Yellowhammer State Education Coverage, Driven by Data
Education News & Data
Local education reporting from every corner of Alabama, grounded in Alabama Department of Education data.
Kevin Daniel, a Madison County Schools graduate, became principal of Riverton Intermediate on July 1, taking over a grades 4-6 school that counted 921 students in 2025-26.
Huntsville City Schools has pushed its chronic absenteeism to 8.2%, more than 3 percentage points below its pre-COVID baseline, with eight of its ten tracked student groups now below where they were in 2018-19.
Heather Roe succeeds her mentor Suzanne Bahr as principal of Robert E. Lee Elementary, the larger school in a Satsuma City district that has grown while Alabama has not.
Michele Downey moves from assistant principal to principal at Piedmont Elementary, a campus that has grown while its district and the state have not.
Blount County has the lowest chronic absenteeism rate of any traditional district in Alabama at 3.18%, below the state average every year since tracking began.
Dr. Tamala Maddox, who opened i3 Academy's middle school and led its high school, now heads the growing Birmingham charter network.
Montgomery County cut chronic absenteeism by 3.25 points in 2024-25, but its 25.29% rate remained the highest among Alabama districts enrolling more than 10,000 students.
Alabama's special education graduation rate climbed from 66.6% to 78.4% over a decade, narrowing the gap with the overall rate.
Mobile County's chronic absenteeism rate plunged from 31.5% to 12.8% in two years, the sharpest recovery of any large Alabama district, now below pre-COVID levels.
Hispanic students in Alabama have lower chronic absenteeism than white students in five of seven years and in 96 of 132 school districts.
Alabama's chronic absence rate fell for a second year, while Barbour County rose 10.5 points to the state's highest published district rate.
Alabama's 2025-26 kindergarten class remains larger than grade 12 statewide, while district entry-exit balances point in different directions.
Alabama's Black-White chronic-absence gap grew from 0.63 point in 2019 to 3.31 points in 2025, after peaking at 6.55 points in 2022.
Alabama's White-Black graduation-rate gap was 4.1 points in 2015 and 4.2 points in 2025, although annual gaps ranged from 3.0 to 4.7 points.
English learners had Alabama's second-lowest reported subgroup chronic absenteeism rate in 2025 at 8.38%, and their rate was below the statewide rate in all seven available years.
