Just over 20 percent of the district’s students are chronically absent, which means they’re missing class on more than ten percent of school days.
Nicole Willis-Grimes is the director of the Western Nevada chapter of Communities In Schools, a national nonprofit that works with schools to support students and reduce dropout rates. She believes that the problematic attendance numbers stem from the effects of the pandemic.
“A lot of it is kind of fallout from the pandemic,” she said.
The district largely agrees. Its own data shows that the chronic absenteeism rate stayed about the same from last school year.
Willis-Grimes believes the distance between students and district staff due to the pandemic exacerbated the barriers to learning and attendance that some students faced at home.
“Having that distance from teachers, from their supports, I think created more trauma and more challenges,” she shared.
Mental health advocates say similar things about student mental health in the aftermath of the pandemic. According to a U.S. Department of Education survey released last May, 70 percent of America’s public schools saw an increase in students seeking mental health support since the start of the pandemic.
“These school districts want to look at mental health. They’re looking for options to support students. Unfortunately, the need of the students is really high right now, especially coming out of COVID. Now that people are talking more about mental health, there seems to be that growing need,” said Laura Yanez, executive director of the Western Nevada chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
There is some new funding allocated to the district that seeks to address those needs, however. Thanks to a request from Nevada’s two U.S. senators, the district will receive more than $2.5 million in two separate grants from the end-of-year federal omnibus spending bill.
District Chief Accountability Officer Joe Ernst says the district will look to provide more individual support to students and families struggling with mental health and attendance with the money.
“It’s really about getting to know every individual student and what it is that they and their family need and how can we as a school work to meet those needs,” he shared.
While the details of the grants are not set in stone, the district plans to use one grant to hire a set of family and marriage therapists as it tries to tackle mental health. Ernst says that type of therapist brings a unique set of skills well-suited to the current needs in the district.
On the absenteeism front, the district plans to use the other grant to hire additional reengagement specialists, who are staffers who complete home visits and interact with the parents of chronically absent kids. The district is also analyzing the local impacts of its five Family Resource Centers and will look to add a couple more through that grant.
Ernst said the goal is to have these new programs up and running by the start of next school year.
Jose Davila IV is a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.