Student Attendance Dashboard — California chronic absenteeism & ADA check

Thirty-five school days into the year, a 9th grader in California has been expected at school 35 times and has shown up 30. That is 5 days absent, an absence rate of 14.3%. Under the rule the California Department of Education uses, that student is already chronically absent.

The CDE rule has two parts, and most spreadsheets only apply one of them. First, eligibility: a student counts toward the chronic absenteeism measure only if they were expected to attend 31 or more instructional days at that school and attended at least one. Second, the threshold: an eligible student is chronically absent when they miss 10% or more of the days they were expected to attend. The rate is the number of chronically absent students divided by the number of eligible students, not by everyone on the roster.

That first part changes answers. Take a 4th grader who enrolled late: 25 days expected, 20 attended. The absence rate is 20.0%, double the line. But 25 is under 31, so the CDE count leaves the student out entirely: not eligible yet. A template that divides by enrollment will show this student as chronic and will put a different number on your board slide than the state does.

Now a 2nd grader at the same point in the year: 35 days expected, 32 attended. Three absences, 8.6%. On track today. In a 180-day calendar the full-year 10% line sits at 18 absences, so this student has 15 days left before crossing it. That number tells an attendance team who is close to the line.

Absences also have a funding side. California's Local Control Funding Formula pays per unit of average daily attendance (ADA), and ADA counts days attended. The CDE's 2025–26 adjusted base grant per ADA is $11,323 for TK–3, $10,411 for grades 4–6, $10,719 for grades 7–8 and $12,746 for grades 9–12. One absent day in a 180-day year is 1/180 of an ADA. For the 9th grader above, 5 absent days × $12,746 ÷ 180 = $354.06 of ADA value. For a 7th grader with 120 days expected and 104 attended, the 16 absences come to $952.80 at the 7–8 rate. These figures price absences at the base grant rate. How much actually reaches your budget depends on your LEA's funded-ADA rules, so treat them as a valuation, not a bill.

You can check one student right now on the free page: pick the grade, type days expected and days attended, keep or change the 180 instructional days, and you get six results. Those are days absent, absence rate, eligibility, CDE status, days left before the full-year line and ADA value.

The paid file is a Tableau workbook (.twb) that runs the same rules on every student in your own export. It holds 8 calculated fields: Days Absent, Chronic Eligible, Chronically Absent, Chronic Absenteeism Rate, Attendance Rate, Absence Days Left, Absence Tier and ADA Value of Absences. It also has 5 named sheets and an Attendance Overview dashboard. The .twb contains no data. Export a year-to-date summary from Aeries, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus or Synergy with one row per student, open the workbook in Tableau Desktop or Tableau Public, and use Edit Connection to point it at your CSV. The README lists the 11 column names it expects. Menu names vary by Tableau version and UI language.

Absence Tier sorts every student into Not eligible yet, Chronically absent, Watch (3 or fewer days left) or On track. Filter to Watch and put Teacher on rows: each advisor gets a short list.

If you would rather pay someone to build it, the BLS OEWS 2025 median wage for data scientists is $57.80 per hour.