At Hayes Middle School in Albuquerque, almost a third of students were chronically absent last school year, even as the share of kids testing proficient in math nearly doubled from 6% to 11%. Principal Katrina Sisneros estimates that only about 10% of students arrive in sixth grade already reading at grade level in math, meaning teachers are racing to close gaps for a student body that keeps missing class.
Why Missing Even One Day Hurts
The numbers come from the Albuquerque Journal, which reports that chronic absenteeism and weak math performance are colliding at Hayes, a school located north of the city's International District where around 40% of students speak English as a second language. Nicole Keeney, a Socorro High School math teacher, told the paper that the subject does not forgive gaps in attendance. “If students miss even a day of math instruction, they can fall behind,” Keeney said, according to the Journal's reporting.
New Mexico teachers broadly say that poor attendance compounds existing math struggles, the Journal reports, and the scale of the absence problem is statewide. Around 28% of New Mexico students missed more than 10% of the previous school year, per the newspaper's account — a threshold that, under the standard definition cited by Source New Mexico, means missing at least 18 days in a 180-day school year.
A Campus With Ten Languages and a Math Gap
Sisneros said that learning math requires filling in knowledge gaps in sequence, one building block at a time, which makes absences especially costly. She has also described math itself as something that can feel like a foreign language on a campus where ten different languages are spoken, according to the same report. School staff face the challenge of maintaining grade-level standards while still bridging those gaps for students who arrive behind.
To tackle the problem, Hayes runs two different interventions depending on where students stand. Struggling students attend a two-day numeracy camp at the school itself, which teaches math basics through drills, the Journal's reporting notes. More advanced students instead spend a few days at a math academy at Albuquerque Public Schools' Berna Facio Professional Development Center, which uses a conference-style learning format rather than a traditional classroom setup.
The Statewide Backdrop
Hayes' struggles sit inside a much larger statewide pattern. New Mexico math proficiency on statewide exams has hovered between 23% and 26% over the past five years, nearly 20 percentage points below reading scores, and the state consistently ranks last in the country in math on national assessments, the Journal reported in a companion piece on the state's math problem.
Absenteeism itself has been trending in different directions depending on the source. A statewide presentation prepared for New Mexico's Legislative Education Study Committee lists chronic absenteeism rates falling from 38% in the 2022–23 school year to 28% in 2025–26. Separately, Source New Mexico has reported that the state's chronic absenteeism rate jumped 119% between 2019 and 2023 — the largest increase in the country during that span, compared with a 71% national average increase — and that studies have linked chronic absence in younger grades to lower reading and math proficiency and ultimately lower graduation rates.
Source New Mexico also noted that English language learners are absent from school at higher rates than their peers, a pattern that could compound challenges at a campus like Hayes where a large share of students are still learning English. The outlet further cited the KIDS COUNT Data Book ranking New Mexico 50th in the nation for education, with 87% of students not proficient in eighth-grade math statewide.
Back at Hayes, the day-to-day work continues regardless of the bigger numbers. Students including Ethan Harrison and Liam Hosteen were recently photographed working through math exercises at the school, a glimpse of the slow, incremental progress Sisneros and her staff are banking on to chip away at the gap between where students start and where they need to be.
