• Across the border from Michigan, Indiana schools have dramatically higher attendance 
• Indiana passed laws mandating schools intervene and threatening parents with prosecution
• Lower attendance rates can hobble learning for entire schools

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FREMONT, IND. — Without a large blue and red welcome sign, it’s hard to tell when you leave Michigan and cross into Indiana on Interstate 69. The scenery remains dominated by flat farmland. Gas prices are within pennies.

The biggest difference can be seen in the school buses that cruise along the country roads on each side of the border.

The children in the Indiana buses go to school more regularly.

Students in the Michigan border district of Coldwater Public Schools miss far more classes than their peers attending Indiana’s Fremont Community Schools just a few miles away.

The story is repeated in districts across the two states. In 2024-25, about 28% of Michigan students were deemed chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days; In Indiana, it was 16.7%.

Related:

• As Lansing mulls change, Michigan schools face uphill fight against absenteeism
• Michigan K-12 crisis: State slow to respond as kids miss school, scores fall
• Alpena schools get tough on absenteeism. Parents don’t make it easy
• Michigan absenteeism FAQ: Who’s to blame? What are penalties to schools, kids?

Michigan has been slow to respond to its attendance crisis, while policymakers in Indiana took aggressive steps to increase attendance. New laws standardize school response to absences, threaten criminal action against students and families and create a reporting system that streams data daily from individual classrooms to state officials.

The differences are stark: Michigan has high absenteeism and low test scores, ranked 44th in the nation in fourth-grade reading proficiency in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. Indiana has low absenteeism and high test scores, ranked sixth on that same test. 

And that was before Indiana decided to crack down even more on absenteeism. 

Indiana’s efforts could provide a roadmap for Michigans as it tries to get more kids into classrooms.

“If they’re not here,” said Fremont Superintendent William Stitt, walking through a school hallway, “they’re not learning.”

An attendance culture

On a recent morning, children filed into Sara Lyon’s kindergarten class at Fremont Elementary, sliding into their desks and working on projects laid out for them to start the day. At her desk, the 23-year veteran teacher recorded attendance on a small laptop.

It was a quick task. All 13 students were there.

Among the one-story building’s 400 students, just 4.4% were deemed to be chronically absent last year. That’s a better rate than every school building in Michigan.

The elementary is part of a district that draws its about 1,000 students from farms, small towns and ritzy lake homes. The district has a chronic absentee rate of 5.9%, less than a third of the 20.9% rate across the border in the Coldwater Public Schools and less than a quarter of Michigan’s overall rate.

Fremont has fewer economically disadvantaged students (about 40%), which researchers tie to increased absenteeism, but district leaders say they also have stepped up effort to help get kids in school.

Small buses pick up homeless students, schools offer telehealth and dentistry care and a countywide “teen court” serves as a first accountability step for some truant teens. 

But Fremont officials also give credit to Indiana policymakers.

Alarmed by chronic absenteeism rates doubling during the pandemic, from 10% in 2020 to 21% in 2022, the Indiana Legislature passed laws in 2024 and 2025 aimed at increasing an attendance rate that was already significantly better than that of Michigan.

Unlike Michigan, which allows districts to set their own rules for intervention, the Indiana law proscribes steps that must be taken at different numbers of unexcused absences, including parent meetings.

As of July 1, parents can be prosecuted if elementary students have 10 more unexcused absences in a school year.

“Hearing from numerous schools, there is a problem with attendance,” Indiana state Sen. Linda Rogers told Chalkbeat Indiana after the passage of the 2025 bill. “Our great educators are saying we want to teach these kids, but if they’re not there, it’s really hard.”

Indiana’s law received some pushback from critics, who argue absenteeism isn’t a crime as much as a symptom of social-economic challenges within families. 

“Telling a parent that they’re going to end up in truancy court with the threat of their child going into the foster system isn’t going to work,” said Michael Gottfried, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education who studies attendance. 

“It never has worked.” 

Even if prosecutions turn out to be rare, the well-publicized threat has raised awareness of the importance of school attendance among Hoosier families, superintendents told Bridge Michigan, and motivated districts to redouble their efforts.

“It’s a culture change,” said Fremont’s Stitt. “It’s good to know the state has our backs.”

By contrast, Michigan allows districts more local control over absenteeism efforts, including metrics for truancy, which is when a student is repeatedly absent without an excuse. 

The Department of Education offers recommendations for attendance interventions, but there is no mandate.

Real time reporting

Indiana also in recent years has created a statewide electronic reporting system that provides real-time attendance data not only to the school districts, but to officials in Indianapolis with the click of a few keystrokes.

The system allows the state to create robust public reports on chronic absenteeism, as well as data that state officials can slice and dice throughout the year in ways that Michigan’s data collection does not allow.

Some examples that aren’t available in Michigan: Indiana officials have a breakdown of excused versus unexcused absences by school, and know at what level of annual absences test scores begin to fall (7%).

In Michigan, schools report attendance data to the state once annually, at the end of each school year.

Anthony Cassel, superintendent of Manchester Community Schools in rural northern Indiana, said the state has “tightened up” what some districts including his had already been doing with attendance data.

“I could run a report right now and know which students are absent, by period,” said Cassel, whose district had an 11% chronic absenteeism rate last year. “Those come in handy if you see a kid who is always missing Wednesday every week or is absent a lot in sixth or seventh period. We can talk to them about why.”

The state’s bully pulpit on the issue matters as much as the new laws, Cassel said.

“There hasn’t always been support outside of the school (for attendance efforts),” he said. “It’s better now, (with) the state saying, ‘Hey, we have an absentee issue.’ Parents are more aware now.”

In Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp, an Indiana district across the border from Niles, the chronic absenteeism rate last year was 8.4%. 

School officials regularly preach the importance of attendance in newsletters to parents. In homerooms, high schoolers are asked to look at their own attendance record and determine if they have teachers who they should speak to about missed assignments.

“We have always paid pretty close attention to student attendance,” said Lavon Dean-Null, assistant superintendent of instruction. “But when the state started implementing the new legislation … it prompted us to do it more intentionally.”

The new state laws have served to get all schools on the same page, said James Taylor, director of student services at Metropolitan School District of Warren Township, an urban district near Indianapolis with a 21% chronic absenteeism rate.

“All these interventions (mandated by the state) are monitored by the school district attendance team, the teachers and the administrators,” Taylor said. “Everyone is held accountable.”

Taylor said he’s glad Indiana is “taking attendance seriously” and urged Michigan to do the same.

“If your attendance is not right, your test scores will never go up,” he said. “Attendance is important for crime reduction, graduation, and stable homes.

“If your work doesn’t start with attendance, then I don’t know what a school is doing.”

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