The bill directs the California Department of Education (CDE) to prepare the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CLPADS) to include a quarterly rate of pupil attendance. Preparation includes adding data fields, defining business rules, building transfer processes, and consulting with the Department of Finance, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, and stakeholder organizations representing administrators, staff, and parents.
This change is intended to give local educational agencies (LEAs) standardized, periodic reports (district, school, class, and individual pupil level) that support early-warning systems to identify and assist pupils at risk of dropping out. The measure also ties chronic absenteeism reporting into the state's dropout reporting framework and anticipates an alternate chronic absenteeism calculation tied to attendance recovery programs.
At a Glance
What It Does
Requires CDE to modify CLPADS so it can receive, store, and report a quarterly pupil attendance rate, by adding fields, business rules, and data-transfer processes and by consulting state fiscal offices and stakeholder groups. The system must be able to produce periodic reports down to the individual pupil level on absence rates and chronic absenteeism.
Who It Affects
Local educational agencies (school districts, county offices), school and district administrators, data and IT staff, teachers and parents who will receive early-warning reports, and state budget/analytic offices involved in system design and validation.
Why It Matters
It creates a state-standardized source of quarterly attendance data that feeds early-warning systems and dropout reporting—changing how districts identify at-risk students and plan interventions while also introducing new data-quality and reporting responsibilities.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill requires CDE to make CLPADS capable of accepting a quarterly attendance rate and to build the technical and operational components needed for consistent statewide reporting. That work is explicitly procedural: add fields to the database, draft business rules and definitions that districts will use for consistency, and design secure processes for transferring data from LEAs to the state system.
CDE must consult with the Department of Finance and the Legislative Analyst’s Office as part of system preparation and also engage representatives of school and district administrators, classified and certificated staff, and parents when setting the criteria and cadence of attendance reports. Those consultations are meant to align the system’s outputs with operational needs at schools while balancing analytic rigor and usability for practitioners.The system must generate periodic reports at multiple levels—district, school, class, and individual pupil—focused on rates of absence and chronic absenteeism, and it must support early-warning capabilities that pair attendance with other predictive indicators (grades, assessment performance, suspensions/expulsions).
The bill specifies that chronic absenteeism will be calculated under a 10-percent rule (see statutory language) and that an alternate rate incorporating attendance recovery program participation will be reported once the department collects those data.Operationally, LEAs may submit quarterly attendance and related indicator data when CLPADS is ready to accept them; the department will provide the early-warning report up to four times per school year on request. Schools identified as persistently lowest-achieving are expected to make full use of the early-warning tools.
The bill also requires CDE to notify LEAs that reporting to the expanded system is voluntary and to describe the practical benefits of participation.
The Five Things You Need to Know
Implementation of the expanded attendance measures is conditional on the appropriation of federal funds specifically for this purpose.
The bill defines a “chronic absentee” as a pupil absent for 10% or more of schooldays, calculated as total days absent divided by total days enrolled and school was actually taught (excluding Saturdays and Sundays).
Once CDE has collected attendance-recovery program data (per Education Code Sections 46210 and 46211), it must report an alternate chronic absenteeism rate that counts attendance accrued through those recovery programs.
A local educational agency that submits attendance data may request the department’s early-warning report up to four times during a school year.
CDE must prepare the system in consultation with the Department of Finance, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, and representative organizations for administrators, classified and certificated staff, and parents.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Prepare CLPADS to accept quarterly attendance data
This subsection directs CDE, working with the Department of Finance and the Legislative Analyst’s Office, to ready CLPADS to store a quarterly attendance rate. Practically, that means adding database fields, drafting the business rules and definitions that will determine how districts calculate and submit the rates, and building the technical transfer processes. The consultation requirement with stakeholder organizations is procedural but material: it shapes report criteria, frequency, and presentation so the outputs are meaningful to practitioners rather than just technical artifacts.
Reporting levels and intended uses
CDE must ensure the system can issue periodic reports at the district, school, class, and individual pupil levels on absence rates and chronic absenteeism. The provision frames the reports as tools to help LEAs identify and support pupils at risk of dropping out, signaling that the primary operational purpose is intervention rather than public accountability or punishment—but the data format and access controls that CDE adopts will determine how those reports are used in practice.
