Many Ohio parents and taxpayers have a new tool from the state to track a key metric in schools: attendance.
It’s not mandatory for districts to submit student counts to the new attendance.ohio.gov dashboard. But state leaders are hoping schools will want to use it to deal with chronic absenteeism, which averages about one in four students statewide.
The dashboard is searchable by districts and individual school buildings. And Gov. Mike DeWine said the timeliness of the data is important.
"For the first time, we'll have data updated weekly," DeWine said. "Previously, this information was only released with state report cards each fall, long after any of the problems could be addressed. Now, communities won't have to wait months to understand what's happening inside their schools."
DeWine had announced the statewide attendance dashboard in his State of the State speech last month. He said he doesn't have the power to mandate districts submit attendance data. And not all districts are adding in their student counts, including some of the districts with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism.
"We have about 24% of our districts and schools who have not yet participated in sharing their data," said Steve Dackin, the director of the Department of Education and Workforce, which is managing the dashboard. "We're working, actually, with a lot of those districts. We do not have a unified data system in our state. So one of the challenges that we have is there are different data systems that has to talk to this system."
Among the districts not submitting data are Lorain, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, which have some of highest rates of chronic absenteeism among the state's big districts. But Akron, Canton, East Cleveland and Youngstown, which also have high chronic absenteeism rates, are on the dashboard.
Here are the highest chronic absenteeism rates of big districts, according to the 2025 state report cards issued by DEW:
- Lorain 59.2%
- Youngstown 57.9%
- Cleveland 55.7%
- East Cleveland 53.2%
- Columbus 52.6%
- Cincinnati 45.6%
- Dayton 44.5%
- Akron 43.5%
- Toledo 38.9%
- Canton 33%
"Once those bigger schools are on, then we're going to have a better picture of what's going on statewide at least," DeWine said.
DeWine cited some districts that have lowered their absenteeism rate by tracking which kids miss school and the reasons why: "They learned that many students actually wanted to be in school, but they were facing real barriers transportation challenges, health issues, difficult situations at home, and other reasons."
He said that helped East Cleveland City Schools reduce its chronic absenteeism rate by 10% and Union Local Schools in Belmont County drop its rate by nearly 6%.
The dashboard is only set up for public school districts. When asked about adding in private schools, DeWine said, "We'll see how this works. It could be valuable to them. And in discussions with them we'll see what they want to do."
"There's no bigger problem than this right now. We have to get kids in our schools and affects every facet of learning for them," said Dackin. "It is just one tool. But it's a pretty powerful one and we're excited about it."
