In 2022-23, Cherokee County School District^↗ET had a chronic absenteeism rate of 39.3%. Nearly two in five students were chronically absent. Two years later, in 2024-25, the latest year in the state's attendance data used here, Cherokee was at 26.2%. That 13.1 percentage point drop was the third-largest of any of the 80 South Carolina districts with rates in both years, and it came in two straight years of improvement.

The drop is measured from Cherokee's peak. The district's rate was already 35.1% in 2021-22, rose to 39.3% in 2022-23, then fell to 28.6% in 2023-24 and 26.2% in 2024-25. Measured from 2021-22 instead, the improvement is 8.9 points.

Still above the state average

At 26.2% in 2024-25, Cherokee was still 3.9 percentage points above the state average of 22.3%. The district, which counted 7,886 students in its 2024-25 attendance data, serves Cherokee County, anchored by the city of Gaffney. Its Black-white attendance gap narrowed sharply over the same yearsET, so the improvement was not confined to one group of students.

A neighbor on a similar curve

Spartanburg School District Two^↗ET, in neighboring Spartanburg County, followed a similar path. The district, which counted 12,274 students in 2024-25, went from 30.5% at its 2022-23 peak to 18.8% in 2024-25, an 11.7-point drop that ranked seventh of the 80 districts. Its 2021-22 rate had been 19.2%, so most of that drop returned it to where it was the year before the spike, and by 2024-25 it was 0.4 points below that level and below the state average. The pairing is a comparison, not proof that the same practices produced both results.

Cherokee and Spartanburg Two were two of eight districts whose rates fell by 10 points or more between 2022-23 and 2024-25, out of 80 with rates reported in both years. Improvement was common beyond that group: 51 of the 80 districts had a lower rate in 2024-25 than in 2022-23. At the same time, 27 districts moved the other way. Florence One Schools^↗ET rose every year, from 24.1% in 2021-22 to 26.4% in 2024-25, and Oconee County^↗ET worsened every year in the data as wellET. The numbers alone cannot say what drove any one district's change. For Cherokee County, the people who did the work can.

What changed on the ground in Cherokee County

Ben Fuller stepped into a new role as Cherokee County's Coordinator of Attendance, Truancy, and Discipline on July 1, 2024, challenged by Assistant Superintendent of Student Services Bessie Westmoreland to strengthen the district's attendance and truancy systems. He is quick to spread the credit. "This improvement has been a team effort," Fuller said, pointing to Superintendent Raashad Fitzpatrick, Westmoreland, and the principals, counselors, attendance clerks, social workers, and families who carried it out.

What changed, in his telling, was less any single program than the arrival of a system. "The biggest difference is that attendance has become a districtwide priority supported by consistent systems and expectations," Fuller said. "We now have better data, stronger intervention processes, and greater accountability at every level. Schools are identifying attendance concerns earlier, engaging families sooner, and using attendance data to drive decision-making."

At the center of it is what Fuller calls an attendance intervention pipeline. The district updated its attendance policies and began implementing revised Attendance Intervention Plans in September 2024, strengthened its truancy procedures, and trained administrators to engage families before a problem became severe. Cherokee also reestablished referrals to Family Court after several years of inactivity, giving the district a full ladder of responses that runs from school-level support to district truancy hearings to court when nothing else works.

Cherokee also borrowed from next door. After watching how neighboring Spartanburg County ran its truancy hearings, Cherokee began planning its own district truancy hearings in October 2024 and partnered with Probate Judge Josh Queen to launch the model in January 2025, with space provided at the county administrative building. "I did not invent any of these strategies," Fuller said. "We benefited from strong leadership within our district and from neighboring districts that were willing to share their successful practices. We simply adapted proven approaches and committed to implementing them consistently."

Fuller says the work is not finished. He says the state's most recent calculations show the rate continuing to fall since the period covered here. Before the 2026-27 school year began, he said, the district was already identifying students at risk for chronic absenteeism so it could begin outreach before the first day of school. "While culture change takes time," Fuller said, "we are seeing evidence that the message is taking hold across our schools and community."

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