It was still dark out when seventh grader Ayden Preciado met up with his friends at Pat Baker Park, less than a mile away from Fred W. Traner Middle School, where students gathered to walk to school together with the school’s Principal Lucy Dugan and staff. 

Dugan said the initiative — dubbed “the walking school bus” — was born from parents’ concerns that the neighborhood surrounding the school is unsafe for those students who walk to school.

“It’s pretty cool because you get donuts every time you come here and you get to walk with all your friends in one group,” Ayden said as he waited at the park on Thursday morning. 

It’s one of the many strategies statewide that schools are deploying to address the post-pandemic chronic absenteeism that’s lingered long after schools reopened and in-person classes resumed. Other strategies include regular calls to the students’ homes, a move to project-based learning, and partnering with a dropout prevention nonprofit. 

Improving Nevada’s rates, which are worse than the national average of 22 percent, has become a statewide priority, with the Nevada Department of Education setting a goal in 2024 of reducing the level by 50 percent over five years.

These efforts are paying off. 

Chronic absenteeism in Nevada public schools continued to decrease during the 2024-2025 academic year, according to recent data from the Nevada Department of Education. 

Statewide, about 26 percent of students were chronically absent — defined as missing at least 1 in every 10 school days — which represented a decrease from the roughly 29 percent rate from the previous school year.

Of nearly 700 public schools in Nevada, about 500 of them saw a decrease in their chronic absenteeism rate in the most recent school year, according to a Nevada Independent analysis. The average change was a decrease of 2.7 percentage points.

However, as is the case with many other education metrics in the Silver State, the state is still in a worse position than it was before the pandemic, when fewer than 20 percent of students were chronically absent. 

The Nevada Independent found that 80 percent of schools have a higher absenteeism rate than during the 2018-2019 school year, with the average school’s rate up 6 percentage points from that year.

In interviews with The Indy, school leaders said they’ve observed a trend of students staying home for minor health symptoms that would not have kept them home prior to the COVID pandemic. Other times, they miss school for family vacation. 

“We’ve seen some societal shifts since COVID that still are lingering,” said Kevin McPartlin, associate superintendent for the Clark County School District’s education services division. “We’ve talked to families where they’ve said, ‘We’re going on this family trip for three weeks, because what we learned in COVID is life is short.’” 

They also see students who are disinterested in school, who lack transportation or whose families don’t see the importance of coming to school every day. 

To combat this, educators are placing greater emphasis on lessons that are engaging and relevant to students’ lives outside of school, improving communications with families and building relationships with struggling students.

“Each of them are completely different, and unless you take that time to support them in the way that they need, it’s not gonna work out,” said Marco Mercado with the nonprofit Communities in Schools of Nevada, a dropout prevention organization. 

High schools, poorer schools struggle more

In the Clark County School District, which enrolls more than two-thirds of the state’s public school students, about 27 percent of students were chronically absent during the 2024-2025 school year, an improvement of about 2.5 percentage points from the previous year. The chronic absenteeism rate in Washoe County decreased at a similar rate to slightly less than 26 percent.

And in the state’s public charter schools, which have long outperformed other districts on absenteeism, the rate decreased by about 5 percentage points to slightly more than 16 percent. Charter schools’ racial and ethnic makeup closely aligns with the state averages, but they have a lower percentage of students who are from low-income households, are learning English as a second language or require special education services. 

Melissa Mackedon, executive director of the State Public Charter School Authority that oversees 80 charter school campuses, said charter schools are smaller and more nimble, giving them the ability to implement strategies much quicker and without needing to go up a long chain of command. 

She added that some charter schools are using state transportation funding they received during the past two legislative sessions, including $17 million from SB468, to pick up students, something that some charter schools couldn’t previously afford to do using only their per-pupil funding. 

“They are being really creative and they are taking this very seriously,” she said.

Title I schools — a federal designation denoting a higher percentage of students from low-income households — were more likely to have higher chronic absenteeism rates, but they are showing greater signs of improvement.

In the 2024-2025 school year, Title I schools had an average chronic absenteeism rate of about 23 percent — about 6 points higher than their non-Title I counterparts. 

However, these schools also lowered their absenteeism rates by an average of 4 points from the year before — an improvement more than six times larger than for non-Title I schools.

There were also disparities across school levels. Chronic absenteeism rates were significantly higher in high schools than in elementary or middle schools. The average high school chronic absenteeism rate also increased in the 2024-2025 school year but decreased in elementary and middle schools.

What’s working

In high school, Estéban Montoya-Mendoza became chronically absent in part because he didn’t always have reliable transportation to get to school and other personal pressures left him feeling constantly overwhelmed. 

His absences led to him failing his classes, putting him behind on the credits he needed to graduate high school. 

“I was a disaster,” he said. 

One of the biggest factors that helped him turn things around, leading to his graduation from Canyon Springs High School in North Las Vegas in 2024, was finding a caring mentor through his school’s Communities in Schools program. The nonprofit places site coordinators in schools who are trained to find solutions to the many barriers keeping students from attending class and help them to succeed academically and socially. 

Montoya-Mendoza said Mercado, Canyon Springs’ former site coordinator, became his biggest cheerleader and support at school.

“CIS made me want to go to school willingly,” he said. “Mr. Marco would tell me how important school was, and he would help me in whatever I asked him.” 

At the middle school level, Dugan said a strategy that’s been working for Traner is having school staff regularly check in on their chronically absent students. 

Last school year, Traner met its goal of reducing its chronic absenteeism rate by 10 percent. The school’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped from 51 percent during the 2023-24 school year to under 40 percent last school year, though that’s still way above its pre-pandemic rate of about 8 percent. 

“It was a lot of work,” Dugan said. “We check their attendance every single day, and the second they’re not here, we’re like, ‘Hi, we miss you. Come hang out with us at school. OK, love you, bye,’” she said. 

Principal Allen Lee said Clifford J. Lawrence Junior High School has had success in making school more engaging and exciting for its 1,200 students by adopting project-based learning and incorporating life skills into their curriculum such as how to make a doctor’s appointment, how to get a job or how to navigate the DMV. 

The Las Vegas school’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped to 25 percent last school year, about 9 percentage points lower than the previous year. 

“Our students are not coming to school for fractions, decimals, percentages and to memorize facts,” he said. “They're honestly coming to school for experiences.” 

But as a dad of an eighth grade student, Lee understands where his students’ parents are coming from. Unlike teachers, who are typically off during the summer, principals work year round and they usually spend their summers hiring staff to prepare for the upcoming school year. 

That means that Lee has to pull his kids out of school so the family can go on vacation during the school year.

“I could have them stay with grandma, grandpa, or a friend or something like that, but then you would lose the family time,” Lee said.

And he argues that traveling can be an opportunity to learn outside the classroom and is different from a student missing school simply because they want to. 

Clark County School District Education Services Director Danielle Jones said school nurses have been educating families on what health symptoms are major enough to keep a student home, and schools have been emphasizing the importance of parents letting them know why their student was absent. 

This allows the district to focus its home visits on students with unexcused absences, who are typically in households facing challenges such as lack of access to transportation, clothes and food or child care for younger siblings.

“So if they say they need something, we do our best to connect them to that resource as well and reconnect them back to the school,” she said. 

McPartlin said while it’s unlikely that schools will ever completely eliminate chronic absenteeism, the goal is to at least continue the downward trend. 

“We’re never gonna get to zero, but if 100 percent of the parents are communicating with us, then that's a win right, and that's also trending in the right direction,” he said. 

Photo intern Nick Stewart contributed to this report.