Despite raising five kids in the Clark County school system, Jenna Robertson said there’s one topic she still hasn’t figured out.

“I still don’t understand the attendance policies,” she told The Nevada Independent. “Except that they’re inconsistent from school to school, and people have complained about it for years.”

Parents’ frustrations about inconsistently-applied attendance rules is damaging trust in school districts even as schools have pledged to boost attendance after no-shows soared during the pandemic, The Nevada Independent found in multiple interviews.

Grievances include such things as kids incorrectly being marked absent, discrepancies in guidance on attendance policies, doctors’ notes getting lost and flawed technology being unable to scan student ID cards.

A Clark County schools spokesperson said the district was “committed to accurate reporting of student attendance” and “has several systems in place to monitor attendance reports for errors, including monthly verification forms submitted by teachers and error reports to verify consecutive absences.”

Parents who notice misapplied rules should contact their child’s school, the spokesperson said.

Nevada state law considers students chronically absent when they miss at least 10 percent of school days, although certain absences, such as doctor-verified illnesses, are exempt from this calculation. Missing two days of school each month could qualify students as chronically absent. 

Sanctions for chronic absenteeism can include being held back or failing to receive class credit. If students are deemed habitually truant — meaning they accumulate three or more unexcused absences per year — their driver’s licenses can be suspended. 

The Indy reported last November that 26 percent of students statewide were chronically absent in 2024-2025, a decline from 2023-2024 but still well above pre-pandemic levels. 

That progress comes as the state and school districts have intensified efforts against absenteeism over the last two years. Nevada pledged in 2024 to cut absenteeism in half in the next five years; the same year, Clark County schools launched a new website to answer parents’ questions about attendance and formed an office dedicated to chronic absenteeism. 

Danielle Jones, the office’s director, told The Indy that the district wants to help families before absenteeism becomes a pattern.

This approach includes making school-level outreach less accusatory. Schools can include “their principal’s voice” in absence notifications, Jones said, or reach out via text message “so it’s not as robotic, so it’s a real person.”

But parents’ trust in school administrators and the district overall remains low. 

Rebecca Dirks Garcia is a Las Vegas mother of three who runs a Clark County parents’ Facebook group with over 18,000 members. Since the group’s launch in 2018, Dirks Garcia said, one of the “most common complaints” posted by parents has been schools’ confusing attendance policies.

“There’s this post-pandemic emphasis on attendance, but that inconsistency makes parents less engaged with the schools,” Dirks Garcia said.

Attendance policies differ between and within districts

Schools have wide discretion over monitoring attendance and some are more successful than others, frustrating parents.

State law dictates students be marked absent if they miss more than 50 percent of a day’s total instructional time. School districts are also required to automatically send families letters on students’ absences. 

But districts determine many other attendance policies, including how many absences trigger these notification letters, how often attendance records are verified and how many missed periods endanger class credit. 

Schools have additional powers. In Clark County, for example, schools create their own absence excusal forms and determine their own tardy policies, which don’t count toward students’ absences. 

One of Dirks Garcia’s three kids attends a Clark County public school with an “incredibly thorough and detailed” online form for excusing absences, she said, while one attends a school where the form “is much more generic.”

At the school with a less-detailed form, “we continually have problems getting things resolved,” said Dirks Garcia. “They sic their attendance officer on me for absences that are their own errors. As a parent, how does that make me feel positively engaged to ensure my child is at school?”

A review by The Indy found disparities in attendance policies posted by Clark County schools over what types of absences, and how many absences, qualify students as truant or chronically absent. 

Some schools use outdated attendance manuals or state that the maximum number of permitted absences is nine, rather than 10. Some schools describe the conditions that exempt absences from students’ attendance rates (including religious holidays or if a student is “physically or mentally unable to attend school”), while other schools do not. 

The county’s own attendance education website states absences “for any reason” count toward chronic absenteeism calculations, without stating the exemptions permitted under state law.

Parents said they complain often, and loudly, about such issues. Disability advocate Robin Kincaid said the Las Vegas families she works with report to her “on a pretty frequent basis that schools resist accepting families’ doctors’ notes.” 

But Julie Wootton-Greener, a spokesperson for the Nevada Department of Education, told The Indy the state “has not heard of this alleged practice” of inconsistent data monitoring and said that training staff on attendance rules was school districts’ responsibility.

Students who slip through the cracks

Some parents say problems go beyond misapplied rules.

Schools might “only look at attendance data once a month, and then you could have a situation where a child’s missed 10 or 15 days of school before you even notice anything,” said Chris Kearney, a UNLV professor who studies chronic absenteeism. 

