Chronic absence in Texas roughly doubled from 11% in 2018-19 to 20% in 2022-23. That is the real news in a paid release from software company Minga, distributed on EIN Presswire on October 23. The company’s pitch is flashier: Texas school absenteeism costs a single mid-sized campus roughly $310,000 a year, and most schools are missing the early warning sign.
Every empty desk in a Texas classroom comes with a price tag. When a student stays home, the district loses money that day. That makes absenteeism a budget problem as well as a learning one.
The $310,000 in Texas school absenteeism is an illustration, not an audit
The headline figure is not a metric schools forgot to track. It is a hypothetical. Minga says a campus with 1,000 students that moves from 90% to 95% attendance would gain roughly $310,000 a year in funding.
The math holds up on its own terms. Five percent of 1,000 students is 50 kids. Multiply that by the $6,215 per-student figure the release cites, and you get about $310,750. However, no real district is named as having lost that amount.
So the number is a useful back-of-the-envelope estimate, not a documented loss, and the company selling attendance tools wrote it.
Two metrics: what funds schools and what defines chronic absence
Two different attendance measures are in play, and they are easy to mix up. Funding runs on average daily attendance, meaning how many students show up each day. Chronic absence is a separate line: missing 10% or more of school days. The two problems overlap, but they are not the same one. Minga’s 90-to-95% example is about funding, not about that threshold.
Why Texas school attendance drives every district’s budget
The money part is real. Texas funds its schools largely on average daily attendance. A student who is absent that day does not count toward the district’s funding, according to the Texas Association of School Boards. In fact, Texas is one of the few states that funds schools this way.
Costs, meanwhile, don’t shrink. The lights stay on and the teacher still gets paid, as a Community Impact report on the state funding formula noted.
That is why attendance campaigns in Texas double as budget moves. The same pressure shows up elsewhere, too: school outbreaks that bring back a familiar disruption hit attendance first.
The survey, and the question it raises
Minga says it surveyed Texas secondary principals at the TASSP Summer Workshop 2026. Tardiness ranked first as their top behavior problem, and attendance came second. Together they drew more than double the responses of every other category combined, the company says.
The release gives no sample size and no method. That is a big caveat.
A survey of principals at one workshop shows what is on their minds. It doesn’t show what is happening statewide, so it says little about student absenteeism in Texas as a whole.
The company also calls tardiness a direct predictor of chronic absence. That is Minga’s claim, and the release cites no study for it. Common sense says kids who drift in late are more likely to drift out entirely. Still, common sense is not data.
Texas chronic absence: the real problem behind the pitch
The bigger problem behind the pitch is real. The doubling from 11% to 20% comes from a Children at Risk analysis of state data, reported by Click2Houston. More than 936,000 students missed at least a tenth of instruction that year.
The release also cites an enrollment drop of more than 76,000 students and a new state law, SB 991, that triggers mandatory intervention for chronic absence. I could not independently confirm either, or the current per-student allotment. I also found no newer statewide chronic-absence figure, and reports differ slightly on the allotment, so treat the exact dollar amounts as approximate.
What happens next for Texas school attendance
The release names no deadlines. The real tests are simple. Does the state’s latest attendance data confirm the trend? Does any district publish what late arrivals actually cost it?
Meanwhile, state politics will shape how the problem gets handled. For more on that, see our explainer on the Texas governor’s race.
If you have a kid in a Texas school, attendance is part of how your district pays its bills, and your campus can do something about it. The cheap fix is the old one. Ask how it tracks tardies, and whether anyone calls home.
You don’t need a $310,000 software contract to notice that a kid is always late. So who is going to notice?
