For five straight years before the pandemic, Delaware's English learner students showed up to school at higher rates than their peers. In 2016, their chronic absenteeism rate sat 2.8 percentage points below the state average. In 2019, the gap had narrowed but still favored English learners: 14.0% chronically absent versus 15.1% statewide, a 1.1-point advantage.

One year of pandemic disruption erased all of it. By the 2020-21 school year, English learner chronic absenteeism had nearly doubled to 27.4%, blowing past the state average of 22.1%. The gap did not just close. It inverted: English learners were suddenly 5.2 percentage points worse than average.

Four years later, that inversion persists. In 2024-25, English learner chronic absenteeism stands at 17.4%, just above the state average of 17.1%. The 0.3-point gap is small, but the structural shift it represents is not. A population that once outperformed the average on attendance no longer does.

Five years of advantage, erased in one

The pre-COVID pattern was consistent and substantial. From 2015 through 2019, English learner chronic absenteeism ran 1.1 to 2.8 percentage points below the state average every single year. Researchers have documented this pattern nationally: immigrant families tend to prioritize school attendance, and for many English learners, school serves as a primary point of community connection, language acquisition, and social integration. The attendance advantage was not incidental. It was structural.

COVID dismantled those structures. Remote learning severed the school-as-hub connection. Essential worker families, disproportionately represented among immigrant communities, faced scheduling disruptions that persisted well after buildings reopened. A UCLA and University of Pennsylvania study of 444,000 students across four California districts found the same reversal: no meaningful difference in absenteeism between English learners and peers in 2016, then a sharp divergence by 2021, with English learners absent at higher rates. The researchers found that students reclassified as English-proficient recovered to pre-pandemic absence levels, suggesting the absenteeism problem concentrates among those who remain classified as English learners.

The slowest recovery in the building

Delaware's overall chronic absenteeism recovery has been strong: 81% of the way back to pre-COVID levels, with an accelerating pace. English learners have not kept up.

The state average sits 2.0 percentage points above its 2019 baseline. English learners sit 3.4 points above theirs, the largest excess of any major subgroup. Only economically disadvantaged students come close, at 3.0 points above their own pre-COVID rate. LEP recovery stands at 74.4%, trailing the statewide 81.0%.

In raw numbers, the gap is more tangible. In 2019, 2,060 English learners were chronically absent out of 14,701 total. In 2025, it is 3,353 out of 19,238. The LEP population grew by 31% over that span, but the number of chronically absent English learners grew by 63%.

Inside Colonial and Brandywine

The statewide numbers smooth over district-level variation that ranges from near-zero to above 23%.

Colonial^↗ET School District has the highest LEP chronic absenteeism rate among traditional districts at 23.2%, up from 15.2% in 2019. Nearly one in four of Colonial's 1,510 English learners is chronically absent. Colonial's overall chronic rate, 24.9%, already places it well above the state average, but the deterioration among English learners has been sharper: an 8.0-point increase compared to the district's 5.6-point overall rise.

Brandywine^↗ET tells a similar story. Its LEP chronic rate more than doubled from 9.4% in 2019 to 19.8% in 2025, a 10.4-point swing that represents the largest absolute increase among districts with sizable English learner populations.

The bright spots sit at the opposite end. Seaford^↗ET School District dropped its LEP chronic rate from 13.8% to 6.1%, and Woodbridge^↗ET collapsed from 13.6% to 3.4%. Both Sussex County districts posted improvements across all subgroups, but the LEP gains were disproportionately strong, suggesting that whatever interventions drove those turnarounds reached English learner families effectively.

What the grade-level data reveals

The grade-level breakdown exposes where the LEP absenteeism problem concentrates. In elementary grades, the increase from 2019 to 2025 is moderate: first grade went from 12.2% to 14.9%, third grade from 8.3% to 12.8%. The system is struggling, but not collapsing.

High school is a different story. Ninth-grade LEP chronic absenteeism sits at 26.2% in 2025, down from 30.8% in 2019. That is one of the few grades where the rate actually improved. But 10th grade (25.4%), 11th grade (26.6%), and 12th grade (25.3%) remain elevated, and the sheer size of the high school LEP population has grown: ninth-grade LEP enrollment more than doubled from 845 to 1,801 students.

The UCLA study found that the absenteeism reversal was "particularly acute for older students and those classified as English learners for six or more years." Delaware's grade data fits that pattern. The elementary grades, where English learner identification is newer and families are more closely connected to the school, show less damage. The upper grades, where disengagement compounds, show the most persistent scars.

A growing population with a stickier problem

Delaware's English learner population grew from 9,639 in 2015 to 19,238 in 2025. It doubled. That growth complicates the recovery picture in a specific way: a large share of the current LEP population entered the system during or after the pandemic. They never experienced the pre-COVID attendance norms that characterized earlier cohorts.

The composition of who counts as an "English learner" shifts constantly. Students who gain proficiency exit the classification. New arrivals enter it. The population in 2025 is not the same population as in 2019. This makes the gap comparison both more and less alarming: more, because the structural advantage appears gone regardless of who is in the group; less, because the 2025 cohort may face different barriers than the 2019 cohort did.

"Something changed, and I think we need to understand how it changed" and how schools can "re-engage these students and families." Lucrecia Santibañez, UCLA researcher, The 74, Oct. 2024

One contributing factor that Delaware educators have flagged more broadly: the normalization of absence after remote learning. Delaware Education Secretary Mark Holodick told Delaware Public Media that "with more parents and caregivers who are working remotely, students staying home doesn't create the kind of burden that it necessarily did pre-pandemic." For English learner families where a parent works from home, the calculus around a child's mild illness or transportation difficulty may have shifted permanently.

Immigration enforcement presents another possible factor. A 2025 UCLA IDEA survey of more than 600 high school principals found that 63.8% reported students from immigrant families missing school due to policies or political rhetoric related to immigration. Delaware's growing immigrant community in Sussex and Kent Counties, where poultry processing and agriculture employ many of the families whose children are classified as English learners, is not insulated from those dynamics. Whether enforcement fears explain any of the 2024-25 data is impossible to confirm with attendance records alone, but the timing overlaps with the period when the LEP gap stopped narrowing.

The question the data cannot answer

The most important distinction this data cannot make: Is the elevated LEP absenteeism driven by the same students who were present before COVID and are now absent more, or by new students entering the system with different attendance patterns? Delaware's LEP population added roughly 4,500 students between 2019 and 2025. If those new entrants arrived with higher baseline absenteeism, perhaps because of housing instability, recent immigration, or enrollment in districts with fewer support structures, the "flip" may be less about a deterioration in existing families' behavior and more about the changing composition of who English learners are in Delaware.

The answer matters for intervention design. If the problem is re-engagement, the solution looks like outreach to families who were once connected and drifted away. If the problem is initial engagement, it looks like onboarding support, multilingual navigation, and transportation access for families who are new to the system entirely.

Either way, the 3,353 English learners who missed more than 10% of school in 2024-25 represent the largest chronically absent LEP cohort in Delaware's recorded history, even as the rate has dropped substantially from its 2021 peak. The population is growing faster than the rate is falling.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.