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In Lafayette Parish, a school system has been quietly building one of the strongest attendance records in Louisiana. New figures reported this week show that Lafayette Parish schools now rank No. 1 for daily attendance in Region IV, the state’s education region that includes Acadiana and the surrounding parishes, with the lowest chronic absenteeism rate in the region.
The ranking was reported by KATC, which noted that the district has been working on attendance for the past three years. That longer view matters, because attendance does not improve by accident. It improves when schools, families and the wider community keep at it, term after term.
The story was reported by KATC as the superintendent reacted to the district’s ranking. It is a local story with a national lesson, because the numbers behind it describe a problem every school system in the United States is wrestling with: students missing so much school that their learning starts to slip, and districts struggling to bring them back.
Lafayette Parish is not a small district testing an idea in a handful of schools. It is one of Louisiana’s large school systems, serving more than 29,000 students across the parish around the city of Lafayette, in the south-central part of the state. A ranking earned at that scale is harder to achieve than one earned by a single school, because it has to hold across dozens of campuses, grade levels, and neighbourhoods at the same time.
The numbers, in plain terms
Three figures define the ranking, and each one measures something different.
Daily attendance: 92.9%. This is the share of enrolled students present on a typical school day. It is the headline figure, and it put Lafayette Parish first in Region IV. Put another way, out of every 100 students enrolled, about 93 were in class on an average day during the 2025-26 school year.
Chronic absenteeism: 22.7%. A student counts as chronically absent when they miss 10% or more of the school year, for any reason, excused or unexcused. In a typical 180-day school year, that threshold is about 18 days. Lafayette’s rate of 22.7% was the lowest in Region IV, which is why the district also took first place on this measure. It is worth pausing on what that figure still means: even in the region’s best-performing district, more than one student in five missed at least a tenth of the school year.
Truancy: 38.12%, ranked No. 2 in the region. Truancy is a narrower, legal category than chronic absenteeism. It generally covers unexcused absences, and it is counted under rules set by the state. Lafayette ranked second-best in Region IV on this measure, not first, which is a useful reminder that the district’s ranking is strong rather than perfect. There is still a neighbouring district doing slightly better on unexcused absences, and that gap is part of the story too.
Read together, the three figures tell a coherent story. Daily attendance shows the typical day. Chronic absenteeism shows the students who are drifting away over the year. Truancy shows the subset of absences that the law treats as unexcused. A district can look healthy on the first figure while struggling on the second, if the same students are missing again and again while most students attend regularly. Lafayette’s achievement is that it leads on the first two measures at once, which suggests that improvement is broad rather than concentrated in a few schools.
A three-year focus, not a one-year campaign
“Making sure students come to school has been a focus of his for the last three years.” That is how Lafayette Parish School System Superintendent Francis Touchet Jr. described the work behind a ranking that was confirmed on November 2, 2026: his district now sits at No. 1 for daily attendance in Louisiana’s Region IV, and No. 1 for the lowest chronic absenteeism rate in the region, according to state data for the 2025-26 school year.
The superintendent’s own framing is the most instructive part of the story. He did not describe a single initiative, a new slogan, or a one-term push. He described attendance as a focus sustained over three years. That timescale matters, because attendance habits in a school system change slowly. Families move, transport arrangements change, health problems come and go, and a student’s relationship with school is built over months, not weeks.
Louisiana’s education department has supported that kind of sustained work through its Power of Presence initiative, which gives school systems resources and strategies designed to reduce chronic absenteeism. The initiative’s name captures its core idea: presence itself is powerful, because a student who is not in the room cannot benefit from the teaching happening in it, however good that teaching may be.
Recent national reporting points in the same direction. A roundup of the week’s education news published on November 2 noted two recent reports on which attendance strategies work best. Their conclusions were consistent: efforts that lean heavily on truancy enforcement, on their own, are less effective than approaches built on family engagement and student connectedness. School leaders who used several evidence-based strategies together saw more success than those who relied on a single approach. Lafayette’s three-year focus fits that pattern. A district that keeps attendance on its agenda for three years is, by definition, using more than one strategy, and is giving families time to notice that the school genuinely wants their children back.
Three habits behind a regional ranking
No single policy explains a region-wide ranking, but the evidence on attendance points to three habits that districts like Lafayette tend to share. Each one is ordinary, and each one is harder than it sounds at scale.
Habit one: notice early, not at the end of term. Chronic absenteeism is defined over a whole school year, but it is created one absence at a time. The districts that improve are the ones that spot a pattern after three or four absences, when a conversation with a family can still change the term, rather than after eighteen, when the label has already attached itself to the student. Early notice requires data that is checked weekly, not filed termly.
