by Ty Tagami | Jul 31, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — When COVID-19 struck, schools closed, students “attended” from home, and too many got out of the habit of going to school when the doors reopened.
In 2022, nearly a quarter of Georgia’s students had absenteeism rates high enough to be considered “chronic” — nearly double the rate before the pandemic.
But new data show that the state is gradually recovering. More students are still missing school than before COVID-19, but the rate has been steadily falling, dropping to 17.7% during the 2025-26 school year.
That is nearly 2 percentage points lower than the prior year, which in turn was nearly 2 points lower than in 2023-24, the state data show. The rate remains more than 5 percentage points above the rates in the two years before the pandemic, but observers find Georgia’s trajectory to be promising, especially when many other states have found their absenteeism problems to be more stubborn.
The Georgia Department of Education released the new rates last week, well ahead of most other states, noted Nat Malkus, with the American Enterprise Institute.
“Perhaps even more impressively,” he wrote in an analysis published Thursday, “Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate is declining steadily, bucking the national trend.”
During the 2024-25 school year, Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate was 19.5%, beating the estimated national average by more than 2 percentage points, according to the group FutureEd, whose numbers had Georgia among the third of the states with the lowest rates.
“We applaud the Georgia Department of Education’s early release of end-of-the-year attendance data, which shows an impressive fifth consecutive year of decreased chronic absence,” Hedy Chang, president and CEO of the group Attendance Works, said in a statement. “Georgia’s commitment to timely end-of-the-year data is a model for how states can make a difference.”
Some of that success came after lawmakers passed a law last year that required more coordinated and sustained efforts against absenteeism. Senate Bill 123 required that school districts with high rates create attendance review teams that engage parents.
State lawmakers tried to build on that this year with Senate Bill 513.
“If we do not have kids’ butts in seats, they are not going to learn,” Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, said before the measure passed with just one vote against it in the Senate.
But the measure faced overwhelming opposition in the House due to some provisions seen as draconian, including loss of driving privileges. Many students who skip a lot of school need their licenses so they can get to jobs — not to mention to school, critics said.
Studies have shown that treating the problem with punishment does not work well, said Matt Smith, the policy and research director for the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.
Indeed, using punishment to address misbehavior in general can aggravate the absenteeism problem by turning school into an unwelcoming environment, he said. Out-of-school suspension, one such “legacy” strategy, directly increases absenteeism.
Instead, Georgia schools are more often trying to address the underlying problems, he said. That started with more behavioral and mental health counseling.
But poor physical health can also rob students of their ability to focus, which can in turn lead them to misbehave, he said, so more schools are looking at that too.
“It could be something as simple as getting them hearing aids or glasses, getting them dental care,” he said.
Smith said the data the state education department has been releasing allows more people, including businesses and organizations in each community, to help school districts identify commonalities among students who are missing a lot of school.
That enables the districts to focus their resources on those students, and it allows the community to help.
They have a reason to help. Research shows that absenteeism affects the whole classroom by bogging down teachers who must divide their students into different groups as they try to catch up the kids who have fallen behind, Smith said.
Georgia and other states still have a lot of work to do to get their absenteeism rates back to a manageable level, Malkus wrote in his analysis. But he added that Georgia is showing how progress is possible when it is seen as an urgent priority.
Many states take far longer than Georgia did to release their data from the prior school year, he wrote. “Indeed, there are some states — Minnesota and Texas among them — that still have not released data for the 2024–25 school year.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 30, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A third former Georgia lawmaker has pleaded guilty to unemployment assistance fraud in federal court in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sharon Henderson, 67, of Covington, pleaded guilty Thursday to making false statements to fraudulently obtain thousands of dollars from the federal government through a program established by Congress to help workers through the crisis, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“While running for and holding political office, Representative Henderson was fleecing taxpayers, lying to steal money from federal programs intended to help people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said in a statement.
Two other former state representatives, also Democrats, were previously convicted of similar unemployment assistance fraud.
