Hundreds of thousands of backpack-wearing and lunchbox-toting students made their way to schools across Clark County on Monday, the first day of school for most students in the valley.

“Welcome back to school, friends!” Kelly Elementary School Principal Jerrell Hall exclaimed as her students arrived on campus. “We are so excited to see you today.”

At Kelly Elementary, teachers and staff rolled out the red carpet for their students at a temporary campus at the former Fyfe Elementary School, near West Bonanza Road and North Valley View Boulevard. Kelly’s campus is being rebuilt and is slated to open for the start of the 2027-28 school year.

Beyond the red velvet ropes, elected officials and Kelly staff danced to the “Cha Cha Slide” and other energetic songs as they high-fived and fist-bumped new and returning students.

U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Kelly graduate, was among the political leaders welcoming kids back to school.

“All of the staff here, all of the teachers, everybody … that makes a difference for our kids every single day, I’m with you,” Cortez Masto, a Democrat, said. “I am the proud product of the public school system right here in Southern Nevada, and if I can do this — our kids and all of us — we can show them what’s possible.”

Masto School

As Kelly teachers and staff greeted kids, each student was handed a backpack stuffed with back-to-school essentials, including pencils, crayons, glue sticks and scissors.

A total of 2,100 backpacks were distributed across three elementary schools by the Las Vegas-based meal prep company Foodie Fit, according to Alex Lee, a managing partner with the business.

“I want smiles from every single person,” Lee said as he thanked Kelly’s staff.

At Cashman Middle School, Clark County School District Superintendent Jhone Ebert celebrated students’ improvements in math proficiency.

Cashman Principal Rachel Samuel said preliminary data showed 25.3 percent of her students tested as proficient in math last school year, an 8 percentage point increase over the year prior that Ebert called “amazing.”

“Normal increase is like 2 to 3 percentage points,” Ebert told a classroom of math students. “Here at Cashman, you guys knocked it out of the park.”

A former middle school math teacher herself, Ebert has identified improving middle school math levels as one of her priorities as superintendent.

Samuel said the improvements were spurred by better curriculum and increased interventions, such as tutoring and additional math classes for struggling students. She added that providing kids a stellar education is “a team effort.”

“I want to give the credits to our kids, because they are given the resources and they are here to learn,” Samuel said. “And then, we have our teachers. Without teachers, we cannot do this. They are the backbone of all the success we have at Cashman.”

Cashman also showed signs of school zone traffic enforcement, a priority for the school district after a dangerous year for student pedestrians. Before the first bell rang at 7:30 a.m., school district police had pulled over two cars outside the campus, located near West Desert Inn Road and South Decatur Boulevard.

School district police investigated 10 traffic accidents and issued 97 citations across 253 traffic stops on the first day of school, according to data shared by the district.

At a midday news conference, Ebert said she was “overjoyed” with the district’s generally smooth operations on the first day of school.

Across the district’s 374 schools, she said, 14 experienced HVAC problems before the start of school. Among those, Ebert added, eight HVAC systems were fully restored before classes began, four had been addressed during the day and two had technicians on site as of noon Monday.

Asked about reports of late buses, Ebert asked students and parents to “please give grace,” as over 120,000 kids took the bus to school on Monday.

Throughout her school visits on Monday, Ebert occasionally polled classes she visited about school bus timeliness and the new start times.

Students largely reported mixed results when asked if their buses arrived at school on time. Asked about the later start times, one Green Valley High School class had roughly half of its 40 students raise their hands to show support for the change.

The district improved its teacher vacancy rates over the summer, starting the school year with only 167 classroom vacancies, Ebert said. That figure includes 91 vacancies in special education positions, she added.

“If you know someone that wants to come to the Clark County School District, or is an educator (who) wants to be with our special education students, please help us there,” Ebert said.

She added that the district has 454 vacancies in support staff positions, with particularly high vacancy rates for literacy and language intervention specialists.

“We have 44,000 employees,” Ebert said. “Why they come to work every day … is because they want to support children. They want them to grow. They want them to thrive.”

While most Clark County students entered school district classrooms on Monday, an increasing number of students are attending charter schools.

The State Public Charter School Authority grew to teach 70,534 students last school year, making it the second-largest school district in the state behind the Clark County School District.

Increased enrollment was one of several reasons why Nevada Rise Academy began school Monday at a new campus, according to Justin Brecht, founder and executive director of the two-star K-5 charter school. The academy is near East Owens Avenue and North 21st Street in the central valley.

About 420 students attend Nevada Rise Academy this year, up from the 360 students they had set a limit at for years before.

Brecht attributed the rise in charter school attendance to parents’ desire for greater flexibility and choice in their kids’ education.

“We’re still a public school, but we’re not part of the district, and being CCSD is such a large district … there are no other districts to go to, unless you move counties,” Brecht said. He added that more school options make parents “empowered to make the choice” of what school is best for them.

Nevada Rise Academy also only teaches students four days per week, he said, with Fridays reserved for teacher preparation and optional student clubs. It allows students to explore their interests and reduces teacher burnout, he said.

About 4 miles east of Nevada Rise Academy, a brand new charter school dubbed Academy of Math and Science Nellis was entering its first full week of classes Monday. The charter academy started school on Thursday to ease younger students into the routine of attending school, according to Andrea Tee, the K-8 school’s founding principal.

Tee said the K-8 model of Academy of Math and Science, where over 400 students now attend, enables older students to become leaders for younger kids.

“You can leverage your older kids to take ownership of modeling for the little ones,” Tee said. “So then you actually have role models at the building rather than kids who are testing boundaries.”

Asked why students and parents are increasingly turning to charter schools, Tee said charters can better listen to community input and implement popular requests more quickly than a public school district.

“Charters are able to be more responsive to the community they’re directly serving,” Tee said. “If you think about turning the Titanic, it takes a lot. But you can turn a little tugboat real fast.”

Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.