Part 3:

I checked my daughter Sarah’s class roster last week. Thirty kids are supposed to be there. Ten showed up. Ten. Where are the rest? Playing video games? Roaming the streets? Nevada’s schools are letting kids vanish, and I’m furious. My kids are in class every day because I make sure of it, working two jobs to keep them on track. But other parents let their kids skip, and the schools do nothing. It’s a slap in the face to every family trying to do right.

The numbers make my blood boil. In some Nevada schools, 30 to 60% of kids skip class daily. In Lyon County, nearly four out of ten students are chronically absent, way above the national average. This isn’t just a few kids playing hooky; it’s an epidemic. My friend’s son in Vegas told me kids skip because they know they’ll get away with it. Nevada has laws, actual statutes, that say truants can face court, and parents can be fined. But superintendents sit on their hands, too scared to enforce anything. I’m shaking as I write this, thinking of Sarah trying to learn in a half-empty room while her peers run wild.

I love my kids too much to watch this state give up on them. I’m anxious about what happens if this continues, a generation of Nevadans who can’t hold a job because they never learned to show up. I hate this apathy, this spineless refusal to hold kids and parents accountable. There’s got to be a way to fix this, to make kids show up so they can learn. I’m digging deeper, because the chaos doesn’t stop at empty desks. Violence is tearing our schools apart, and I’m not staying quiet about it.

Stay tuned, in Part 4, I reveal the terrifying violence turning our schools into battlefields and why it’s time to fight back.

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