Karen L. Bennett pleaded guilty Jan. 21 to making false statements to obtain $13,940 in unemployment benefits, and Dexter L. Sharper pleaded guilty March 11 to making false statements and collecting $13,825, according to Hertzberg’s office in the Northern District of Georgia.
Henderson pleaded guilty to collecting $17,811 in unemployment benefits by filing fraudulent weekly certifications that she could not report to her job with the Henry County Schools, Hertzberg’s office said. Henderson claimed she had worked for the school system throughout 2019 and into early 2020, until quarantines made that impossible.
Yet she had only worked as a substitute teacher for five days in 2018 and had signed an acknowledgment that substitutes were ineligible to draw unemployment wages, prosecutors said. She applied for unemployment benefits in June 2020 while running for the state House and filed eight fraudulent certifications in June 2021 after she was sworn in, they added.
Henderson is scheduled for sentencing before U.S. District Judge Michael L. Brown on Nov. 3.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 29, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Marcye Scott, the daughter of late U.S. Rep. David Scott, drew the most votes in Tuesday’s special election to complete his term, and will face former Gwinnett County School Board Chair Everton Blair in an Aug. 25 runoff.
Scott took 46% of the vote to Blair’s 37% in the race between five candidates. An outright victory would have required a majority.
The two Democrats are vying to fill the U.S. House District 13 seat for the rest of the year after Scott died in April at age 80.
The election to succeed Scott for a full two-year term will be held in November, when state Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Lilburn, will go up against Republican Jonathan Chavez.
Clark won the Democratic primary in May with 56% of the vote, or more than 61,000 in her contest against five other Democrats. Chavez had no opponents in the Republican primary and collected more than 25,000 votes.
The turnout for Tuesday’s special election was far lower at 3.9%, with just over 21,000 casting a ballot.
Scott won handily in five of the six counties represented by the metro Atlanta congressional district. Blair took the vast majority of votes in Gwinnett County, the most populous among them.
Women outvoted men by nearly 70%, and Black voters outnumbered white voters by nearly three to one. More than 13,000 Black voters went to the polls compared with fewer than 5,000 white voters. Only 257 Hispanic voters cast a ballot.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 28, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Starting Saturday, Georgians who watch television or go online will likely encounter campaign ads from Rick Jackson, the Republican candidate for governor.
The wealthy entrepreneur announced this week that he will spend $87 million on an initial ad buy to promote his campaign against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democrat.
“This is the largest general election buy of this race, and it reflects exactly how seriously we take the job of earning every vote in every one of Georgia’s 159 counties,” Garrison Douglas, the Jackson campaign spokesman, said in a statement Monday.
Bottoms’ campaign fired back Tuesday, pointing to Jackson’s business dealings with the state, which have earned his company, Jackson Healthcare, more than $1 billion, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in March.
“Rick Jackson made a billion dollars off of taxpayer-funded contracts with the state for health care services, even while rural hospitals closed and Georgians lost health care coverage, and now he’s trying to buy this election,” Bottoms’ campaign spokesperson, TaNisha Cameron, said in an email.
Jackson has been campaigning on his business background ever since he announced his candidacy in February, describing himself as a former foster child and self-made billionaire.
Last week, the Jackson campaign attacked Bottoms as anti-business after she posted an Instagram video responding to “online chatter” about Jackson’s visit to a Black-owned business.
Bottoms had alleged that Jackson was visiting barbershops, restaurants and other minority-owned businesses merely to promote his campaign. In her brief video posted in mid-July, she called that hypocritical because she said he opposed diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“I’m assuming anybody who opens their doors to Rick Jackson has made a calculated decision based on the benefits and the risk of doing that,” Bottoms said. “But don’t allow people to piss on us and then tell us that it’s raining.”
The Jackson campaign said people online had been calling for a boycott of a Black-owned brunch spot Jackson had visited. The campaign accused Bottoms of effectively warning businesses not to admit Jackson and said she should have defended the restaurant.
