Chapter 4: The STAS File and Attendance Recovery Integration

What Is the STAS File?

STAS stands for Student Absence Summary. This CALPADS file has been part of End-of-Year (EOY) submissions for years, capturing student absence data that feeds chronic absenteeism calculations. Starting with 2025-26, STAS picks up a field that matters directly for district revenue: Field 13.24, Attendance Recovery Days.

The LEAP file (covered in Section 2) reports expanded learning program participation. The STAS file reports absence and recovery data tied to the regular instructional day. They measure different things:

LEAP = Days a student attended afterschool/expanded learning programs
STAS = Days a student was absent from regular school + AR days earned for ADA apportionment

For districts running AR programs under EC §46211, the STAS file is where you report how many AR days each student earned during the fiscal year.

Field 13.24: Attendance Recovery Days

Field 13.24 is new to STAS for 2025-26. It captures the total AR days a student earned through qualifying programs.

Valid range: 0 to 10 days.

The 10-day limit comes straight from EC §46211: “A pupil shall not be credited with more than the lesser of the equivalent of 10 days of attendance in a school year, or the number of absences the pupil accrued in that school year.”

CALPADS enforces a two-part validation:

Field 13.24 can’t exceed 10
Field 13.24 can’t exceed the student’s total absences

Table 2 in CALPADS Update Flash #305 summarizes these validations. The principle: you can’t report more AR days than a student is eligible to earn, and CALPADS will cross-check your submission against absence data.

How AR Days Are Calculated

Before AR days land in Field 13.24, they need to be calculated from instructional time accrued. The dedicated AR chapter covers the full mechanics — here’s what matters for CALPADS reporting.

Students earn AR days by participating in qualifying programs outside the regular school day — before school, after school, weekends, or intersessional periods. These programs must be:

Supervised by a certificated teacher who’s an LEA employee
Composed of educational activities aligned to grade-level standards
Substantially equivalent to the student’s regular instructional program
Within required student-teacher ratios (10:1 for TK/K, 20:1 for grades 1-12)

Minutes accumulate across sessions and convert to whole days based on grade-level instructional minute thresholds:

TK/Kindergarten: 180 minutes = 1 AR day
Grades 1-3: 230 minutes = 1 AR day
Grades 4-12: 240 minutes = 1 AR day

A 5th-grader who logs 480 minutes of qualifying instruction earns 2 AR days (480 ÷ 240 = 2). Those 2 days become ADA credit — fiscal recovery for days that would otherwise generate zero revenue for the district.

Districts handle these calculations locally, usually through the SIS or specialized AR tracking software. By the time data flows into STAS, you’re reporting the final day count, not the hourly detail.

Critical Validation Rules: The 10-Day Cap and Absence Limit

The STAS validations create hard constraints. Your data systems must enforce them before submission.

The 10-Day Cap. No student gets credited with more than 10 AR days per year, regardless of total instructional hours logged. If your calculations show 12 days’ worth of qualifying time, you still report 10 in Field 13.24.

The cap keeps AR in its lane as a supplemental fiscal recovery tool, not a replacement for regular attendance. Ten days is roughly 5.5% of a 180-day year — enough to recover meaningful ADA revenue for a student who missed time due to illness or family circumstances, but not so much that it substitutes for daily attendance.

The Absence Limit. Even tighter than the 10-day cap: AR days can’t exceed the student’s actual absences. CALPADS validates at two levels:

School-level: AR days can’t exceed absences accrued at the school site where AR programming occurred.
LEA-level: AR days can’t exceed total absences across all schools in the LEA during that fiscal year.

You can’t recover ADA for days a student wasn’t actually absent. If a student missed 7 days and logged enough hours to earn 9 AR days, you report 7 in Field 13.24.

Enforce these rules before submission. Discovering validation errors during the certification window creates avoidable problems.

How AR Days Recover Revenue

This distinction trips up a lot of districts, so it’s worth getting right: AR recovers funding, not attendance.

When a student earns AR days, the district gets ADA credit for those days — revenue that would otherwise be lost. The student’s attendance record doesn’t change. The absences stay on the books.