Habit two: ask why, before deciding what to do. Absences have causes, and the causes differ. A student may miss school because of illness, transport, caring responsibilities at home, anxiety about school itself, or a family move. A response built for one cause will fail for another. That is why family engagement keeps appearing in the research: a short, respectful conversation with a family often reveals a practical barrier, such as a bus route or a shift pattern, that the school can actually help with.
Habit three: make school a place students want to return to. Connectedness sounds vague, but it has a concrete meaning. Students return to schools where they are known by name, where they have at least one adult they trust, and where missing a week does not mean returning to confusion and embarrassment. Attendance work that ignores this side of the story tends to produce compliance without enthusiasm, and compliance fades the moment pressure lifts.
None of these habits shows up in a single ranking table. They show up in the table only after years of practice, which is why the superintendent’s three-year comment is the most important sentence in the story.
Louisiana’s wider attendance push
Lafayette’s ranking did not emerge in isolation. Louisiana’s Department of Education publishes attendance data that lets districts see where they stand, and its Power of Presence initiative supplies the resources and strategies that districts draw on when they build their own attendance plans. That state-level support matters, because a single district cannot change transport, health services, or housing conditions on its own, but it can change how it responds when those conditions affect attendance.
The state-level picture also helps explain why Lafayette’s figures are reported with such care. Daily attendance, chronic absenteeism, and truancy are not interchangeable. A district that improves one measure while letting another slide has not solved the problem; it has moved it. Lafayette’s value as an example is that it leads on daily attendance and chronic absenteeism at the same time, while remaining second on truancy, which shows both progress and room for further work.
What the ranking does not say
First, a ranking is a comparison, not a verdict on every student. Even with the lowest chronic absenteeism rate in Region IV, 22.7% of Lafayette students still missed at least a tenth of the school year. That is more than one student in five. A district can lead its region and still have thousands of students whose learning is being disrupted by absence.
Second, truancy tells a different part of the story. At 38.12%, Lafayette’s truancy rate is the second-best in the region, which means unexcused absences remain a substantial issue even where overall attendance is strong. Truancy and chronic absenteeism overlap, but they are not the same thing, and a family or a school that confuses them may apply the wrong response: enforcement where support is needed, or support where a legal process is already under way.
Third, rankings compare districts at a point in time. They do not show whether a district is improving quickly or slowly, whether its gains are concentrated in particular schools, or whether the students who need the most help are the ones benefiting. Those questions require looking at trends, school-level data, and the experiences of students themselves, none of which fit into a single headline ranking.
The takeaway for families and students
For a family, the takeaway is not a ranking but a routine. The most useful question to ask at the end of a week is not whether a child is chronically absent in the technical sense, but whether a pattern is forming. Three absences in a month, for different reasons, can look harmless in isolation and still put a student on course for the 10% threshold. A family that notices early can ask the school for help before the pattern hardens.
For a student, the arithmetic is simple, and that simplicity is the point. Attendance percentage is just days present divided by days enrolled, multiplied by 100. A student who knows that formula can track their own standing without waiting for a term report. The guides on how to check your attendance percentage, how to calculate absenteeism rate, and the classroom attendance guide explain the same calculation from different angles, and they are written for exactly this kind of weekly check.
For other districts, Lafayette’s story is a reminder that rankings follow habits, not announcements. A three-year focus, built on early notice, asking why, and making school a place students want to return to, is not a slogan. It is a set of routines, repeated term after term, until the numbers move.
Questions readers are asking
What is Lafayette Parish’s daily attendance rate?
92.9%, the highest in Region IV for the 2025-26 school year.
What is its chronic absenteeism rate?
22.7%, the lowest in Region IV.
What is its truancy rate?
38.12%, ranked No. 2 in Region IV.
How is truancy different from chronic absenteeism?
Chronic absenteeism counts any absence, excused or unexcused, that reaches 10% or more of the school year. Truancy is a narrower, legal category that generally covers unexcused absences under state rules. A student can be chronically absent without being truant, and the two measures point to different kinds of response.
What is Power of Presence?
It is Louisiana’s education department initiative that gives school systems resources and strategies to reduce chronic absenteeism. Its core idea is that presence itself is powerful, because a student who is not in the room cannot benefit from the teaching happening there.
How long has Lafayette been working on attendance?
Three years, according to the superintendent, who described attendance as a sustained focus rather than a one-term push.
Lafayette’s ranking is a milestone, not a finish line. The district leads its region on daily attendance and chronic absenteeism, while remaining second on truancy. That combination, strong but imperfect, is probably the most honest picture of where the district stands: ahead of its neighbours, still working, and with a clear sense of what comes next.
