LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — The Clark County School District faces a $50 million budget shortfall, set to eliminate teaching positions at hundreds of schools at the end of the school year.
The district says the shortfall is largely due to declining student enrollment. Enrollment has dropped by about 47,000 students since peaking in 2018 (325,081 to 277,083), which means less funding.
To try to keep kids in the district, CCSD is making a push to cut down on chronic absenteeism, which can lead to students leaving the district entirely. According to new numbers, they are making big strides.
“We are proud to share that we are continuing to see substantial decreases,” said Kevin McPartland, associate superintendent over the Education Services Division.
Chronic absenteeism rates show improvement
Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student missing 10% of school days or 18 days during the 180-day school year. It peaked after COVID at 40% of students in 2021-2022.
It has gone down each of the last four years to just over a quarter of students last school year.
“Ideally, we want to get close to where we were before COVID, where we were at about 21%, but our dream is 15%,” said Danielle Jones, executive director of alternative services.
For the first semester of this school year, numbers continue to creep down except for Native American/Alaska Native students. About a third have been chronically absent. That’s also the case for high school students.
“This data point has led us to prioritize kindergarten parents to educate them about attendance and 12th-grade students with our home visits,” Jones said.
“My first Bright Futures Walk was for the littles, and we found that we lost a lot of our pre-Ks to charter schools, and it’s hard to get them back,” said Trustee Ramona Esparza-Stoffregan during a meeting of the CCSD Board of Trustees Thursday night.
Door-to-door outreach efforts
Early this month, community members went door-to-door to the homes of chronically absent students.
“I think we are seeing some traumatic situations with even the younger children as well,” Esparza-Stoffregan said.
To try and get some kids back to class, CCSD is “strengthening culturally responsive and trauma-informed approaches” in their home outreach.
“Because of the extremism that is happening in our communities, and I know that I am kind of talking in code language, it is the barriers and the challenges that our families are facing, and it is why our kids are not coming,” Esparza-Stoffregan said.
The district clarified that student walkouts for protesting ICE that have been seen over the past few weeks will not impact chronic absenteeism numbers. Since students are usually out of class for an hour or two, it doesn’t count as a full-day absence.
The district also says they believe new school start times next school year should help the grades with the highest absenteeism — early elementary and high school — as they will start later in the morning, giving those kids more time to get to class.
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