Pajaro Valley Unified attendance campaign for 2024-2025 school years

WATSONVILLE, Calif. (KION-TV) -- It's been one week since schools in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District celebrated their first day.

Pajaro Valley Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Heather Contreras said their goal for the school year is to reach 98% attendance, this would be a higher attendance than last year.

Pajaro Middle School was closed until this year because of damage from 2023 winter storms. Despite going through obstacles, students have shown resilience and are excited to come back to school.

So excited, actually, that attendance has reached 98% this week.

"Since the beginning of this week, Monday, we've hit our attendance mark every day, so we're seeing students very happy to be coming to school and happy to be back together at home," said Pajaro Middle School Principal Nicole Killian.

The attendance campaign slogan is called, "You can't achieve your dreams, if you don't show up to chase them." Superintendent Contreras said the campaign slogan was created by a high school student.

She said why creating this campaign was so important:

"Attendance since covid has been a real challenging piece for all school districts; getting students back into the habit of coming to school and in-person. So this year, we decided we want students to really learn at a high level, and to achieve that, we needed them to be in school with their teachers and learning in person because that's the best type of learning."

Superintendent Contreras said that attendance last school year was at 88%. She also said that there may be multiple factors for why students don't go to school.

"As people are coming off of Covid, it was illness, students were ill [and] we needed them to stay home," said Superintendent Contreras.

She also said that some students have difficulty learning:

"There was also learning loss students experienced," said Superintendent Contreras. "So, school can be a little bit hard and we're doing everything we can to put interventions in place and meet students where they're at and bring their learning up from there."

Superintendent Contreras said the important takeaway is that this campaign was driven by students. They formed a Superintendent-student advisory council of six students from different high schools in the district and asked them what a great campaign would sound and look like.

They later submitted and then voted on it.