JACKSON, Miss. ( WJTV ) – Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann (R-Miss.) proposed several policy measures for the 2025 Legislative Session in order to tackle Mississippi’s high chronic absenteeism rate in public schools.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing more than 18 days of the school year, or 10%, for any reason including excused absences, unexcused absences, and suspensions.

According to officials, the state’s chronic absenteeism rate for the 2022-23 school year was 23.9%. While the rate has begun to trend down since the pandemic, and is lower than some other states, Hosemann said it’s still more than 10 percentage points above the state’s 13% rate during the 2018-2019 school year.

“If students are not in the classroom, they are not learning. We need to drill down into this data and see where our biggest opportunities for driving up the rate are, particularly regarding unexcused absences,” he said.

Some of the ideas proposed by the lieutenant governor include restricting the use of cellphones in public schools, moving school attendance officers from the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) to district-level supervision, increasing school attendance officer salaries, and encouraging low-performing schools to consider moving to a modified calendar.

Several bills were introduced in the 2024 Legislative Session addressing school attendance officers, but they did not pass.

When classes resume in the fall, Hosemann said he plans to visit schools in different regions of the state which have lower and higher chronic absenteeism rates to hear about on-the-ground challenges and other possible solutions to the problem.

Hosemann has also asked the K-12 and Postsecondary Mental Health Task Force to examine this issue in the context of child and adolescent mental health and its impact on school attendance and academic performance.

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