Certain Nevada school districts, including Carson City and Clark County, require or strongly recommend school administrators to review teachers’ attendance records once a month. Lyon County and Washoe County require principals to do so every week. 

But an Indy review showed other districts lack clear policies on reviewing absence records.

Katarina Rivers, a mom of three in Las Vegas, said irregular attendance monitoring imperiled the safety of her teenage daughter, who struggles with mental health and frequently skips school. 

During the 2023-2024 school year, Rivers said she discovered “over 30 incidents where my daughter had skipped one particular class, and they didn’t even update the portal.” 

She said her daughter’s school failed to alert her to any of these absences.

“When I found out, I was like, ‘OK, well where was she?’” Rivers said.

Katrina Green is also a Vegas-based mom of three. Her oldest child struggled with behavioral issues. In May 2024, a car struck and killed the 18-year-old while riding his skateboard.

Following his death, Green said representatives from her son’s school and the district contacted her “at least once a month” for seven months to inform her of the unresolved absences her son accrued before his death. She said the communication did not stop until after her lawyer got in touch with a school district representative in November 2024.

The experience was triggering and upsetting, Green said. But she said she was almost more frustrated that the school ramped up its attendance outreach when it was too late. 

“It’s days after the school year ended, and you’re knocking on my door about his attendance?” she asked. “Nobody knocked on my door the entire school year before.”

Danielle Jones, director of Clark County schools’ chronic absenteeism office, said that the monitoring and classification of absences is standard across all district schools.

“There may be different time constraints on when notes get processed from school to school,” Jones said. But discrepancies were not significant nor widespread, she emphasized.

A potential solution: more data?

Experts say Nevada should require schools to monitor attendance records more regularly.

Nevada law only requires school districts to submit chronic absenteeism reports once a year, when summer break begins. 

Hedy Chang is CEO of Attendance Works, the nonprofit that formulated the pledge to cut chronic absenteeism in half which Nevada signed onto in 2024. 

Chang wrote in a statement to The Indy that regularly collecting absenteeism data “allows districts and schools to identify patterns so they can see if the problem — such as a problematic bus route, lack of access to health care or bullying — is causing a large group of students to miss school.”

More data also enables districts to spot trends earlier, said UNLV’s Kearney.

“When schools have to report overall absenteeism rates, they often utilize one or two data points for a given year, which do not reflect changes or fluctuations over the course of the year,” he said.

Twenty-four states collect district-level attendance data more than once per year, according to a June 2025 AttendanceWorks survey. That report highlighted Connecticut as a leader in fighting chronic absenteeism. It collects and publishes attendance records monthly.

Kearney also cited Connecticut as a model, emphasizing that Nevada only recently turned its attention toward absenteeism. 

“It’s an evolutionary process,” he said. “Looking at what other state systems do is going to be important.”

School officials skeptical

Some wonder what more the state and school districts can do to win parents’ trust.

“I do understand that sometimes families are getting attendance letters, and they’re feeling a certain way instead of feeling welcomed,” Jones, manager of Clark County schools’ absenteeism office. “We’re trying to work against that with supportive communication from the teacher, from the administrator.”

Dirks Garcia, the Clark County parent, showed The Indy emails from one of her children’s schools that demonstrated a shifting tone on absenteeism in recent months. 

A February 2025 letter concerning a missed school day warned that too many absences would block students from extracurricular activities and field trips. The same letter in December said: “We would like to help you and your student in any way we can to alleviate this attendance concern.”

Other school officials are skeptical that paying more attention to data will fix an issue as complicated as absenteeism. 

“In general, chronic absenteeism is not a problem whose origin is in the procedural parts of taking attendance,” said Adam Young, superintendent of the White Pine County School District, emphasizing that his district is focused instead on supporting students comprehensively.

Kristin Baker agrees. She spent two decades as a Clark County teacher and administrator before transferring to Nye County last year. 

Baker said her monthly teacher attendance review for Clark County required her to sign papers confirming, with no verification, that the previous month’s records were correct. 

“It was one of the most performative things I’ve seen Clark County do,” she said. 

Parents who make noise about their children’s incorrect attendance records are a much more reliable check on the system, Baker said. 

She also argued that individual errors in attendance monitoring, while rare, reflect a system asking too much of its instructors. 

“Teachers need to mark the attendance and move on with their day,” she said. Following up about absences with families can be tense and distracts teachers from helping kids learn, she emphasized.

“There are times when I would call home and a parent would say, ‘I had no idea my child was missing that much school, thank you for reaching out,’” Baker said. “Other times we call and we’re told it’s our fault. … If we call, we’re jerks. If we don’t call, we’re also jerks. It’s a fraught situation.”