair Park Middle School leads at 74.5%, three in four students chronically absent. Booker T. Washington High sits at 61.6%. Caddo Middle Career and Technology School is at 58.8%. Eight Caddo schools have chronic absenteeism rates above 50%.

At the other extreme, South Highlands Elementary Magnet posts 1.2% and Fairfield Magnet sits at 2.1%. The within-district spread, from 1.2% to 74.5%, mirrors the broader state pattern of two parallel school systems operating under one administrative umbrella.

What 31% means for Shreveport

At 31.0% chronic absenteeism, nearly one in three Caddo Parish students is missing at least 18 school days per year. For a district that has simultaneously been dealing with declining enrollment, budget pressures, and facility challenges, the attendance crisis compounds every other problem.

Students who are chronically absent in the early grades are less likely to read at grade level by third grade. Those who are chronically absent in middle school are more likely to drop out. At schools like Fair Park Middle, where three out of four students meet the chronic threshold, the question isn't whether instruction is disrupted. It's whether consistent instruction is possible at all.

Caddo's trajectory is a cautionary tale for other Louisiana parishes that saw early post-COVID attendance gains. Recovery in 2022 didn't hold. The forces that keep students out of school (poverty, transportation gaps, disengagement, housing instability) didn't disappear when the rates briefly dropped. They reasserted themselves, and three years later, Shreveport's schools are worse off than at the height of the pandemic's attendance disruption.

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