Definition and integration of chronic absenteeism
This section provides the statutory chronic absenteeism formula: 10% or more of schooldays absent, using a days-absent divided by days-enrolled denominator and excluding weekends. It also requires CDE to fold chronic absentee metrics into the annual dropout report (Section 48070.6) and to publish an alternate chronic absenteeism calculation once attendance-recovery program data are available, which will change the numerator for students who make up missed time through recovery programs.
Early-warning system characteristics
The bill sets qualitative expectations for the early-warning systems that CLPADS will feed: use of highly predictive indicators (attendance, course grades/completion, assessment performance, suspensions/expulsions), a validation process to verify predictive reliability, and periodic reporting designed to trigger timely support by principals, teachers, and parents. These are design standards rather than prescriptive technical requirements, leaving much of the implementation detail to CDE and local systems builders.
Timing and intended users of submissions
Once the state system can accept quarterly attendance rates, LEAs may begin to submit that data. The bill expresses legislative intent that persistently lowest-achieving schools fully use the early-warning systems, effectively prioritizing those schools for uptake and support but stopping short of imposing a mandate.
Frequency of early-warning reports available to LEAs
An LEA that reports attendance data to CLPADS may request the early-warning report described in subdivision (d) up to four times per school year. That cap defines an operational cadence for districts that intend to integrate state reports into local intervention cycles.
Voluntary reporting and outreach requirement
The department must notify LEAs that submitting attendance and chronic-absence data is voluntary and include a description of the benefits—training, supports, or analytic outputs—that reporting can produce. This clause ensures adoption remains optional and requires CDE to make a case for participation rather than simply collecting data by default.
Funding contingency
The statute will not be implemented unless federal funds are specifically appropriated for these purposes. That makes the entire expansion dependent on outside funding and places the primary financial burden, and the decision whether to proceed, outside state budget appropriations unless federal resources materialize.
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Explore Education in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- At-risk pupils — Earlier and standardized identification through quarterly metrics and early-warning reports can trigger targeted interventions before academic failure or dropout.
- School intervention teams and counselors — Receive more frequent, state-standardized reports that can prioritize caseloads and tailor supports across school terms.
- District data and analytics staff — Gain a state-supported dataset and business rules that reduce local ambiguity about definitions and enable cross-school comparisons and program evaluation.
- State policymakers and researchers — Obtain a standardized quarterly attendance data stream that can improve monitoring of trends, evaluate interventions, and inform resource allocation decisions.
Who Bears the Cost
- Local educational agencies (districts and county offices) — Must modify local SIS exports, align to new business rules, and invest staff time to submit higher-frequency data.
- School IT vendors and integrators — May need to update software and interfaces to support new CLPADS fields, extract-transform-load (ETL) logic, and secure data transfer pipelines.
- CDE and state analytic offices — Must expend planning, development, validation, and ongoing support effort to build reports, run validations, consult stakeholders, and provide technical assistance.
- Parents and schools — Face potential privacy and communication tasks as individual-level reports are generated and interventions are proposed, creating a need for clear local protocols and training.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is whether to prioritize broader, standardized data collection (to enable consistent early identification and evidence-based interventions) or to avoid imposing new, resource-intensive reporting requirements on under-resourced LEAs; the bill leans toward enabling state-level data and supports while relying on voluntary participation and federal funds, a compromise that improves flexibility but risks fragmented implementation and inconsistent data quality.
The bill stitches useful features into existing data infrastructure but leaves critical implementation choices unresolved. It mandates business rules and definitions without specifying standard formats, security controls, or exactly how CDE will reconcile differences in local student information systems.
The result: data quality, comparability, and timeliness will depend on technical specifications CDE issues later and on LEAs’ capacity to conform. Because the measure ties an alternate chronic absenteeism rate to attendance-recovery program records, the comparability of the main and alternate measures will depend on the fidelity and completeness of recovery-program reporting.
Two operational tensions are especially salient. First, reporting is explicitly voluntary and implementation is contingent on federal funding—both choices reduce the risk of unfunded state mandates but also risk patchy adoption and skewed datasets that undercut statewide comparisons and the utility of aggregate reporting.
Second, generating individual-level early-warning reports raises privacy and usage concerns: the statute anticipates using reports to support pupils, but it does not set boundaries on data access, retention, or the consequences for pupils or schools labeled as chronically absent. Those gaps increase the likelihood of uneven practices and potential misuse or public misinterpretation of attendance metrics.
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