By: John Hecht and Alexandra Wittenberg
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended education in Sedona and the Verde Valley, with some school districts having shifted between remote and in-person learning multiple times in the first half of the 2020-21 school year alone.
The disruption goes beyond the decisions of individual school boards on how to instruct students, as all area districts have reported declines in enrollment for this school year. Though many families have left on their own accord this year to try out homeschooling options or move to a district where the in-person regulations were preferred, other students were forced to be dropped due to inactivity.
“These are ‘our’ students and they are enrolled in ‘our’ classes, but they are not attending either virtually or in person, and we’ve made massive efforts trying to connect with the families, trying to get ahold,” Sedona-Oak Creek School District Assistant Superintendent Deana DeWitt said at the Dec. 7 school board meeting.
“We’ve received no records requests from other schools, yet those students are not appearing in our classes either virtually or in person, and by state mandate after 10 days of inactivity and we’re not able to confirm what’s going on with them, we have to drop them. And that’s happened at both schools. So there are serious question marks out there as to what’s happening with those students right now.”
DeWitt said 28 students district-wide have had the “10- day drop” status this year and were unenrolled, with 18 students at West Sedona School, eight at Sedona Red Rock Jr/Sr High School and three from the online-based Red Rock Academy.
“We do our best to contact these families, beginning with the first unexcused absence,” DeWitt wrote in an email, noting that the district sends automated messages to parents the day of an unexcused absence, with a personal phone call follow-up after two to three absences and again before the 10th day.
“The 10-day drop is a code in our student information system, which indicates why a student was withdrawn. If we 10-day drop a student and then receive a records request from another school, the code is changed in the system to reflect ‘transfer to another school.’ A code of 10-day drop indicates that there has been no records request or other communication with the family indicating why the student has not been in school.”
Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District has 140 fewer students than last school year, with 36 unenrolled due to the 10-day drop. Mingus Union High School District has lost 30 to 40 total, with 15 to 20 having the 10-day drop status. Camp Verde Unified School District has lost about 50 students total and Clarkdale-Jerome School District, which is a single K-8 school, has lost nine.
“I definitely think it’s connected to the pandemic,” COCSD Superintendent Steve King said. “We’re seeing people go where they can feed their families, where the jobs are, where the housing is more secure …. Other families have gone homeschool. We’ve always had a high mobility rate with many of our families and students, but we’re definitely seeing an increase.”
MUHSD Superintendent Mike Westcott points out that although this year’s drop is lower than some previous years, it isn’t alarming.
“That [average daily membership] change isn’t really an aberration when you consider a 10-year average,” Westcott said. “We go up or down 20 students annually. So, it’s not really an outlier.”
Verde Valley superintendents say that they believe these are mostly families keeping their children home during the pandemic without filing the proper paperwork. King suggested that there are several students that the district believes have moved to Mexico to spend time with family, making them unreachable.
However, SOCSD Superintendent Dennis Dearden said that many Sedona students whose families moved back to Mexico after job closures in the early weeks of the pandemic are still enrolled with SOCSD and working virtually from Mexico, with regular communication.
The drop in enrollment leads to drops in school funding from the state, especially when remote learning only counts for 95% of what an in-person, on-campus student counts per Arizona Revised Statute §15-901. However, increases in grants from the state and federal government to deal with COVID have generally allowed districts to fill in the gaps, at least for this year.
“This is concerning, not only because of the funding implications but because these students are unaccounted for,” DeWitt said. “Sadly, this is a national issue and not unique to SOCSD.”
