September 24, 2025 – More Bulldogs are showing up to school. District attendance data showed strong growth in attendance rates for students during the 2024–25 school year, improving from 78.3% to 83.7% of our students achieving an overall attendance rate of 90% or higher for the year, along with an average daily attendance rate of 94%. 

By building, the overall attendance breakdown looks like this: 

• MHS from 71.5-76.4%
• MMS from 75.5-80.5%
• HAW from 87.6-92.6%
• EF from 90.0-87.0%
• MELC from 84.6-90.8

Overall Attendance Rate. The overall attendance rate measures the percentage of students who attend 90% of the time. Mexico is slightly above the state average of 78.2%, which also shows an increase from previous years, yet it is still lower than the 87.3% rate in 2019 before the pandemic. 

Average Daily Attendance. The 83% overall attendance percentage is not to be confused with “average daily attendance,” which measures how many students are at school on an average school day. In Mexico, 94% of students attend school on most days. 

Chronic Absenteeism. The district’s ultimate goal is to reduce chronic absenteeism, which means students missing more than 10% of school time, which averages out to more than two absences a month. Last year, about17% of students fell into this category for Mexico Public Schools. 

Getting kids to school matters because when they frequently miss school, they often fall behind academically, feel less connected to their classmates, and can become overwhelmed trying to catch up.

Assistant Superintendent Julie Lower-Welch works closely with the student services team. She reported that the buildings offer attendance incentives as well as intervention practices from the team, which saw much success under attendance coordinator Wendy Lentz last year. 

Efforts continue this year as students face a variety of reasons and underlying issues that contribute to their missing school. Lower added, “The work will continue this year as our social workers have taken the lead in attendance interventions. Moving forward, we have a full-time social worker at both Eugene Field and Hawthorne elementary schools. In addition, the C2C full-service site coordinators are now serving on their building attendance teams to help identify students with consistent attendance and provide regular incentives.”

Attendance numbers are also included in the district’s score on the Annual Performance Report (APR) with DESE,  based on the number of students who attend 90% of the time. 

Superintendent Troy Lentz confirmed that seeing success in attendance numbers allows the district to receive more state aid. However, this is just one part of the equation in student success – and not a dollar sign for each student. 

“It’s true that some of our funding is tied to Average Daily Attendance (ADA). Last year, ours was about 94%. At the heart of the work is helping kids succeed and supporting them as a person,” Dr. Lentz shared. “What it all boils down to is that we care about our kids and want to see them here at school.”

The data shows that when there’s a focus on helping students attend more consistently, their confidence grows and their learning improves. 

Historical Context. Like schools everywhere, Mexico Public Schools felt the impact of the pandemic, and not just for a semester or two.

When schools closed in spring 2020, students missed an entire quarter of in-person learning. By fall, students and teachers were back together, but masks made it harder for kids to pick up on things like word pronunciation and phonics. Then came the quarantines. During the 2021–2022 school year, hundreds of students missed large chunks of time. At Mexico Middle School alone, over 300 students collectively missed more than 2,000 days of instruction. The absences continued into the 2022–2023 school year, indicating that students required additional support to catch up.

Getting back on track. In 2023, the district launched a focused effort to help students get back on track — starting with reading. Teachers placed a stronger emphasis on the Science of Reading and introduced DESE’s Reading Success Plans for students who needed additional help.

By 2024, the second year of Reading Success Plans was underway. A group of teachers began LETRS training with DESE to deepen their expertise in teaching reading, and a teacher-selected team implemented the 95 Core Phonics curriculum. At the middle school level, after-school clubs were introduced. The inaugural year of the Link Crew program also helped students transition from 8th grade to high school. 

This school year, 2025, marks the third year of Reading Success Plans, the second year of LETRS training, and the launch of a brand-new math curriculum to strengthen student learning even further. The Link Crew transition program also blossomed into WEB, a transitional program for 6th graders as they enter middle school. 

Together with a focus on improving attendance, these efforts are helping students make real progress, not just in test scores, but in confidence, connection, and learning.