A student absent 8 days who earns 8 AR days still shows:

Total days enrolled: 180
Days present: 172
Days absent: 8
AR days earned: 8

The district recovers ADA apportionment for those 8 days. That’s the fiscal benefit. The student’s record still reflects 8 absences for chronic absenteeism calculations, truancy monitoring, and every other attendance purpose.

STAS captures both data points in separate fields for exactly this reason:

Absence fields (existing) report days missed
Field 13.24 reports AR days earned for ADA recovery

CDE uses both to calculate different metrics, which brings us to the alternate rate.

Alternate Chronic Absenteeism Rate

After certifying 2025-26 EOY data, CDE is required to calculate an alternate chronic absenteeism rate that accounts for AR participation under EC §§46210-46211. The alternate rate essentially asks: what would chronic absenteeism look like if AR days reduced a student’s counted absences?

CDE will publish the alternate rate on its website in late 2026. It won’t affect the 2026 California School Dashboard. The Dashboard’s Chronic Absenteeism indicator will still use the traditional rate — raw absences, no AR adjustment.

Why publish a rate that doesn’t touch accountability yet?

Policy evaluation. The Legislature and CDE want data on whether AR programs are actually moving the needle on chronic absenteeism. The alternate rate provides that signal.
Future accountability. The 2026 Dashboard won’t incorporate AR data, but future iterations of California’s accountability system may. Publishing the alternate rate now establishes a baseline.

For CALPADS reporting, your job is straightforward: submit accurate AR day counts in Field 13.24. CDE handles the calculations from there.

Why AR Data Lives in STAS, Not LEAP

AR sessions often run during afterschool hours. So why doesn’t AR data go in the LEAP file?

Because the two files serve different policy purposes:

LEAP tracks participation in programs funded by ASES, ELO-P, and 21st CCLC grants — enrichment, homework support, extended learning.
STAS tracks absence and recovery data tied to ADA apportionment.

AR is a fiscal recovery mechanism. Even when sessions run alongside afterschool programming, the data reporting follows the policy intent, not the physical location.

This means districts operating AR within their afterschool programs report the same students in two CALPADS files:

LEAP: Days the student participated in afterschool programming (Field 26.07)
STAS: AR days earned for ADA recovery (Field 13.24)

These aren’t redundant — they measure different things. A student might attend 120 days of afterschool programming (LEAP) but earn only 6 AR days (STAS), because AR’s instructional minute thresholds are more demanding than general ELP participation requirements.

Documentation for Audit Readiness

AR days directly affect ADA apportionment — district revenue — so they draw heightened audit scrutiny. The STAS submission is the reporting endpoint, but behind each AR day in Field 13.24, you need:

Sign-in/sign-out records showing student attendance at specific AR sessions
Instructional time logs documenting minutes of qualifying instruction
Teacher certification records proving sessions were led by certificated LEA employees
Curriculum documentation showing alignment to grade-level standards
Ratio verification demonstrating compliance with 10:1 (TK/K) or 20:1 (grades 1-12) limits

None of this goes to CALPADS. Auditors will request it to verify your Field 13.24 entries. If you report 8 AR days for a student but can only document 6 days of qualifying time, that’s a finding — and it means revenue adjustments.

The standard: for every AR day reported, produce contemporaneous records showing when, where, and how instructional time was delivered, by whom, and to which students.

Aligning STAS and PADC Data

AR days show up in two state systems: STAS for CALPADS reporting and PADC (Principal Apportionment Data Collection) for ADA calculations. The numbers must match.

If you report 6 AR days in Field 13.24 but claim 8 in your PADC submission, auditors will flag the discrepancy. Your data systems need to serve as the single source feeding both CALPADS and PADC from the same underlying records.

Most SIS platforms are being updated for AR tracking with dual reporting, but the workflows are new. Coordination with your IT team (covered in Section 4) is critical — you need to map how data flows from AR session attendance → SIS → CALPADS/PADC extraction → submission.

Practical Next Steps

STAS file compliance for districts running AR programs comes down to four things:

Accurate AR day calculations that respect the 10-day cap and absence limit
CALPADS integration so AR days flow into Field 13.24 without manual re-entry
Audit-ready documentation behind every reported AR day
Pre-submission QA to catch validation errors before the certification window opens

If you’re not running AR programs, STAS still requires your attention for regular absence data as part of EOY. Field 13.24 just contains “0” for all students.