In Louisiana, the share of students who are chronically absent (those who miss 10 percent or more of enrolled days) reached 22.5 percent statewide in 2025. In New Orleans, individual schools land all across that range, from a handful of campuses where almost no student is chronically absent to others where most students are.

The contrast is sharpest at the two ends. Einstein Charter School at Village De L'Est^↗ET, which serves a primarily Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans East, reported 0.0 percent chronic absenteeism in 2025. McDonogh 35 Senior High School reported 70.4 percent. Both are New Orleans high schools reporting in the same year, in the same statewide dataset.

Schools at the low end

Several New Orleans schools posted some of the lowest chronic absenteeism rates in the state in 2025:

• Einstein Charter at Village De L'Est: 0.0 percent
• New Orleans Center for Creative Arts: 3.6 percent
• Benjamin Franklin High School: 5.3 percent
• Audubon Charter School: 8.2 percent

These campuses share a common thread: each draws a defined or selective student body. The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts is an arts program students apply to attend, Benjamin Franklin High School admits students by academic criteria, and Einstein at Village De L'Est is anchored in a specific neighborhood community.

Schools at the high end

Other New Orleans high schools reported chronic absenteeism well above the state figure in 2025:

• McDonogh 35 Senior High School: 70.4 percent
• Walter L. Cohen High School: 53.6 percent
• Warren Easton Charter Foundation: 50.8 percent
• Eleanor McMain Secondary School: 45.5 percent

At McDonogh 35, roughly seven in ten students missed at least a tenth of the school year. These are open-enrollment high schools, and their rates run roughly double the statewide figure of 22.5 percent.

How Orleans Parish compares

In the 2025 data, the Orleans Parish school system is reported under two separate Louisiana Department of Education codes, one showing 26.1 percent chronic absenteeism and the other 32.4 percent. The state does not label which schools fall under each code in the published file, so we report both figures as they appear rather than combine or interpret them. Both readings sit at or above the statewide rate of 22.5 percent.

What stands out is not a single parish number but the distance between individual campuses. The gap between Einstein at Village De L'Est and McDonogh 35 is more than 70 percentage points, among the widest school-to-school differences anywhere in Louisiana.

Why the range matters

Chronic absenteeism is one of the clearest early signals that a student is disengaging from school, and it tracks closely with later academic struggles. A 70-point gap between New Orleans campuses means students a few miles apart are having very different relationships with daily attendance.

The schools at the low end tend to be selective or community-anchored programs. The schools at the high end tend to be open-enrollment campuses that serve higher shares of students from low-income households, where attendance is shaped by transportation, work, family caregiving, and housing stability. Those are the conditions a citywide attendance strategy has to reach.

NOLA Public Schools has announced an Attendance Hearing Office to intervene when individual schools struggle with chronic absence. Whether a citywide mechanism can narrow a 70-point gap between campuses is an open question, and one the 2025 numbers make pressing.

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