Jackson pressed the issue while on stage with President Donald Trump last week, during the president’s visit to Wheeler High School in Cobb County.
“My opponent wants to cut down businesses and cancel them just because I visited a restaurant,” Jackson said. “Well, that’s just wrong.”
Jackson said he would focus on business to address the cost-of-living issues that are top of mind for many voters.
“I’m going to bring business solutions to solve real problems,” Jackson said. “The other side talks about affordability as if that’s a solution. Affordability’s not a political problem. Affordability is a business problem. It requires business solutions.”
Jackson also said he was going to be Trump’s “favorite governor,” and Trump responded that Jackson would be a “great” governor.
Bottoms said in her video that she supports small businesses, having helped minority- and women-owned companies secure grants and low-interest loans. She said she normally gives them her own personal business.
“Jackson’s in this for himself and to serve Donald Trump, and Keisha’s the only candidate in this race who will stand up for Georgians,” her spokesperson, Cameron, said.
Democrats predict that the president’s endorsement of Jackson, whom they call an “out-of-touch billionaire,” would ultimately hurt Jackson’s campaign.
A national poll earlier this month found that Republicans had become less positive about the economy since January.
“The share of Republicans who say Trump’s policies have worsened conditions has risen from 18% to 28%, while the share saying they have improved conditions has fallen from 57% to 42%,” said the the Pew Research Center report, which was focused on the national mood and on Congress rather than specifically on Georgia.
Jackson’s campaign said Georgians simply need to hear from the man himself and that the advertising blitz will help.
“Rick Jackson has spent this campaign showing up in places candidates usually skip,” Douglas said, “and this buy makes sure all 11 million Georgians hear the same thing the people in those rooms have heard, which is that he is running to fight for them.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 27, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
Gov. Brian Kemp weighed in on the rush to develop artificial intelligence, calling the technology “scary” while also welcoming data centers to Georgia and criticizing others who would pause their development.
“I’m not saying we need a data center in every community that’s out there, but to have a moratorium just like the governor of New York did and what Keisha Lance Bottoms is proposing — to me, is irresponsible,” Kemp said in a video interview with POLITICO Energy published Monday.
The Georgia governor, who is nearing the end of his final term, may have been referring to a video interview given by Bottoms in April to the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer.
At the time, the former Atlanta mayor was competing in a crowded primary to win the Democratic nomination for governor, which she subsequently won in May.
“If I have the privilege of being elected governor, I am going to ask for a pause in construction on data centers throughout the state,” Bottoms said. “Give us an opportunity to understand exactly where we are. Are we on the right track or do we need to scale back?”
Kemp said data centers can generate local tax revenue and other benefits and that communities rather than the state should decide where they are built.
“We don’t need to try to push these things where people don’t want them,” he said in the interview conducted last week, “but to say that we’re just going to have a blanket moratorium — to me, is indeed insane.”
Kemp said he was concerned about the effect of AI on children and on security.
“Some of the things that are very scary when you think about national defense, cybersecurity issues, and other things,” he said. “But I’m more concerned about China winning this race and using all those things against us economically, militarily.”
Kemp said some data centers had been announced or even started working “in the dead of the night.”
That is not the case with the $20 billion data center that OpenAI announced for an industrial site in Effingham County near Savannah last week, he said, adding that the company had met with local officials and utilities in advance.
The public learned of the company’s plans Wednesday, when residents were given a one-day notice that the company would be holding an open house about its planned facility.
Beth Remmes, with the environmental group Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, attended the event. It featured information tables with company representatives who gave sometimes vague information, she said.
Remmes said she and others were concerned about the use of noisy and polluting diesel-fueled generators for backup power.
“They said they do have diesel generators, but they are just backing up a small part of the system, but what is a small part of a $20 billion system?” Remmes said. “That’s what I would like to see written down and explained.”
