I’m trying to find one of our missing students.”It had been a year since the pandemic closed Indio High School and its 2,100 students began to disappear, first from the hallways and then from virtual classes as attendance dropped from 94 percent down to as low as 70 percent. At least 350 students were regularly failing to attend class, so Pimentel had decided to spend every Wednesday driving to homes across the Coachella Valley to find missing students and offer his help. “Student’s location unknown.”* * *Indio High School, which was closed as the coronavirus pandemic spooled up on March 13, 2020, remains dark. There were students in stable homes who still got mostly A’s and B’s, and hundreds of at-risk students who were failing at a historic rate. There are students in stable homes who still get mostly A’s and B’s, and hundreds of at-risk students failing at a historic rate.

Source: Washington Post March 21, 2021 21:33 UTC