Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Another enrollment drop at school district
Since 2017, demographers estimate that Clark County’s population has increased 8 percent to 2.359 million. Over that same period, enrollment in the Clark County School District has fallen each year, from more than 315,000 students to just 284,000 as the current calendar begins. Where have all the children gone? District officials insist they’re on pace to meet projections and said they expect attendance numbers to rise leading into October, when official enrollment will be tabulated. Perhaps. But the trend is unmistakable.
Southern Nevada is not an outlier. Enrollment has fallen recently in most large, urban school districts, including New York City, Chicago and Miami. Many districts have used pandemic funding to paper over the loss of students, but that will eventually run out.
Pandemic school closures clearly played a large role in the exodus. Teachers unions, which led efforts to keep campuses closed for far longer than necessary, gambled that parents would come flocking back once COVID eased. That hasn’t been the case in many places.
“Researchers from Stanford University,” Campus Safety magazine reported in May, “found 14 percent of students who were disenrolled from public schools between fall 2019 through spring 2022 went to private schools and 26 percent switched to home-schooling.”
In Nevada, the Census Bureau reported, the number of home-schooling families increased by 10 percent during the pandemic. Many of those students have never returned to their traditional public school. At the same time, private school enrollment also increased nationally heading into the 2022-23 school year, a Cato Institute analysis found.
“Parents want greater personalization, and it seems like a trend that’s here to stay,” Romy Drucker, K-12 education director at the Walton Family Foundation, told Axios. “Schools will have to earn back the trust of parents.”
This is the dynamic that Nevada’s legislative Democrats willfully ignore as they marshal their influence and resources to limit schooling options for Nevada parents while blocking most efforts to hold the status quo accountable for the state’s dismal academic record. But some researchers believe this type of obstructionism won’t reverse current trends.
“Many school districts facing fiscal and operational challenges in the face of enrollment loss are likely to find those enrollment losses enduring,” noted Thomas Dee of the Urban Institute in a February paper. He added that “the sharp and sustained growth in home-schooling and private school enrollment raises new questions about the quality of the learning environments children are experiencing.”
Throw in the safety concerns many parents have with the public schools — violent occurences on Clark County campuses increased when district officials imposed more lenient disciplinary procedures on wayward students — and the declining enrollment figures make sense.
As the new school year begins, the Clark County School District is locked in a bitter contract dispute with the local teachers union. At issue is how to spend a record new state appropriation for public education. But unless any new deal also addresses the importance of creating a safe, nurturing learning environment while imposing high academic expectations for students, expect more and more families to explore alternative schooling options.
The views expressed above are those of the Las Vegas Review-journal. All other opinions expressed on the Opinion and Commentary pages are those of the individual artist or author indicated.