About 83% of students feel safe at BC schools

Councilwoman Sherri Jorgensen was full of praise regarding a recent all-schools event at the high school.

“I loved what you talked about at the Boulder City High School Legacy,” she said following a Clark County School District presentation during Tuesday’s city council meeting. “They did a time capsule and they lined the teachers up, from the one that had been there the longest to the one that just got on. And I can’t remember. I could be wrong and it will be in the newspaper if I am. I thought it was 40 years, possibly that there was someone, you know, one of the teachers. And I thought that was pretty remarkable.”

For the record, Jorgensen was not wrong. In fact, she was correct. The longest-term teacher at BCHS is Bill Strachan, who has been teaching for 42 1/2 years and 40 of those have been at BCHS.

The quarterly report from the district was all about those kinds of transitions as the Region 3 superintendent, who has been reporting to the council for years, Deanna Jaskolski, has been promoted to chief of teaching and learning initiatives for CCSD. In this position, Jaskolski will work alongside teaching and training leaders to ensure systems and structures are in place for the most at-risk students. And she won’t be reporting on Boulder City schools anymore.

That job gets passed on to CCSD newcomer and recent Denver transplant, Theodore Robison III, who, as the new District 3 superintendent oversees progress at 108 CCSD schools. In other words, the five public schools in Boulder City represent 3.7% of his job.

“I worked the last seven years of my career in Thompson School District, which is in Loveland, Colo., which is a very similar, small, semi-rural community such as Boulder City,” he told the council.

Jaskolski — and now Robison, starting in December — present to the council four times a year on a variety of subjects. This time was all about safety, absenteeism and student behavior issues.

“As you saw, for students in grade four through five, about 88% of the students said that they felt safe,” she said. And the report backs that up. What was left unsaid is that last year 100% of students in those grade levels reported feeling safe and the 88% is actually lower than it has been since the waning days of the Covid pandemic. And the Boulder City stats show a smaller percentage of students feel safer than they do in schools in Henderson.

“I mean, as you’ve seen, the middle school at Garrett Junior High, that there has been a decline over the last three years of our students reporting that they feel safe,” she continued. Indeed, that stat has fallen from 87.5% in 2022-23 to just 72.5% last school year.

“I’ve been working with Principal Teemant,” Jaskolski reported. “What they had done when they received this data was actually administer another survey to their students, because they really wanted to drill down more specifically to better understand why they didn’t feel safe and what they could do. So they have focus groups of students. They’re working very closely with their counselor. They’ve also identified a few students to provide wraparound services as well as working with the families for a plan.”

Overall, about 83% of Boulder City students reported feeling safe at school.

The news on chronic absenteeism (defined as students who missed 10% or more of total school days) was a little better. It ticked up slightly from last year but down from its pandemic-era highs. Still, just a little more than one in every five Boulder City students across age and grade groups were chronically absent last year.

Similarly, behavior issues that result in suspensions were down significantly from 2023-2024 when they spiked to 107, up from just 63 the year before. The number for 2024-25 was down sharply. But at 73, suspensions are still about 15% higher than in the 2022-23 school year.

Delayed maintenance on school facilities after Boulder City balked at a CCSD plan to combine three existing schools into a single K-8 has been a topic of significant discussion and concern in the past year and Jorgensen asked for it to be addressed.

Dr. Jesse Walsh, deputy superintendent was on-hand, seemingly just to address the issue.

“So we are working through those steps in terms of our facilities master plan,” he told the council. “I mean, literally, I can tell you we’ve had conversations as recently as this morning talking about some of that.”

Walsh said that a “variety of meetings” were being planned where parents and other stakeholders hear from the district and voice concerns.

“I’ve seen some of the stuff in terms of here in Boulder,” Walsh said. “And so I know that’ll be something coming. So definitely keep your ears open. There hasn’t been any determinations in terms of exactly what that may look like, because we want to hear from the community.”