School attendance is important for adolescent and adult health, but drastically decreased during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We aimed to identify distinct attendance trajectories across a 5-year period spanning the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and examine the influence of school policies and practices related to school discipline and college readiness programming on these trajectories.

We analyzed administrative data from the 2016–2017 to 2020–2021 school years for 2805 rising high school students (seventh or eighth grade at baseline) at 5 Southern California schools participating in a randomized trial of the AVID college readiness program. We identified attendance trajectories using group-based trajectory modeling, then estimated the influence of suspension and AVID participation by including these as time-varying covariates.

We identified 3 attendance trajectory groups: stable high attendance (77.2%); acutely declining attendance (17.7%); chronically declining attendance (5.1%). Suspension was associated with decreasing attendance across all groups (stable high: β = −8.96; P<.0001; acutely declining: β = −12.00; P<.0001; chronically declining: β = −7.61; P = .025). AVID participation was associated with a small decrease in attendance in the stable high attendance group (β = −0.97; P = .025) and a larger increase in the acutely declining attendance group (β = 3.60; P = .015).

These findings increase our understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents’ school attendance. The health and educational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are not uniformly severe, and both tailored individual and universal school-level interventions are likely needed to support all youth to thrive.

Absenteeism

Adolescent health

COVID-19

Education

Schools

© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier, Inc. on behalf of Academic Pediatric Association.