What KIPP Delta loses when students walk away
Since 2018, KIPP Delta has lost 2,198 students and $2.48 million in per-pupil funding. After a brief dip in 2022, attrition climbed to its highest sustained level in 2024-2025 -- over 300 students per year walking out the door. But this year, something has shifted. Sixty-one students have left since October -- the lowest mid-year count in nine years. Historically, roughly 60% of annual attrition occurs over summer, when families decide not to return. The mid-year trend says we can change the story. The spring and summer ahead are where we prove it.
Attendance predicts attrition with striking consistency. Across six years and 8,517 student-year records, the relationship is linear and steep: the worse a student's attendance, the more likely they leave. Students below 80% attendance leave at 2.6 times the rate of those above 95%.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series established two facts: attendance drops on Fridays across every campus, and attendance compliance is low enough at some schools to make the reported numbers unreliable. Part 3 explains why those facts matter.
DELA averages 48 absences every Friday -- nearly double a typical Tuesday. KBC drops 3.4 points on Fridays. These weekly absences compound into chronic absence patterns that, as Section 02 shows, predict attrition at 2.6 times the baseline rate.
KBC reports 96.9% attendance with only 26% compliance. If the true attendance rate is closer to 88%, the number of KBC students in the danger zone -- below 90%, below 80% -- is almost certainly higher than what the dashboard shows. We cannot intervene on students we cannot see.
Every campus has students sliding toward the exit. The data proves attendance predicts who they are. But at the campuses with the lowest compliance, we may be watching a dashboard full of green while the students who need us most slip through uncounted.
Part 1 measured the Friday tax in attendance points. Here, we measure it in bodies. These are average daily absences -- the number of students not in the building on a given day of the week. Friday is the worst day at every campus, but at DELA, 48 absent students is not a dip. It is a structural failure.
Attrition is not evenly distributed. Transition grades -- 7th grade (entering middle school) and 9th grade (entering high school) -- consistently show the highest attrition rates. DCHS 7th grade has lost 15.4% of its students this year. These are predictable pressure points, and they are where intervention dollars would go furthest.
At-risk students do not just attend less -- they fall further behind as the year progresses. By December, the gap between at-risk and all-student attendance widens dramatically. At KBC, at-risk students dropped to 68% attendance in December while the school averaged 95%. These are the students on the path to goodbye.
Over three installments, this series has laid out the attendance picture at KIPP Delta -- not as we wish it were, but as the data shows it to be.
The path forward is not complicated. It requires three things: measure accurately (compliance must reach 90%+ at every campus), identify early (the gradient shows us exactly which students are most at risk), and intervene on Fridays (the cheapest, most targeted day to recover attendance).
None of this requires new systems, new hires, or new budgets. It requires using the systems we already have and trusting the data enough to act on it.
The nine-year trend is real. But so is this: 61 mid-year departures is the lowest in nine years. Something is working. The summer ahead will determine whether 2026 becomes the year the story changed -- or just another line on the chart. The cost of inaction is $2.48 million and 2,198 names. But for the first time in nearly a decade, the mid-year data says we have a chance to write a different ending.