Gary's Graduation Rate Fell 28 Points in a Decade, Indiana's Steepest

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2017, Gary Community School Corp^↗ graduated 89.6% of its senior cohort, actually above the state average. It was a quiet bright spot in a district already under financial distress, a number that suggested the academic side of the house was holding together even as the fiscal side crumbled.

By 2025, that rate had fallen to 57.8%.

The 27.7 percentage point decline from 2014 to 2025 is the largest of any Indiana school corporation with a cohort of 100 or more students. The next-largest decliner, Logansport, lost 12.2 points, less than half as much.

The takeover and the cliff

Gary's trajectory has two distinct eras. From 2014 through 2018, the rate fluctuated between 82% and 90%, respectable and competitive with state averages. Then between the 2018 and 2019 graduation cohorts, the rate fell off a cliff: from 87.3% to 58.5%.

That 28.8 percentage point single-year drop is the largest one-year decline for any Indiana corporation with a cohort of 100 or more students in both years. It coincided with the state's takeover of the district. Indiana placed Gary under emergency management in 2017, assuming control of finances and operations. The graduation rate did not immediately respond. The 2017 and 2018 cohorts had largely been educated under the prior administration. But the 2019 cohort, the first to spend its full high school career under state control, posted a rate nearly 30 points lower.

The rate never recovered. It bounced to 72.1% in 2022, then fell back to 67.5%, then 63%, and finally 57.8% in 2025. That is the lowest in the available data.

The gap between Gary and the state average widened from 4.3 points in 2014 to 34.0 points in 2025. While Indiana reached an all-time high of 91.8%, Gary sank to an all-time low.

The cohort stayed. The rate didn't.

One explanation that the data rules out: this is not a story of a shrinking cohort distorting the numbers. Gary's graduation cohort was 386 in 2014 and 334 in 2025. It dipped to 205 in 2018, roughly the period when school closures and consolidation reduced the number of students, but rebounded to the 280-360 range in subsequent years.

The 2025 cohort of 334 students is large enough that the 57.8% rate is not a small-sample artifact. Approximately 141 students in the cohort did not graduate on time.

Beneath the headline

Every student subgroup at Gary with reportable data posted rates far below state averages in 2025. Black students, 90% of the cohort, graduated at 58.3%, compared to 86.9% statewide. Male students graduated at 52.7%, meaning nearly half did not finish on time. Special education students posted 41.3%.

The economically disadvantaged subgroup graduated at 74.1%, substantially higher than the overall rate, a pattern suggesting that the broader "economically disadvantaged" definition captures a wider slice of the student body, including students who are relatively better-positioned academically. The paid-meals subgroup, a narrower measure of poverty, graduated at just 45.4%.

The state's role

Gary is not the only Indiana district under state intervention, but it is the one where the graduation rate has fallen the furthest and fastest after the takeover. The state assumed emergency management with the stated goal of stabilizing the district's finances and improving academic outcomes. By the graduation rate measure, academic outcomes have moved sharply in the wrong direction.

Gary faces population loss, industrial decline, and resource constraints that precede state intervention. Maybe the decline would have happened regardless. But eight years after the state took control, the graduation rate is 32 points lower than it was the year the takeover began.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Two in Three Gary Students Miss Too Much School

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (2026-05-21): An earlier version of this article stated that every Gary school with at least 50 enrolled students had a chronic absenteeism rate above 50%. Two schools did not: Banneker Elementary at Marquette (46.2%) and Mary M. Bethune Early Child Development Center (26.6%). The article has been corrected to reflect this accurately.

At Bailly Middle School in Gary, 79.1% of the 445 enrolled students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year. At West Side Leadership Academy, the city's main high school, the rate was 75.3% among 1,369 students. Across all of Gary Community School Corporation^↗, 3,214 of 5,055 students (63.6%) missed 10% or more of the school year.

That is the highest chronic absenteeism rate among Indiana's traditional K-12 school corporations, and it is not close. The next-highest large district, South Bend, is 23 percentage points lower.

A city losing students and attendance simultaneously

Gary's chronic absenteeism rate was 20.1% in 2013. It has more than tripled. Over that same period, the district's enrollment fell from 9,446 to 5,055, a 46.5% decline. The district is losing students to departure and losing the ones who remain to absence.

The trajectory has not been linear. Gary's rate dropped to 11.6% in 2017, a year that coincided with the beginning of state oversight. But by 2018 it had spiked to 34.1%, suggesting the 2017 figure may have reflected a reporting change during the transition rather than a genuine improvement. Since 2020, the rate has not fallen below 43.5%.

The COVID years broke what remained of Gary's attendance norms. The rate hit 61.2% in 2021 and peaked at 71.0% in 2022, when nearly three in four students were chronically absent. It fell to 55.8% in 2024 before rebounding to 63.6% in 2025, erasing most of that year's progress.

A building-by-building breakdown

In 2025, 8 of the 10 Gary Community School Corporation schools with at least 50 enrolled students had chronic absenteeism rates above 50%. Bailly Middle School's 79.1% means that fewer than one in five students attended school regularly. Beveridge Elementary recorded 68.5%. Daniel Hale Williams Elementary, named for the pioneering Black surgeon who founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, posted 59.5%. Two Gary schools fell below the 50% threshold: Banneker Elementary at Marquette (383 students, 46.2%) and Mary M. Bethune Early Child Development Center (154 students, 26.6%).

These are not abstractions. A student who is chronically absent misses at least 18 school days per year, nearly a full month of instruction. At Bailly, where four in five students cross that threshold, the building is functionally operating without most of its student body on any given day. Teachers prepare lessons for classrooms where the majority of seats may be empty. Cumulative learning loss compounds year after year.

State intervention and persistent barriers

Gary Community School Corporation has been under state oversight and emergency management for years. The district's superintendent has publicly cited students experiencing homelessness, bullying, chronic illness, and transportation as root causes. Gary is a city of roughly 70,000 people, down from a peak of 178,000 in 1960, with a poverty rate above 30% and limited public transit options.

Indiana's new attendance intervention laws, SB 282 requiring K-5 intervention at five missed days and SEA 482 extending requirements to grades 7-12, apply to Gary as they do everywhere in Indiana. But a district where nearly two-thirds of students are already chronically absent faces a fundamentally different challenge than one where the rate is 15%. The intervention thresholds designed for statewide application may be inadequate for a community where missing school is closer to the norm than the exception.

Gary's 5,055 students represent less than 0.5% of Indiana's total enrollment. Its 3,214 chronically absent students represent 1.6% of the state total. The disproportionate burden falls on one of Indiana's poorest communities, in a city that has been losing population for six decades. The U.S. Steel plant that built Gary employed 30,000 workers at its peak. The school district that educated their children and grandchildren now watches two in three of its 5,055 remaining students miss too much school.